Recipe of the Week: Pork Cutlets
Ingredients:
- Boneless Pork Chops
- Flour
- Egg
- Panko breadcrumbs
- Vegetable oil
- Salt
- Pepper
- Lemon wedges
Method & Analysis:
Today, I am going to de-mystify the art of making your own fried cutlets. I want to spread the good news far and wide: making cutlets is not actually difficult. I’m not asking you to make Hollandaise sauce from scratch or anything; there are no scary techniques to fear. But that being said, making cutlets is work, and it’s messy work, at that. There are lots of steps, you need a decent amount of kitchen implements, and you’re gonna get your hands dirty, in the most literal sense of the term. But even so, this work isn’t all that onerous, and once you’re done, you’ll have a pile of delicious cutlets to chow down on. What fun! We should all be so lucky!
Before it’s time to fry up your cutlets, you must take your meat slabs and turn them into cutlets with the power of violence! This recipe is for pork cutlets, which are best made by pounding out boneless pork chops. Grab a plastic cutting board and a roll of parchment paper, place a single pork chop on the board, and cover the chop with parchment paper. Use more paper than you need to cover the chop in its current form; this process will significantly increase the meat’s surface area. Once your paper is in place, whack the living daylights out of the pork with either the flat end of a meat mallet (if you have one) or a rolling pin, until the chop has been flattened out to a thickness of approximately half an inch. This may take a minute or three with each chop.
Congratulations, you’ve turned a pork chop into a pork cutlet! Season your cutlet on both sides with salt. Get decent coverage but don’t slather salt all over; more salt is on the way in later stages. Set your cutlet aside on a plate or baking sheet, and repeat this process for each chop. Do not attempt to pound out two pork chops at once, pound out each individually! Again, the surface area increases a good deal in the cutlet-making process, so trying to do two at once will result in messy annoyance and general inefficiency.
Once every chop has been made into a cutlet, preheat your oven to 200º F, then grab three decent-sized bowls. Ideally, these bowls will be relatively shallow and have a flat bottom, but if they don’t you’ll be able to make do. Just make sure they’re no smaller than a small mixing bowl; standard issue cereal bowls will not cut the mustard in this instance. Fill the first bowl with flour and sprinkle in some salt and pepper, then stir the flour and seasonings together with a whisk or fork. Crack one egg into the second bowl and beat it with a fork. Use a second egg if and only if you are making more than three cutlets. Finally, fill the third bowl with your panko breadcrumbs.
It’s dredging time! This is the vaunted two hands method of cutlet breading, which keeps one hand dry while the other gets all messy. Or at least, it does when performed correctly; I have screwed this method up time and time again, so I will help you avoid this fate by keeping track of what hand to use when with the power of bold text.
Pick up a cutlet with your non-dominant hand and put it in the flour, then cover absolutely as much of the surface of your cutlet as possible wit the flour. Pick up the cutlet with your non-dominant hand again, shake off any excess flour, and drop it in the egg. Now, use your dominant hand to cover the cutlet with egg, then pick the cutlet back up with your dominant hand and let any excess egg drain back into the bowl, then place the cutlet in the breadcrumbs and use your dominant hand to cover it in breadcrumbs, brushing off any excess with your dominant hand. Congratulations, your first cutlet is breaded! Place it on another clean plate or baking sheet, then repeat and re-fill each bowl if it proves necessary.
Now we fry! Grab a frying pan and yet another baking sheet. If you have a wire rack that will fit in the baking sheet, place it in the sheet. If not, grab a separate plate and put paper towels down on it. Note that this plate is not a substitute for a baking sheet! You still need one of those. Get your pan going on medium heat (see those somewhat unsightly charred breadcrumbs in that picture up there? Those are the result of using medium-high heat; avoid this error) and place a generous amount of vegetable oil in the pan. Use enough to fully coat the bottom of the pan and then some Some excess is acceptable here, but we’re not deep-frying. Aim for an eighth to a quarter of an inch.
One the oil is hot, fry each cutlet one at a time. Fry it one one side for about 4 minutes, until breadcrumbs are golden brown, then flip and cook for an additional 3ish minutes, until the middle of the cutlet registers 145º F when probed with a thermometer. Once the cutlet is done, remove it to either your sheet and rack, sprinkle some additional salt over it, and stick it in the oven; this will keep it warm and crisp while you fry up the others. If you went with the plate and paper towel combo, let it drain on the towel for a couple minutes before placing it in the oven. Repeat for each cutlet; you may wish to try and get out any loose breadcrumbs between each fry, and you will definitely need to replenish some oil each time.
