Pan-to-oven pork chops with garlic

The River Cottage Meat Book by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is one of those books I love having, but I can't say I've been able to use it much. Partly because it is really a very pedagogical book about meat, written with English style and wit, but many of the lessons are specific to the British context they are written in.

Still, I'm sure there are many wonderful things in it if I can find them. This particular dish is really more of a technique than a recipe and Hugh (I hesitate to use the hyphenated surname) suggests some interesting variations.

The operative word here is garlic. You take one large head or two normal heads and "release" all the cloves without peeling them (anyone who remembers Gerard Depardieu in "Green Card" knows just how to do this). Crush them slightly with the blade of a knife, but the peel will keep them from burning. Now, embarrassingly, I had closer to one normal head of garlic because I thought wrongly there was more on hand, so we probably missed out on the full impact of this recipe.

You place an ovenproof dish that can hold 4 pork chops in the oven and heat it to 425 degrees. Then you heat "a little" olive oil in a skillet and fry the garlic cloves there for a few minutes. Add the chops and brown them just one minute on each side, seasoning as you turn. Remove the chops to the ovenproof dish, scoop out the garlic cloves with a slotted spoon and distribute over the chops, and deglaze the skillet with 1 c. white wine. You reduce by half and pour over the chops. Hugh makes a big point of having the "bony end" of the chop sticking up in the air so it will get crispy while the meaty end stays in the braising juices, but none of my chops had a protruding bony end. You return the dish to the oven and cook for 15 to 20 minutes, basting the chops halfway through. He suggests serving with mashed potatoes and steamed greens, though we had risotto cakes left over from Henry's Super Bowl party.

The technique works for any kind of chop, Hugh says. He offers suggestions for veal with lemon and capers or lamb with garlic and anchovies, but those will be for another day.