Healthy Meal: Oven "Fried" Pork Chop and Honey Roasted Sweet Potatoes

It’s rare for me to not think about food for most of the day. I usually am dreaming about what I’m going to have for dinner. However, at 6 PM today, I had forgotten to think about dinner at all, and was browsing Food Network trying to think what I was in the mood for. I was kind of in the mood for fried chicken, but I knew I only had a HUGE breast in the freezer that was really two servings. I know you can’t unfreeze and then refreeze meats, and since I’m traveling till Thursday, the other half would be bad before I got home. However, I remembered hearing of something called a “chicken fried pork chop,” so I decided to take a fried chicken recipe and use a pork chop as the meat instead. To go with it, I decided on roasted sweet potatoes.

Note that when I say “fried chicken,” I mean “baked chicken” that’s breaded so it’s almost like fried. This is a healthy blog, after all 🙂

Recipe notes: pork chop
I followed the recipe exactly as written, except that I forgot to spray the top of the meat with oil before putting it in the oven. What that meant was that the breading didn’t really crisp up until I realized halfway through and flipped it so it would soak up some of the oil I had used to grease the pan. Basically, it came out not as pretty as it should, and not quite as crispy as you’d get if you followed the recipe exactly. To make up for it, I tried to pop the pork chop in the toaster after, but it basically just succeeded in making the pork chop slightly overdone. Oops. Still, the breading was very tasty flavors, and if you don’t screw it up, it would be delicious and very healthy. It’s a unique idea to use mustard to get the breading to stick, but I like it a lot.

Recipe notes: sweet potatoes
I followed the recipe as-is again, but cut it down for two people (I decided to have a double serving because I had bought a very large sweet potato and didn’t want to waste it). After making it, I decided that to make it healthier you could probably do without the honey (sweet potatoes are sweet enough), and maybe using cooking spray or a Misto instead of drizzling olive oil, because you could use less of it that way. The flavors were absolutely fantastic though – cinnamon on sweet potatoes is fantastic.

Nutrition facts:
273 calories for the pork chop (recipe here)
225 calories per serving of the sweet potatoes (recipe here)

Review: 4/5
The pork chop was overdone, but that was my fault, not the recipe. I think if you’re cooking chicken, 30 minutes would be about right, but because I substituted for a thin-cut pork chop, I should have shortened the cooking time. The flavors of the breading were great though – the spices really came through, and I loved the mustard-y flavor that permeated because I had used that to bind the breading. The sweet potatoes were great with the cinnamon. And actually, I take back what I said before about omitting the honey: I think it would just be better if you drizzle the honey on at the end to give them a bit of moisture and so you taste the honey more (rather than having it all melt onto your baking pan). I would definitely make this again (either with pork chops or chicken) as a healthy alternative when I want some homestyle southern food.