I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world. Mastodon Verification Link	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he migrated to the Fediverse. He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance. He hates cell-phones.

Chops can be a bit tricky to deal with, I find. Grilling them, which works well, is not always an option, and pan-frying can be problematical. If the chops are thick, it can be difficult to get them cooked all the way through without doing violence to the exterior, and trying to slow the process down can result in toughness. The solution, rather obviously, is not to pan-fry chops unless they are quite thin. Thus opens the wonderful world of the baked chop.

The main thing to be wary of when baking chops is the danger of dryness. If the chops are lean, some way of ameliorating the drying effect of the longer cooking time is called for. I've had success with simply putting a bit of bacon on top to keep the meat lubricated as it cooks, but there are other options, as well. For instance, you can punt to a braise, which is what I've done with the smothered chops below.

I had some lovely goat chops that I wanted to cook, and goat is pretty lean to start with, so this seemed like an excellent treatment for them. (And so it was.) However, the same recipe works perfectly well for pork chops, and would probably work well for many other cuts of meat that don't require the long, slow braising of, say, oxtails.

These chops, by the way and except in the picture at the top, are saddle chops, or what is sometimes called a 'Barnsley chop.' I first ran across these at Keene's Chop House in NYC, where they use it for their mutton chops - or at least they used to. I like the look of them, and if you're dealing with a smallish animal like a lamb or a goat, they're a good size for a single serving, as opposed to a 'regular' chop which is often not quite big enough.

• four or six chops, depending on size
• an onion
• a clove or two of garlic
• a splash of olive oil
• salt and pepper
• a can/carton of chopped tomatoes in the 400 gm/14 oz range, mine was 390 gm

That's it really. We served them with mashed potatoes and either roasted sprouts or steamed broccoli. They were moist and tender, and the character of the chop wasn't overwhelmed by the smothering sauce - delicious.