Cheesy Pork With Braised Vegetables (by G)

I was watching Iron Chef (the Japanese and only good version) and saw the Iron Chef wrap a sweetfish around some cheese, crumb it and deep-fry it. That seemed and excellent idea to me if the fish was substituted for pork.

Things didn't go quite right from the start. I bought some pre-beaten pork schnitzel pieces from the supermarket - disappointingly they were all irregular sizes and it appeared some of them would not wrap all the way around the cheese - so I did a little extra beating but there's only so far a piece of pork is willing to be beaten. I thought I'd get around the likelihood of the cheese oozing out by enveloping the cheese in some nori before wrapping in the pork. Through a mathematical mis-step I didn't cut the pieces of nori large enough.  By that point my carefactor was much reduced so I just wrapped and skewered everything together, bathed the pork in a slurry of egg, flour and water, then dusted with a breadcrumb/parmesan mix and fried.

The oil got a bit hot at one point and I burned some of the crumbs, then I stuck them in the oven to stay warm.

I was looking for a couple of sticks of celery the other day and could only find a ginormous full bunch so I was determined to use up some of it today. I fried the celery in butter along with some carrot and mushrooms then added pepper and beef stock and reduced - braised vegetables in minutes.

I also oven roasted some little potatoes to ensure there was enough food.

As expected the cheese oozed out of the meat roll so I served it (rather elegantly) on the side. The time in the oven toughened up the pork quite a bit so it was quite leathery.  Despite these issues I still enjoyed this dinner.