Once every cutlet is done, haul them out of the oven, cut up a lemon into wedges, and serve each with a lemon wedge, so everyone can squeeze some juice on their cutlet. See, that was a lot of work, but it wasn’t all that hard and parts of it were pretty fun actually! Dig in!
Week 14 NFL Confidence Pool
I’m a huge fan of ignoring my own advice. Last week, I implored all five of my loyal readers to reflect on how their feelings about football influenced and intersected with the whole of their mental health. I wrote out my bulleted list of self-reflection questions for the emotionally aware sports fan to either ponder directly or use as an invitation to reflect in their own way. Football fandom is emotionally exhausting. Ultimately, that’s part of the fun of it, but when this exhaustion is left unchecked, no such fun is even possible.
And I intended to do some of my own ruminating this past weekend, but as I typed up the questions, I half-heartedly answered them in my head and figured that was sufficient. I mean, I have a near-constant stream of Vikings thoughts going in my head, which let me get lazy with the emotional work here. To my thinking, as long as I was making sure football fandom wasn’t ruining my life, and in the broadest sense it wasn’t and isn’t. But after a thoroughly depressing Sunday of football left me feeling spiritually dessicated, I learned the hard way that I was the one who needed to do some soul-searching.
Therefore, because I am always striving to better as a person, and because I’m always on the hunt for ways to pad this column out fresh new ways to examine the sport of pro football, and because I’d rather not spend more than one dependent clause harping on my shitty Week 13 point total (52 out of a possible 91, Jesus Tapdancing Christ), I am going to answer last week’s reflection questions for myself and share the results, in order to hit my arbitrary word count I set for myself that no one else cares about model emotional wellness in football fandom, and let the healing begin.
First and foremost, are you having fun watching your favorite team play football this season?
Obviously, this has been a very up and down season for the Vikings, and therefore, a very up and down season for me as a fan. Their 1-3 start was absolutely no fun whatsoever, especially since they barely squeaked out that one win against the putrid Panthers. What made it worse in the long run is that I had low expectations coming into the season; the Week 1 loss to Tampa convinced me that the Vikings were probably going to have a down year, and that would be OK, but in hindsight I think I was trying to avoid confronting my disappointment. But alas, there’s no avoiding feelings of disappointment when your team is 1-4, and my moods suffered accordingly.
And then, as we all know, the season got truly weird. The Vikings – with Justin Jefferson on Injured Reserve, mind – started winning their games and played their way into the playoff picture, even after Kirk Cousins was lost for the season. After the two good Josh Dobbs performances against Atlanta and New Orleans, I had managed to convince myself that not only would the Vikings make the playoffs, they still had a chance at overtaking the Lions for the division, and hell, maybe a playoff win (or two!) was possible. These were the good times
And then, the bad times returned in the form of two brutal losses, both of which came in primetime. That they were in primetime makes these losses hurt extra; I live out of market, and Sunday Ticket is expensive. It sucks to be able to watch the Vikings’ game in full, and then stay up until 11:30 local time just to watch them lose. I can deal with a loss on the road to a resurgent, out-of-conference opponent; I cannot deal with a loss at home to the Bears, who still suck and suck mightily. To make matters worse, than game was utterly unwatchable even by Vikings/Bears standards. The only good news to come out of that game is that I had the sense to bail on watching at some point in the second half. If the Vikings play like they did in that game from here on out, they will lose every game remaining on the schedule. It feels bad! I’m back to wanting this season to be over already!
If your team is a non-contender with a shot at the playoffs, what do you want out of the remaining season?
Well gee, when I put it to myself that way, I suppose I don’t exactly know. No wonder I’m having trouble dealing with my feelings, huh?
That said, I think that I’m less concerned with how the rest of the season plays out – if they make a token Wild Card appearance, great; if they don’t, I’ll live – and much more concerned with what happens in the off-season. Kirk Cousins needs to go, and if the Vikings bring him back, I’m gonna be real sad about it. A team with Cousins under center is a team that has a definite ceiling, one that’s far below actual contention. He cannot create plays outside of structure, he dumps the ball off short on 3rd (and 4th!) and long, and he goes through periods of several weeks where he takes straight dropbacks like he’s driving on his learner’s permit for the first time. His contract was and is an albatross.
