Goofing Around

Just goofing around, I came up with a pretty fine sauce for our pork chops the other day. I usually follow recipes pretty closely, at least the first time I attempt a new one, but every now and then I just wing it. Some times my "wingings" are delicious and other times, uh, well, back to the drawing boards.

There's not much that can go wrong, however, when you have a fresh pineapple in the house. I have loved pineapple since the days when my family would pack a picnic to go out to the beach in Hawaii and stop on our way by the pineapple stand for a plate of freshly picked fruit.

In those days, before Statehood, the "stand" was a simple shack between the road and the pineapple field, big enough to shade perhaps two people from the sun, one of whom would grab his huge machete, stroll out into the field, reach down into the spiky leaves to whack off a pineapple and, with a few swift and sure strokes of his knife, would remove the husk and slice the fruit onto a paper plate. Quickly wrapped in waxed paper, the plate would be soggy from the piercingly sweet juice before we could get to the beach. We ate it still warm from the sun, the juice dribbling down our chins and making our fingers sticky until we went swimming.

I think about those days with all six of us packed into our four-door Oldsmobile sedan - two-tone gray, the car that we could never get all the sand out of, no matter how hard we tried - whenever I am removing the husk from a Hawaiian pineapple. Out of sentiment, I only buy the Hawaiian ones. I also like pure cane sugar for the same reason, but that's another story.

Anyway, back to our pork chops sizzling away on the Jennair grill; they are delicious just plain with applesauce but I was dreaming of something a little different. Rooting through pantry and fridge, I came up with some diverse and somewhat weird ingredients that somehow seemed appealing together, so I tossed them all in a bowl, mixed and tasted, tasted and mixed until finally it tasted like the sauce in my head - a sort of curried, pineapply, tangy, lumpy sauce.

'Twas good. Here it is; try it if you dare. Aloha.

Goofy Pork Sauce

2 Tbs kefir
juice of 1/2 lemon (I used Meyer)
1/4 cup fresh pineapple, cut into 1/2" dice
a few drops of jalapeño hot sauce
1/2 tsp or more curry powder, to taste
two slices of red onion, minced
1/4 cup apple sauce
a splash of balsamic vinegar

All the measurements are approximate. I put them into my bowl in roughly this order and tasted until it tasted good. As I said, goofy.