Pork Chops w/ Tomatilla Salsa & Cucumber, Mango, Black Bean Salad

Print Friendly

Well, sadly I am back from vacation. :( We had a great time, as always. The weather was perfect all week - it only rained a couple of times in the evening - and then it didn't matter. :)

I spent most of my time sitting in my chair by the water, reading. I could do that forever.

We went out on my uncle's pontoon boat for a day and did a bit of fishing. And, of course, we ate some great food. My brother made us some delicious grilled mahi-mahi with strawberry salsa; we also had some homemade spaghetti and meatballs, beer soaked chicken, fresh blue crab claws, shrimp cocktail, and some type of bacon-tomato pasta. We went to a place called Indigo Marsh on Thursday for dinner and I had a delicious plate of pasta with sun-dried tomatos, shrimp, crawfish tail and crab meat. YUM!

This is the sound side of the island, which is why the water is so calm. Gorgeous, isn't it? The ocean is a short 10 minute walk across the island (it's very narrow on this south end), or you can walk around the tip of the island, which is a little over a mile.

We take turns making dinner when we're there - each couple takes a night. For J and I, I wanted to find something fairly easy to make for a crowd (10 people), not too expensive, healthy and delicious! I found these recipes from Cooking Light that definitely fit the bill.

Unfortunately we were in such a hurry to get the food on the table and eat, I completely forgot to take a picture. :/ I thought about not blogging these, but they were so good that I didn't want to pass up the chance to pass them on to my readers.

For the main course we made Grilled Pork Chops with Tomatillo, Corn and Avocado Salsa. I'm not going to repeat the recipe - I followed this one exactly as written in the link above.

This salsa was so good - it had the sweetness from the tomatillos, and just a bit of kick from the jalepenos. I was eating the leftovers for a few days after with tortilla chips. :)

I would say, start to finish, this is about a 1/2 hour meal. I served the pork over Basmati rice as the recipe suggested. Oh, and instead of pork chops, we actually bought a sliced pork loin.

This is extremely simple to throw together. The worst part is there is a good bit of chopping. We doubled the recipe, plus the knives at the house we rented were absolute crap. But we managed. :)

As a side to the pork, we made Cucumber, Mango and Black Bean Salad. It kind of looked like a chunky salsa. We ended up tripling this recipe, and I'm glad I did! This is, again, really simple to throw together. It's maybe 10 minutes to make, and you want to let it sit for about 15 for the flavors to blend.

I only made one change. I thought we had some orange juice, but it turned out it was gone. So I substituted a bit of lemon juice instead.