Cream Cheese Pork Chops

Twenty weeks. The halfway point. I am halfway to meeting my child. Dr. Hernandez did the anatomy scan on Wednesday — a detailed ultrasound that took forty-five minutes and mapped every organ, every bone, every chamber of the heart. The baby is healthy. The baby is developing normally. The baby has ten fingers and ten toes and a spine and a beating heart and a face that looked, on the grainy ultrasound screen, like a very small, very serious person who was evaluating their surroundings with suspicion. Karen would say: that is a Park trait.

We found out the sex. James and I had debated — to find out or to wait — and ultimately decided to find out because we are both engineers and we believe in data and because Jisoo needs to know the sex to choose the name. The baby is a girl. A girl. A daughter. I am having a daughter.

I sat in the car after the appointment and held the ultrasound photo — profile view, the baby's face in silhouette — and I thought: I am going to have a daughter. I am going to raise a Korean-Taiwanese-American girl in Seattle and I am going to give her kimchi and beef noodle soup and Karen's pot roast and the Korean language and her birth grandmother's name and everything I was not given and everything I was. She is going to know where she comes from. She is going to know all of it — Jisoo and Karen and David and James and Ming and Wei and the doorstep in Gangnam-gu and the split-level in Bellevue and the kitchen in Haeundae. She is going to know.

I called Jisoo on Wednesday evening (Thursday morning in Busan). I said, "It's a girl." Jisoo screamed. A small Korean woman in Busan screamed so loud I held the phone away from my ear. Then she started talking rapidly in Korean — too fast for me, but I caught fragments: "daughter," "girl," "name," "I know, I know the name." She has chosen. She will tell me when she is ready. She is not ready yet. She wants the name to settle first, she said. She wants to be sure. I can wait. I have waited thirty years for this woman. I can wait a few more weeks for a name.

I told Karen on Thursday. I drove to Bellevue with the ultrasound photo. I handed it to her. She held it with both hands — shaking hands, steady grip — and she looked at the profile for a long time. She said, "A girl." She said, "She has your chin." I said, "Mom, you cannot see a chin on an ultrasound." She said, "I can see your chin on anything." She put the photo on the refrigerator with a magnet. It is there now, next to a photo of me as a baby and a photo of Karen and David's wedding. Three photos. Three generations. The refrigerator in the Bellevue kitchen is a timeline of women in my family.

The recipe this week is gamjatang — pork bone soup with potatoes — a hearty, spicy, deeply comforting Korean soup that I am craving constantly now. Pork spine bones, boiled and cleaned. Simmer for two hours with garlic, ginger, doenjang, gochugaru. Add potatoes, perilla leaves, and napa cabbage in the last twenty minutes. The broth is milky and rich and the meat falls off the bone and the potatoes are tender and soft and it is, I think, the most satisfying Korean soup I know. I am eating it for the baby. I am eating it for myself. I am eating it because I am having a daughter and the soup is warm and the world is good.

The gamjatang I described above is the soup of my heart this week — but on the nights I don’t have four hours and a bag of pork spine bones, I turn to these cream cheese pork chops, which deliver the same deep, savory comfort in under an hour. There is something about tender pork in a rich, creamy sauce that feels like the right thing to eat when your whole world has shifted in the most beautiful way — when you have just learned you are having a daughter and you need a meal that is warm and generous and asks nothing of you. I made these on Thursday night after driving back from Bellevue, after leaving Karen’s kitchen with my ultrasound photo on her refrigerator, and they were exactly enough.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 35 minutes | Total Time: 45 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

4 bone-in pork chops (about 3/4 inch thick)
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup chicken broth
4 oz cream cheese, softened and cubed
1/2 cup sour cream
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped (for garnish)

Instructions

Season the chops. Pat pork chops dry with paper towels. In a small bowl, combine garlic powder, onion powder, smoked paprika, salt, and pepper. Rub the seasoning mixture evenly over both sides of each pork chop.
Sear. Heat olive oil in a large oven-safe skillet over medium-high heat. Once the oil shimmers, add the pork chops and sear for 3–4 minutes per side until a deep golden-brown crust forms. Transfer chops to a plate and set aside.
Build the sauce. Reduce heat to medium. In the same skillet, add the minced garlic and cook for 30 seconds until fragrant. Pour in the chicken broth, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Let the broth simmer for 2 minutes.
Add the cream cheese. Reduce heat to low. Add the cubed cream cheese to the skillet and whisk gently until it melts fully into the broth. Stir in the sour cream and Dijon mustard, whisking until the sauce is smooth and uniform.
Finish the pork. Return the seared pork chops to the skillet, nestling them into the cream cheese sauce. Spoon sauce over the tops. Cover and cook over low heat for 15–20 minutes, until the pork is cooked through and registers 145°F internally.
Rest and serve. Remove from heat and let rest 5 minutes. Spoon additional sauce over each chop, garnish with fresh parsley, and serve over mashed potatoes, egg noodles, or steamed rice to catch the sauce.

Nutrition (per serving)

Cream Cheese Pork Chops — For the Week Everything Changed