Fork and Flame is a cooking blog from PdCToday founder Tino Kaltsas.  Spending time in the kitchen is one of his favorite hobbies, and although he rarely makes the same meal twice, he will be posting some of his better meals here on PdCToday.com

One of my hobbies is cooking up tasty meals and I’ve decided to share some of my better offerings with the PdCToday.com audience.  It’s not going to a regular thing, but from time to time you’ll see something tasty popping up here.  These meals will probably be focused on grilling and smoking through the summer and as we get into the winter months things will move indoors.  The photos will be amateur, I’ll just be using my Canon point and shoot but things should look pretty tasty still.   Also, beware I am not the person who follows recipes to a precise degree but I will do my best to layout what I have put together.   Finally, if you have a favorite dish, send it in to me, from time to time I will feature reader favorites.

I’m going to start things off with a meal we had a few weeks ago.  It was well received by the whole family.  Pork chops marinaded in beer and spices, homemade beer battered onion rings, and grilled asparagus wrapped in bacon.  As you’ll see I find beer helps the cooking process both as an ingredient and a beverage along the way. I’ve linked to the original recipes at the bottom of this post, but generally I end up making some modifications to just about everything I find.

Grilled Pork Chops marinaded in beer and herbs:

Ingredients

• 4 boneless pork chops (Whatever your favorite chop is will be fine. I picked up a family pack of assorted bone-in chops as it was the cheapest.)
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1 cup beer
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• Tablespoon oregano
• Tablespoon parsley
• Pepper

Combine beer, soy sauce, sugar, oregano, parsley and pepper.  Place pork chops into marinade.  I like to use a large zip lock bag for this, but any pan or container will do; you just want to make sure the marinade is covering most of the meat.  If you need more liquid, I’d suggest using some broth or just plain water as you don’t want the beer flavor to become too over powering.  If you really like beer though go ahead and just use more beer.  Place in the refrigerator and marinade for at least an hour.  Ideally I like to marinade for at least four hours or overnight, but I also don’t plan my meals very far in advance so an hour will do.

Prepare your grill to a medium-high heat.  I love the flavor of charcoal grilling, but gas grilling will do fine as well.

Grill the chops 5-6 minutes per side.  If you have thick chops they may need another minute or two, these were on the thinner side.

Beer battered onion rings:

I have tried making onion rings in the past and not had too much luck but this recipe I found is super easy and super fantastic.

• 1 cup of flour
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp baking powder
• Enough beer to make batter with the consistency of pancake batter

Dip the onion rings into dry flour, then into the batter right before frying.  If you have a “Fry Daddy” or similar appliance use that, otherwise I just used canola oil in a pan set on heat slightly above medium. Since my pan would only hold 6-9 rings at a time, I kept the finished rings in the oven on 225F to keep them hot while I kept frying additional batches.

Grilled Asparagus:

• Asparagus spears
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• Cracked pepper
• 6-8 strips of bacon (I like Bloomington Meats bacon as it does not lose so much volume in cooking like most store bought bacon)

The garden was full of fresh asparagus, but you can use the frozen spears from the freezer section at the supermarket as well.  Garden fresh is the best though, it just has great flavor like anything else that is freshly picked.  Drizzle the spears with the olive oil and pepper to taste.  You can use table pepper but fresh ground pepper just has so much more flavor.  Pan fry the bacon just enough to soften it.  Wrap bundles of 4-6 spears in a strip of bacon and secure with a toothpick.  Grill these bundles 4-5 minutes (turning once or twice) until asparagus is tender.

Pull everything off the grill and serve it up.

We had some multi-grain bread with a little Wisconsin butter to finish off the meal.

Enjoy!

Original recipe references:

• Beer Grilled Pork Chops: Recipe Zaar
• Hickory Smoked Onion Rings: Cowgirl’s Country Life
• Grilled Asparagus: All Recipes