Pork With Plum and Chili Glaze

You can make your own plum preserves/jam for this recipe, as it's easy to do.

Ingredients:

6 boneless pork chops
4 black or red plums, washed, seeded and chopped
1/3 cup to 1/2 cup sugar, depending upon the sweetness of the plums and your personal taste
(or store bought plum preserves)
1/2 habanero chili
1/2 serrano chili* 
about 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons seasoned salt, to season the pork, both sides (I use adobo seasoning)

To make your own fresh plum chili sauce for this dish, put the chopped plums and chilies into a sauce pan with 1/3 cup sugar, mix in well. Cook over low heat, stirring frequently to prevent sticking. Taste the mixture to see if it is sweet and hot enough. When I made this the last time, the plums were very ripe and sweet, and thus they required less sugar, but I've also made it with plums that were tart, so the amount of sugar is simply a base guideline, and you just adjust it according to your own preference. Cook until the mixture thickens well, remove from heat (it will thicken even more). If using store bought preserves, add about 6 to 8 ounces of plum preserves to a pan and then add the chilies (continue as for making your own preserves). Season the pork on both sides with seasoned salt. Heat oven to 325 F. Bake pork on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, or on a rack in a baking pan/dish, until essentially tender (but it will be baked for a while longer). In a bowl, add the preserves and use a fork or tongs to then coat each pork chop with the plum/chili mixture. Return the pork to the oven for about 10 to 12 minutes. Serve extra plum/chili sauce on the side.   

* As I've noted here before, chilies vary in heat, even among the same type of peppers. When can always adjust the amount of chili pepper you add, according to the heat of the chili used and for your own personal heat preference.   

WORD HISTORY:
Glaze-This word, related to "glass," "gloss" (the form meaning "sheen, beauty") and "glow," goes back to Indo European "ghel," which had the notion, "to shine, to be bright." This gave its Old Germanic offspring "glaza/glasa," which seems to have originally meant, "amber," for the light and shiny fossil resin used for jewelry and decorative purposes. This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "glæsen," which was an adjectival form, "made of glass, shiny like glass." This then was used to form the verb, "glasen/glazen," "to be like glass, to shine like glass," and these then produced the noun form, but not until the 1700s, "material used to make something shiny." This then became modern "glaze," which broadened the meaning to cooking and "shiny" sauces to coat food. German has the closely related adjective "gläsern," "glassy, glass-like" (Low German also uses the same word, but whether it came by way of standard German, or gave the word TO standard German, I'm not sure).