Honey Nut Pork Pockets
Sounds gross, doesn’t it? Yeah, well I’ve got news for you: it looks even worse than it sounds.
It tastes terrific, though. I don’t mean to sound surprised, but since I made it out of what I had in the house at the end of an extra long day — leftover puff pastry, frozen pork, crushed nuts, honey, and goat cheese. It could have been a massive failure, but it wasn’t! So here’s what I made out of it, and let me tell you something: I will make it again.
I will make it again even after my mom reads this and gives me an estimate of the fat content.
Probably.
Ingredients:
- 1 sheet frozen puff pastry
- 2 small boneless pork chops
- 2/3 cup crushed nuts (I used walnuts and pecans; cashews would also be nice)
- 2/3 cup honey (I am absolutely guessing at the amount here, so you’ll need to use your head)
- 1 tsp minced garlic
- 1 other tsp minced garlic
- Onion powder
- Parsley
- Ground ginger
- Black pepper
- Sea salt
- 1 egg
- 1 tablespoon water
- Crumbled goat cheese (1/2 cup should be enough)
- Nonstick spray (or oil)
- Parmesan to garnish
- Flour to roll out your pastry
- First, put your puff pastry out on the counter and thaw it according to the package directions. I never give my pastry enough time and then I get impatient and do you know what happens then? My pastry tears. Is that what you want? No? Thaw your pastry!
- While it’s thawing, get everything else ready. Coat your pork chops in one of your teaspoons of minced garlic, some parsley, some black pepper, and the tiniest bit of ginger. Throw them into a hot pan (use a nonstick pan and/or spray with nonstick spray) and cook them up until they’re browned on both sides and just barely cooked through. They’re going to spend another 15–20 minutes in the oven, but better safe than sorry where food poisoning is involved. When the pork’s cooked, take it off the heat and set it aside.
- Make the honey-nuts. You can do this while your pork is frying, or, if you took your pastry out of the freezer kind of late and you’re trying to kill time, wait until the pork is cooling. Put your nuts in the bowl with your honey. You want the end result to be a loosely honey-bound clump of nuts. You should be able to spread it, but just barely. So add honey until you feel like you’ve accomplished that. Then add the other teaspoon of garlic, some sea salt, some onion powder and some black pepper. How much? Up to you. I went pretty easy on all of these. It’s tough to season this “to taste,” though, because the taste of this alone is so different from what it’ll be like when it’s mixed up with everything else. In essence, the seasoning is meant to help cut the sweetness of the honey just a tad.
- Once the pork cools a little, cut it up into bite-size pieces.
- Put some flour on your counter and get a rolling pin and wait for your puff pastry to be thawed. Roll it out just a bit flatter than it comes. You want it to take up maybe one and a half times as much of the counter as it did when you opened the package.
- Preheat the oven to 400 F.
- Cut the pastry in half longways, so you have two long rectangles. Spread half the honey-nuts in the center of each rectangle, at least an inch from the short edges (and probably about six inches from each of the long edges). Put half the pork pieces on top of the honey-nuts, then sprinkle the goat cheese on top of that. Wrap the long ends of the pastry over the top (you’ll have two layers of pastry on top), and press the short edges gently with a fork so they’ll stay closed. This recipe needs pictures. I’ll add them next time I make it. Consider this the alpha version.
Note: I also added sauteed green pepper that I had chopped up, but it was overwhelmed by other flavors and couldn’t be tasted. So don’t bother adding it, and ignore it in the pictures.
- Spray a baking sheet with nonstick spray. Place your two pastry pockets on it.
- Then beat your egg in a bowl and add the water. Brush the egg mixture on top of each pastry and sprinkle some parmesan on top.
- Bake for 15–20 minutes until nice and golden. THEN EAT IT BECAUSE IT’S AWESOME.
