Golden Pork Chops

Easter Sunday, 2021. The first in-person family gathering in over a year. Thirteen months of video calls and masked doorstep visits and the particular loneliness that comes from being separated from the people who make your life worth living — all of it ending today, in the sanctuary of Mt. Zion Baptist Church, where the pews were full again (socially distanced but full) and the choir sang "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today" and the sound of two hundred voices praising together after a year of praising apart was the most beautiful thing I have heard in sixty-two years of hearing.

After church, the family gathered at the house on Deadrick Avenue. All of them: Walter Jr. and Tamika and the kids, Marcus and Angela and Naomi — Naomi, who is fourteen months old and walking, WALKING, her small body tottering across my living room floor with the fearless determination of a Johnson woman, which she is — Charlie and David from Nashville, Tyrone from Raleigh, and Mama, transported from Whitehaven by Walter Jr., sitting in her wheelchair in the kitchen, thinner than she was before COVID, foggier, but present, alive, here.

I smoked a leg of lamb for Easter — the Mediterranean rub, rosemary and garlic, the annual departure from my pork-and-beef theology that Easter demands. But the lamb was secondary. The gathering was primary. The gathering was everything. Fourteen months of separation, of screens instead of hugs, of waving at windows instead of holding hands, and now here we were, in the same room, breathing the same air, passing the same dishes, and the normalcy of it — the beautiful, ordinary, irreplaceable normalcy — was the resurrection. Not of Christ, though we celebrated that too. The resurrection of the family. The family that COVID separated and Easter reunited, and the reuniting was a kind of grace that I will never take for granted again.

Naomi walked to me. Across the living room, fourteen months old, arms out, tottering with the concentration of someone performing the most important act of their young life. She walked to me and I caught her and lifted her and she laughed, and the laugh was the sound of everything that COVID tried to take and couldn't, because laughter survives quarantine, love survives distance, and a grandfather's arms survive anything.

That Easter I made lamb because Easter demands something ceremonial, something outside the ordinary — but it’s the everyday table that holds a family together across all the other Sundays of the year. These Golden Pork Chops are what I reach for when I want to feel that reunion warmth on a Tuesday night in November, when the house is quiet and I need to cook something that says we are still here, we are still whole. The garlic, the browning, the smell that pulls everyone into the kitchen — it’s simple, and simplicity is exactly what fourteen months of absence taught me to treasure.

Prep Time: 10 min | Cook Time: 25 min | Total Time: 35 min | Servings: 4

Ingredients

4 bone-in pork chops (about 3/4 inch thick)
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup chicken broth
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
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, paprika, thyme, salt, and pepper. Rub the mixture evenly over both sides of each chop.
Sear until golden. Heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add pork chops in a single layer and sear without moving for 4–5 minutes, until a deep golden crust forms. Flip and sear the other side for 3–4 minutes.
Build the pan sauce. Reduce heat to medium. Pour in chicken broth and Worcestershire sauce, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Those bits are flavor — don’t leave them behind.
Simmer and finish. Cover loosely and simmer for 10–12 minutes, or until the internal temperature of the thickest chop reaches 145°F. Remove chops to a plate. Stir butter into the remaining pan sauce over medium heat until melted and glossy.
Rest and serve. Let chops rest 3 minutes, then spoon pan sauce over top and garnish with fresh parsley. Serve alongside rice, mashed potatoes, or roasted vegetables.

Nutrition (per serving)

Golden Pork Chops — The Everyday Table That Brought Us Back Together