lemon parsley pork chops, roasted pears and sweet potatoes and yellow rice pilaf

Well, if at first you don't succeed, try try again. Actually, that's not true - I had to use up a value pack of chops so we were stuck trying another pork chop recipe - yippee! This time I'm the wiser and gave us options on the side. Here we have Lemon Parsley Pork Chops with two sides - Roasted Pears and Sweet Potatoes and Yellow Rice Pilaf.

Let's start with the Lemon Parsley Pork Chops from Great Food Fast. These are great! The cooking technique is simple but wonderful. The chops rendered a nice pan jus which helped blend the Lemon Parsley topping. All the flavours were really great together. 

Then we have Roasted Pears and Sweet Potatoes from Great Food Fast which had a totally ingenious technique for chopping sweet potatoes leaving lots of coverage for seasoning and browning making them like bite-sized chips. Both the pears and sweet potatoes were cooked beautifully but the seasoning of a combination of dry mustard, ginger and cayenne was just retched. My goodness, it was spicy and over the top. Basically inedible. 

Luckily, like I said, options - we had Yellow Rice Pilaf. I can't bring myself to buy those packets of seasoned rice, even if they are tasty for kids. I just felt it was easier to know exactly what was going into my rice instead of a bunch of preservatives and crazy-high sodium. Having said that, I didn't have much hope for this rice because it seemed too simple. Boy, was I wrong - this rice is outstanding. The turmeric dyed my favourite wood rice paddle yellow, which stinks, but it was so great Owen went nuts over it. This is a super great side for kids.