The Cost of Cooking Pork Chops With Applesauce, Couscous, and Asparagus

I haven’t done a “cost of making food” post since I did that whole series about the Lenny Letter’s meal plan, in part because I’ve been living off that sesame-encrusted tofu recipe ever since.

(Seriously. I’ve eaten so much tofu that I’ve had to Google “can you die of eating too much tofu.”)

But then I heard the Call Your Girlfriend podcast episode where ann friedman interviews Deb Perelman from Smitten Kitchen.

Phone-a-friend: Smitten Kitchen’s Deb Perelman | Call Your Girlfriend on acast

Perelman drops this quote:

I remember when I asked once for some slow cooker recipes, and the sheer number of people who told me “oh, you just take some chicken breasts and a jar of salsa and you put it in the slow cooker and then when you come home you have chicken tacos,” and I mean, it sounds really good, but I’m not going to write up that recipe.

To which I mentally responded: Wait. You can DO that?

One of the big reasons I don’t cook a lot of meat is that it takes way too much time—not only the baking or broiling or whatever, but also the whole “remove pork chops from store package and separate into individual freezer bags because I’m only one person and I’m not going to defrost and bake two pork chops at once, then sanitize every inch of the kitchen because I just touched raw pork” thing.

But if I could put two pork chops (or chicken breasts) in the slow cooker, the second one might stay moist enough to work as leftovers the next day. Especially if you cover it with a can of liquid.

So I had to try it. Here’s what I ended up spending on what I hoped would become two dinners:

Safeway pork loin chops, 0.79 lb: $3.94

Seneca applesauce, 1 lb 7.5 oz: $2.00

Near East couscous, Original Plain, 8 oz: $2.00

Dole asparagus, 1.12 lbs: $2.15

Total: $10.09, or $5.05 per meal. (The wine was a gift.)

The pork was delicious. Moist and flavorful. I never want to stick another pork chop into the oven again, not when I can do it in the slow cooker like this.

The applesauce cooked down considerably; I wondered if I’d have a bunch of pork-flavored applesauce left over, but by the time the chops were done the applesauce had turned into a glaze. I’ll put the second chop into a Pyrex container for tomorrow, and warm it up with another round of couscous and asparagus.

That $2.00 box of couscous will probably make five or six meals for me; I only cooked half the box today and still ended up with about twice as much couscous as I needed, even for two meals. I may end up sprinkling some of it into a salad for lunch.

I also have some frozen chicken breasts and two cans of diced tomatoes ready to go, when I decide to try this “recipe” again next week. I’m hoping I can get a kind of chicken cacciatore with lots of garlic, served over the other half of that couscous box.

I’ll let you know how it turns out and how much it costs.

Also, please leave your favorite “protein plus sauce” slow cooker combinations in the comments!

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