I was looking at some of the the Simple Woman Day Journals yesterday when I saw Nancy at Home Made Blessings mention pork chops with orange rice for dinner. I’ve never heard of orange rice before and I had pork chops defrosting in the frig, so I googled orange rice. Well, her recipe ended up different than the one I found. Will have to try hers too (you can find Nancy’s on the 25 August 08 Day Journal).

I modified a recipe I found ~

I sauteed two stocks of celery (with leaves) and 1/3 of a red onion (thats all I had, probably would have used a yellow onion if I had one) in 1 TBSP of butter. Added about a TBSP of fresh thyme out of my garden, the zest of one large orange, 1-1/2 cups of water, 1 cup of orange juice. Bring to boil, add 1 cup of brown rice (you can use white…but I like brown). I browned the two pork chops (just two of us) with salt & pepper and then added them to the pot and cooked until the rice was ready ~ that was about 40 minutes. The rice was GREAT! Very tasty…really good on a summer’s evening.

Made a salad up with just romaine lettuce and a cucumber from the garden…I had bought Newman's Own Light Lime Vinaigrette a while back…my husband had some but I never tried it until last night. HOLY COW! That’s really good stuff! They always say 2 TBSP is a serving…never could figure out why…that’s a lot of dressing. I only use enough to give it flavor, which is less than 1 TBSP. If you’ve never tried it, please do! It’s excellent! LOVE the Lime zestiness of it! Making my mouth water just writing about it.