Pork and Roasted Vegetable Salad

I love roasted vegetables.  I love roasted vegetable salads.  In a restaurant if I see a roasted vegetable salad I'll immediately order it.  And if it's with some sort of meat on top then even better.  I love roasted vegetable salads.  They're so simple and cheap and I had never made it at home, I always order it in restaurants and it costs a fortune when you think about how cheap the ingredients are.  These fancy restaurants are robbing us blind! This is so good, this is what you'd pay 9 pounds for in a restaurant.  I made 4 portions of this and my ingredients cost....can't remember but it was surely less than 5 pounds.  

And isn't this pretty? You can imagine this being served at a restaurant, right?  I'm so proud because usually I'm so bad at presentation.  Food is one of those things in life that gets judged unfairly based on its appearance.

Anyway, based on my recipe below I probably made waaayy too much roasted vegetables for the amount of pork that was there, I could've used another pork chop and made it into 6 servings instead.

Total time: 1 hr     Serves: 4   Suitable for: healthy and fancy dinner parties 

Ingredients

For the Pork

2 pork chops

1/2 cup white wine

2 sprigs of thyme

For the Balsamic sauce

4 tbsp balsamic vinegar

2 tbsp runny honey

For the Roasted Vegetables Salad

2 bell peppers, cut in half

2 courgettes, thinly sliced or grated into long strips

about a dozen of cherry tomatoes, cut in half

1 tsp oregano

olive oil

1 aubergine, thinly sliced into round discs

2 onions, thinly sliced

2 cups rocket

Method

Start with the vegetables:  Fry the onions over medium high heat until softened, reserve.  Put all the other vegetables, except for the rocket, in a roasting tray and drizzle with olive oil, season with salt and pepper (for the tomatoes add the oregano as well).  

Roast in a preheated oven of 200C for about 20 minutes or until all tender.  You should then be able to peel the skin off the red peppers.  Discard the skin and slice into strips.  Mix all the veggies and onions and rocket together.  Cover and keep warm.  

Now with the roast pork: Season the pork chops with salt and pepper.

Put some oil in a pan over medium high heat and add the pork chops.  Just let that sear for a minute and turn it over and let that sear for a minute as well.  Then add the white wine and thyme.  Cover and let cook for a couple of minutes until cooked through.  Slice into strips when done, so you can actually cut them up in the middle of cooking to see if they're cooked through.

The balsamic sauce: Pour the balsamic vinegar into a sauce pan over high heat and let that reduce to about 1/4,  then add the honey and whisk that in.

Plating up!  Put a blob of the vegetable salad onto the center of the plate and place  the strips of pork on top, then drizzle with the sauce.