1 medium apple, peeled, cored and quartered
1 small Portobello mushroom, stem and gills removed
1 cup baby spinach
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1. Preheat grill to low.
2. Rub apple and portobello with half the olive oil and place on the grill. Grill on both sides, about 2 minutes per side, until grill marks form and apple is slightly tender.
3. Slice apple and portobello and mix with spinach and remaining olive oil. Drizzle balsamic vinegar over top to serve.

Makes 1 serving

4 six ounce pork chops
3 small apples, peeled, cored and cubed
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1/8 teaspoon nutmeg
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
salt and pepper
water

1. Preheat grill.
2. Place apples, cinnamon and nutmeg in a wide bottomed pot and cook over medium heat, stirring often, with as much water as necessary to prevent sticking and dryness.
3. Meanwhile, rub pork chops with vegetable oil, salt and pepper and grill until cooked through to center, about 4 minutes per side.
4. Spoon sauce over top of pork chops to serve.

Makes 4 servings

After drinking a bottle of Shannon's dad's homemade apple wine, I decided it'd be a brilliant idea to make a dinner themed around apples. Apples are delicious in both sweet and savory dishes and I just filled up an entire crisper with cheap ones last week! What an excellent opportunity to make use of them, right? Well, in theory.

First, I did not have an entire crisper full of apples, but 2; just two apples. Though I did buy a large bag of apples, I also happened to eat a lot of apples over the course of a week. So my first mistake was making an apple themed dinner with only 2 apples. Actually, my first mistake was deciding to formulate a dinner theme after drinking a bottle of wine. Mistakes continued to occur from this point on.

My entree was going to be a grilled pork chop with applesauce. I read a hint on a website that said I should microwave my apples because it's so much faster and just as tasty! Just pop them in the microwave for 10 minutes on high and all will be delicious. So, in my apple wine induced haze, I'm thinking, "This will be awesome! 10 minutes and I'll have apple sauce!" but in reality, 4 minutes later my microwave sort of looked like a magic show with lots of smoke effects as the apple had begun to reduce to ash and emit a terrible, burnt hair odor.

While trying to diffuse the smell from the kitchen and prevent the smoke detector from going off, I left the pork chop itself on the grill (the smell from the microwave was so bad I caught a whiff while on the balcony) and thus did an excellent job of charring that as well. I should've taken this as a cue to ditch the apple theme altogether and go with something Cajun, but I kept it up with a Grilled Apple Salad. I was grilling the apples on low, so they did not meat the same fate as the pork chop. The grilled apple was actually really good since it sort of lightly caramelized.

Something that I hadn't thought about before this week is that there are many ways to dress a salad. Apparently the way we would typically add salad dressing to a salad is the French way; mixing together the oil and vinegar and then pouring it over the salad ingredients, thus coating them in the dressing itself. The Italian way is to pour olive oil over the salad ingredients, thus "protecting" them from the acid, then adding the vinegar afterwards. My preference is still for the French way, since you can actually taste the vinaigrette before making it a permanent addition to the salad.