Champagne Pork Chops

You can only eat so many champagne cupcakes before you figure out you need another way to get rid of your champagne leftover from New Years. I decided to search on the Food Network website for some ideas. Emeril had a recipe that made a vanilla-infused champagne sauce. The only problem is the sauce requires the addition of more than a stick of butter. While that does sound rather decadent, I'm at least attempting to shed some of my winter blubber. So I used a Robin Miller recipe instead: pork chops in creamy champagne sauce.


This recipe pretty much uses champagne like any other wine to deglaze the pan after you've cooked the pork chops. Then you thicken the sauce with some flour mixed into some milk. The sauce does not have a strong champagne flavor, but the sparkling wine did add a sweetness to the sauce that complimented the shallots and worked well with the thyme.

As a side note, I got to use my new potato ricer to make the mashed potato side for this dish. Normally I just use my masher to make lumpy mashed potatoes. But this new ricer extrudes the potato through small holes, kind of like a Play Doh factory. The end result is a much smoother mashed potato. What a delicious way to kick off 2010.