You can buy wild rice in big bags to cook from scratch or in those microwave bags to nuke for a couple of minutes. Wild rice has stacks of fibre in it which does great stuff for your digestion and blood pressure. You can absolutely serve the chops and rice with some broccoli or green beans but I love it with figs, feta and walnuts. It’s such an earthy dish with sweet and salty elements that just makes you feel good and it looks amazing too.
INGREDIENTS
Serves 2 Adults
210g wild rice
2 large pork chops
25g walnuts
50g goat’s cheese
2 figs
1/2 lemon
2 tbsp maple syrup
2 tbsp olive oil
salt
fresh thyme
- Put the rice into 1 litre of salted water and boil until tender (about 25 minutes). Once the rice is cooking you can gather the ingredients to cook the pork chops.
- Dry and salt the pork chops then put the olive oil in a large frying pan on a medium high heat. Once the oil is hot add the chops to the pan along with a couple of thyme sprigs and cook until you can see the meat is cooked halfway through then turn over and cook for half the time again (for example; if the first side took 4 minutes, the second side takes 2 minutes).
- Remove the chops and thyme from the pan and rest the pork on a plate. Add the walnuts to the pan and cook for a minute before adding the maple syrup and halved figs, cut side down, to the pan and cook for another minute then turn the figs over. Squeeze the lemon over and stir everything to make a sauce. Add any resting juices from the pork to the sauce.
- Serve the cooked, drained rice with the pork chops, walnuts and figs then crumble over some feta and fresh thyme leaves then drizzle with the sauce.
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