Most nights when I cook dinner, it's more of a somewhat random throw-together of ingredients that I come up with when I take a look at what I have in the pantry and the fridge. Last Wednesday (almost a week ago! Sorry!) I put together something I've kind of done before via recipe... Sweet Potato Chicken (not containing any real sweet potatoes).

This type of meal usually ends up a little sweet, but with a bit of spice too. If you're adverse to the spice, just leave it out.

What I had in the pantry:

What I had in the fridge:

How I did it:

Toss the chicken with some salt, pepper, rosemary, and cayenne pepper. You could do this with any part of the chicken, including boneless skinless chicken breast - I just happened to have legs & thighs available.

Slice the onions.

Brown the chicken with some oil in a large ovenproof pan w/ lid. Once all the chicken is done, brown the onions in the same pan (remove the chicken first) with a little more oil. When the onion is translucent, move it to the outside of the pan and put the chicken back in.

Pour about 2 cups of the sweet potato soup over the chicken, put the lid on and toss in a 350 degree oven. After 30 minutes, take the chicken out, pour 1 more cup of soup over and add a handful of raisins. Put the lid back on again, and put back into the oven.

For the sides, I made a box of my fave EZ rice, and tossed some baby spinach with balsamic vinegar on which to put the chicken.

15 minutes after putting the chicken back into the oven, take it out and remove the chicken to the plates and put the pan on a burner on medium. Allow the sauce to reduce about 50%, then spoon over the chicken and greens.

Add the rice (or other starch) to the side and serve!

Yum!

Posted at 6:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm going to Vegas for the weekend, so there won't be any updates until I'm back, when I regale the memory of the throw-together dinner of which I took photographs on Wednesday. See you on Sunday!

Posted at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I must say that I'm a lover of the curry. From Thailand to Japan, I have had curry in the most amazing number of ways, but I most often make Japanese chicken curry at home. So much, in fact, that I'm bored of it and am currently taking a haitus. So, when I was looking for a beef stew recipe (I've had some beef cubes thawed in my fridge for days), I came across this recipe on epicurious that looked tasty, and I tried it out last night.

The recipe for the curry will not be reprinted here due to copyright stuff. Following the advise of some commentors, I switched out the whole milk for "lite" coconut milk (the change also made the recipe kosher), added a little sachet of lemongrass to the mixture (for something to cut the sweetness a little), threw in some carrots, and made it a bit spicier by using 1Tbs normal curry and 1/2Tbs hot curry. The spiciness turned out just right.

The ingredients, set out on the island, ready to be curry. It was remarkably hard for me to find kosher Major Grey Chutney and coconut milk. I ended up settling for both being verified vegan. Verified by whom, I don't know.




The beef, cut into smaller cubes (the ones in the package are all sorts of different sizes), all salted and peppered.




The first batch of cubes browning....




...And how all of it turned out - I'm too lazy to get the brown on all sides, so I settle with 2.




Sliced onions and my garbage bowl




Spices, with the awesome spice bags. The bags I found at my local Co-Op. I think they're for tea or something more inconspicuous. The last time I've purchased them, I got them for free since the cashier couldn't find the price (to be fair, I can never find a barcode or price for them, either). These are awesome for bouquet garnis or any other kind of spice that's hard to get out after having it simmer for 2 hours. Plus, they're washable and reusable. I love them.




Added the onions to the pot with a little more oil. I tossed these about a few times, and scraped up some of the bits from the beef that were left over from the browning.




2 of my favorite recipe additions are chopped up to be added to the curry. Once in a while, I'll just crush the garlic and ginger nicely and smear it on some chicken before baking. Yummy!




Once the onions looked brownish, I added the beef & juices back in. The next few minutes are a blur, as the rest of the ingredients are added in 2 batches, one minute apart.





After all the ingredients are added, and things are stirred around a bit, the heat is raised and things get bubbly. This is when the smells start to mingle and make your mouth wateriffic. Unfortunately, there's a 2-hour wait before you can eat.




Oops! I almost forgot the carrots! I went back into the kitchen after about 15 minutes of simmering to stir, and realized there was something missing. I added 3 medium carrots cut on a bias into thirds and tossed them in.




About 30 minutes from the end of the 2 hours, cook up some rice. I made organic basmati, and the smell of the rice coupled with the curry made my stomach implode. At the 2 hour mark, the heat is turned up again and the pot is left uncovered to reduce the liquids into a creamy sauce. I only reduced for about 5 minutes - I was far too impatient and wanted to eat now.




Ben's curry, over rice, with some parsley on top for show. Ben doesn't like the parsley, but I ate it with the curry, and it added a little fresh bite.

The curry itself was perfectly balanced between sweet, spicy, and savory. The sauce was creamy and was paired well with the rice. Ben had 2 huge helpings, and I have to say that I had a small second helping as well. Then I ate the rest for lunch today. Now that I have some of the ingredients for this curry that I normally don't have in my pantry (Major Grey Chutney, coconut milk, basmati rice), I'll probably make it at least once more before Passover. Hopefully we'll get more servings out of it next time...

Posted at 6:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This lasagna had it coming for 5 years. My notoriously picky-eating husband proclaimed his hatred for lasagna as a whole when we first started dating, which didn't bother me too much; there are plenty of other pasta dishes one can prepare that include the same ingredients. However, after a recent trip to Italy, he returned a lasagna convert. "Do you want to make lasagna?" he asked, "I had some in Italy I really liked. I think I didn't like it before because of the hard noodles." Hard noodles? No lasagna I have ever made included hard noodles.
I took him up on the offer last Friday. I originally planned to make the entire thing from scratch (including noodles), but ran out of time. I did, however, make the tomato sauce from scratch, as I have been wont to do lately. I was a little nervous, as I hadn't made lasagna in a very long time, and decided to base the recipe off of the one in the Barefoot Contessa Family Style cookbook. The recipe includes meat and cheese, which together aren't kosher, so I got rid of the meat, added some veggies, and here's how it turned out:

Okay, so it may not be the most aesthetically pleasing lasagna, but it tasted wonderful. For the recipe, etc, keep reading...