Up until relatively recently I got the sense that Kwesi Adofo-Mensah understands this, but as I watched Josh Dobbs put up at 54.3 passer rating against a putrid defense, it occurred to me that I was watching the argument for bringing Cousins back make itself in real time, and it made a horrible Monday night even worse. This cannot happen. I don’t care that the next quarterback they bring in might not work, because I accept that any transaction at the position is a risk. The Packers have made it clear they aren’t going anywhere (this is why Sunday was so damn depressing), and the Vikings will need to take a real big swing in order to match their pace. The lack of risk in bringing Cousins back is a point against doing so, not an argument for it. Kirk Cousins is a band-aid; rip off the band-aid.
So that’s where I’m at. More wins and the playoffs will be nice and fun enough, but frankly I’m starting to expect them to tumble out of the playoffs altogether. Maybe that’s reflexive pessimistic defeatism; even if it is, I’m sure I can only benefit by trying to focus on the nice feelings involved here (watching the Vikings play is fun, and I like it!). But I don’t see how they could make noise in the playoffs if they do make it, so I’m pinning my hopes for the future on what happens once their season ends.
Also, for the record, the Ravens are my bandwagon team this year, but I’m not trying to invest emotionally. I just want to watch the playoffs with a hint of real investment in the outcome, you know?
Ok, I feel a bit better now, I think. That’ll do. To the picks!
Week 13 Correct Picks: 8/13 (0.615)
Season Total Correct Picks: 135/193 (0.699)
Week 13 Points: 52/91 (0.571)
Season Total Points: 1,165/1,541 (0.756)
Bye: Cardinals, Commanders
15 Points: Dolphins over Titans
14 Points: Packers over Giants
13 Points: Ravens over Rams
12 Points: 49ers over Seahawks
11 Points: Texans over Jets
10 Points: Lions over Bears
9 Points: Chiefs over Bills
8 Points: Cowboys over Eagles
7 Points: Broncos over Chargers
All that pontificating ended up being a rambling and discursive waste of characters even by my standards, and unless I can find a way to make Miami vs. Shitty Team into its own category of game it’s easier to split this week into two groups: Games with Good Teams and Games with Technically Professional Teams.
Yes, the Packers are back. Yes, Jordan Love is playing way better. No, I’m not at all happy about this turn of events, but I am happy to report that it means we can all go big against the Giants this week. I’m a bit nervous on giving the Ravens 13 because the Rams have also quietly salvaged their season, but unless Baltimore has one of their off games they’ll be fine. I’m not at all nervous about finally putting double digits on the Texans. I could’ve been profiting big on the Jets’ collapse this whole time, but it’s never too late, or something.
We have four divisional matchups in here; they are ranked in order of relative safety. The 49ers get the most points of the four because they are the safest this week; the Lions are second safest (and would be first were it not for their struggles against the Bears a few weeks ago), then the Cowboys, then the Broncos. You are free to tweak the individual point assignments if you wish, however, please note that this sequence is an objectively correct measure of each team’s chances. I will not be taking questions at this time.
6 Points: Jaguars over Browns
5 Points: Falcons over Buccaneers
4 Points: Bengals over Colts
3 Points: Raiders over Vikings
2 Points: Saints over Panthers
1 Point: Steelers over Patriots
You know what, fuck all these games. What even is all this drek? These are six miserable games featuring, by my count, 10 completely miserable teams, and one of those 10 is guaranteed to win the NFC South. Blessedly, I’m willing to give hobbled Trevor Lawrence 6 points; I was about to give those to Joe Flacco and his mortal remains. I have picks and point assignments in this group, but know that neither I nor you can lose on any of these games unless we watch any one of them for a single second. I can only pray that Scott Hanson does the right thing and delivers us all from such a fate, unless the Vikings score touchdowns, which they will not. And don’t come at me with tales of woeful Raiders’ defense; if the Bears can hold you to 10 points, anyone can. Cripes, what a bummer!
Enjoy the games, everyone!
Rob Writes About Whatever 