Cooking with Emily: Sweet & Sour Pork

I have a confession to make....sometimes meals at our house are not complicated made from scratch recipes.  Sometimes we open a jar or thaw out one of my "in case of emergency" casseroles (an emergency, more often than not, is that I don't feel like cooking).
Monday is supposed to be Emily's night to cook.  However this week Emily decided she wanted to go to her friend's house after school.  She had intended to make Bison Meatball & Lentil Soup, but at quarter past five I still hadn't seen her, so I browned the ground bison I had thawed and made spaghetti sauce.  Tuesday I stopped at the grocery store for bread on my way home and decided pork chops looked good, and Emily again decided to spend the afternoon with her friends, although she did return home just before I lit the barbecue with a tearful and apologetic hug for "abandoning" me two nights in a row.  Wednesday she invited s friend home with her and I turned the leftover spaghetti sauce into baked penne.  Thursday was the church youth group kick off barbecue and I was freed from needing to make a decision about supper (leftovers were again on deck) Friday was definitely a leftover, because we need to clear out the refrigerator night, but I agreed to babysit for a friend and frozen pizza made an appearance on our menu.

And then it was Saturday.  Emily took it upon herself to clean the garage for me, and we finally made a trek to the bottle depot.  On the way home we stopped at the grocery store for a few odds and ends and to see if something sparked an inspiration for dinner.  Emily looked at the frozen meals, which I vetoed as overly expensive.  Then she suggested sweet and sour pork.  It sounded like a pretty good plan to me.  Bottled sauces were on sale so we picked up one as well as a small pork roast.  Dinner was planned.
While Emily cleaned her room I went out to tackle some much neglected yard work.  When it was done she asked if she could make dinner.  Even better.  I told her to cut the roast into small, bite-sized chunks and to brown it with a chopped onion, advising her to brown it half at a time.  Once the meat was all browned she poured over the bottle of sauce and let it simmer while she prepared some broccoli to steam and set a pot of water on to boil as she had opted for pasta instead of rice as a side.
She asked me for a simple sauce to make for the pasta, but I told her the sauce on the meat would be more than adequate.  She was a little disappointed I suspect, since her culinary muscles were not getting much of a workout.  Nonetheless dinner was very tasty, and we were done early enough to make it to a movie, her reward for helping with taking a summer's worth of bottles to the depot.

With any luck this week we should be back on track schedule-wise.  At least I hope so.