The Clever Chef's Vegetarian Lasagna

Take 1:

• Slosh some good olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pan with a lid. This is going to be cooking for a while, so start early. Put the pan on your stove and turn the burner on to Med-High.
  
  
• Chop up a medium yellow or sweet onion. Once the pan is warm, toss it in and give it a good stir.
  
  
• Peel some garlic. I like lots. Chop it up and divide in half. Add one half to the pan with the onions - save the other half for later. Stir it about some more.
  
  
• Once the onions are translucent, toss in 2 cans of chopped tomatoes
  
  
• Stir in the tomatoes, then add some red wine. DO NOT SKIP THIS. The wine adds tons of flavor. If you don't add the wine, I can't tell you how your sauce will turn out. How much wine? At least a cup. I measure wine in glugs (3 glugs for the sauce, please).
  
  
• Add the following spces: ground red pepper (optional - this gives it a nice kick), garlic powder, cayenne pepper (again, with the kick), basil, oregano, sage, and ground cloves. The garlic powder, basil, oregano, and sage can be added in larger quantities - I usually give about a half tablespoon apiece. For the peppers and the cloves, add about a tsp.
  
  
• Mix all the spices in, then let come to a simmer. Mix once more and add a glug of good Balsamic vinegar. This is going to give the sauce some sweetness, as well as a little tartness. It's perfect.
• Lower the heat so that the sauce is just barely simmering - very very low. Cover and go to the bar to play some cribbage.
• Once you're back from the bar, check the sauce - it should be purply-red and smell awesome. There will still be quite a bit of liquid in it. Right now, you have two choices - either go to the hardware store or finish the sauce right now. I chose to go to the hardware store.
  
  
• An hour later, check the sauce again - it pretty much looks the same. Turn the heat up to medium, stir, and leave uncovered to reduce.
• Start prepping the other lasagna items. I had 1 box of whole-wheat organic lasagna noodles, 2 smallish balls of fresh mozzarella, 1 triangle of aged domestic parmesan, 1 medium and 1 small portabello mushroom, 2 small zucchini, and some Tofurkey "Italian Sausage". I'm in the market for some pretend-meat, so I added the "sausage" to half of the lasagna to try it out.
• The noodles: take 1/2 the box and soak in the hottest tap water you've got. Keep soaking for 20 minutes, then drain. This can obviously be done while you're prepping the rest of the items for construction.
  
  
• Slice the zucchini and the portabello mushrooms up into even slices. The zucchini should be about 1/8", the mushrooms about 1/2". A mandoline comes in v. handy here, at least for the zucchini.
  
  
• Pause! Check the sauce to see how it's reducing. If it's looking good at this point, you can mash some of the tomatoes with a hand-masher or a stick-blender, or just stir it about, depending on your chunkiness preference. When it's done, take it off of the heat and add the rest of the garlic and stir it in. Your sauce is done! Also turn your oven on to 400 degrees F.
• The mozzarella - slice in about 1/4" circles. See how many you can get out of it - this has to "cover" 2 layers of the pasta. As for the parmesan, just have it ready with a good grater. A microplane is totally worth the $$ for this kind of thing.
  
  
• Get all your ingredients together and take out your pan.
• Layer as such:
  
  
  
• Sauce - noodles - zucchini - mozzarella - parmesan - sauce - noodles - mushrooms - mozzarella - parmesan - sauce - parmesan. As you can see, I ran a low on sauce for the top layer, so you may want to ration better than I did.
• Stick the entire thing into the oven and let cook for about a half hour, or until it's all bubbly and lovely and your house smells like lasagna and your tummy is grumbling. Take it out and let it cool for at least 5 minutes before digging into it. It will be super super hot.
  

This was incredibly tasty. However, the next time I do this, I won't be including the "sausage" - it just tasted like dried out jerky chunks, and some of it was crunchy. There shall be no crunch in my lasagna. I also noticed that it was a bit too cheesy in some areas - next time I'll make the slices of mozz a bit thinner and more evenly spread. The zucchini didn't add really any flavor to the finished product, but the mushrooms were wonderfully meaty and had soaked in a lot of flavor from the sauce. So next time I'll either add some pesto to the zucchini layer or I'll switch it out for a tastier fruit/veggie, like red peppers or broccoli. There will certainly be a "part II" for this lasagna in the future. And most likely, it will not be as long of a post!

Posted at 5:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

...there was 12+ hours of Photoshopping and Dreamweavering. Once the creation was set, she saw it was good. Congratulating herself on a job well done, she named the site The Clever Chef, because that's what she eventually wanted to be. And in the first paragraph of the first post, she tired of refering to herself in the 3rd person.

Welcome to my brand-spanking-new foodblog. After running my own personal site for 3+ years, I finally made the decision quite suddenly to start this - an extension of my site based off of my food preferences, trials, and errors. I really can't make any promises about the quality of writing, or the quality of the photos. I can, however, guarantee that if you like food, you will most likely enjoy the recipes and information of which this site should soon be full. I do not consider myself a writer, as such, but I do enjoy writing. Almost as much as I enjoy cooking (and purchasing kitcheny items).

Feel free to comment and send constructive criticism. I promise I can take it.

Posted at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)