I’m always looking for good pork chop recipes, probably because I seldom find any that we love enough to repeat.  But I finally found one that could be a contender.  We adapted this pork chop dish from this recipe on the Epicurious website.  We’ve mentioned Epicurious before — it’s a great, user-friendly site with tons and tons of recipes.  The “user rating” and review features of the site are so helpful and provide tips and feedback from other people who have cooked the recipes.  For example, several reviewers of this pork chop recipe mentioned that they substituted panko for the cubed bread and suggested putting a little extra stuffing around the chops in the baking dish.  We followed both of these tips and the pork chops turned out great.

We made a few other substitutions as well, based on taste preferences and ingredients we happened to have on hand.  The ingredients include boneless pork chops, panko (instead of cubed French bread), mushrooms, dried thyme (instead of rosemary), shallots (instead of onion), butter and gorgonzola cheese (instead of roquefort or blue cheese.)

Finely chop the mushrooms for the stuffing.

Finely chop the shallots (or onion) as well.

Melt about a tablespoon of butter in a skillet over medium heat.

Saute the mushrooms, shallots and thyme until the shallots are soft — about 5 minutes.

Remove the sauteed mushrooms and shallots to a bowl and refrigerate until the mixture is cool — about 15 minutes.  This step is important because you don’t want to put warm stuffing (or warm anything!) into the raw pork chops.

Cut a pocket in the middle of each chop for the stuffing.

Expand the pocket a bit so that you can fully stuff the chops.

Add the gorgonzola (or roquefort or blue cheese) to the mushroom/shallot mixture.  We like gorgonzola because it is a little less strong than blue cheese.

Add the panko (or cubed French bread) to the mixture.  We used panko because it was easier than having to saute the French bread as called for in the original recipe.

Mix all the stuffing ingredients together, then salt and pepper to taste.

Stuff the mixture into the pocket of each chop.

Season the stuffed chops with salt and pepper.

Melt about a tablespoon of butter in a skillet over high heat.

Saute the pork chops until they are browned on both sides — about 5 minutes total.

Place the browned pork chops in a baking dish and sprinkle the remaining stuffing around the chops.

De-glaze the pan in which you browned the chops with a little white wine.  This was another tip we picked up from the user reviews for this recipe on Epicurious.

Scrape up all the browned bits from the bottom of the pan.

Pour the pan liquid over the chops and stuffing.

Bake the pork chops in the oven preheated to 350 degrees until the pork is cooked through — about 25-30 minutes.

We served the pork chops and stuffing with a simple salad.  Not only were the pork chops delicious — with just the right sharp taste from the gorgonzola contrasting nicely with the earthiness of the mushrooms — but the recipe is really versatile.  While this flavor combination was particularly good, this recipe would also work well with other stuffing variations, depending on what you like and the ingredients you have.