A cookin' we will go!

Adventures in cooking

I've been a meal planning, dinner making machine lately!!  It is definitely NOT easy with two small chillins, but I know myself enough to know that if there is no plan, nothing will be made.  I am not really, as much as I wish I was, a fly by the seat of my pants kind of girl.  I need my planner and I need to make lists or I am an absolute lost cause.  

SO, I've been planning my meals and actually COOKING them.  Which is great.  I'm starting to get into a groove.  I roast one chicken a week, and that usually feed us for at least 1 1/2 meals.  We eat most of it that night, but I *try* to save some either for lunches (Roxie would eat chicken pieces in my homemade ketchup for lunch every day for a week probably!), or I save a few cups for an upcoming meal.  

Here is a really awesome recipe that I found that I used my leftover chicken pieces from that turned out REALLY great.  Well, at least I liked it!  

~2-3ish cups of chicken chunks/pieces.  (I can't remember exactly how much I used.. just as much as I had)

~2 TB of flour of your choice (we used a gluten free flour, but you can use whatever)

~1 tsp salt

~2 TB coconut oil, butter, ghee, or schmaltz.... we used coconut oil

~1 diced onion

~5 garlic cloves, pressed

~2 TB grated fresh ginger

~1 tsp coriander

~1 tsp cumin

~1 cup of chicken stock (I make mine every other week from my chicken carcasses- way easy and better for you because of all that awesome gelatin and minerals that come from the bones)

~2 cups chicken stock

~1 cup diced dried apricots

~1 cup of pitted green olives, sliced or unsliced... whatever you prefer.  I started slicing and got lazy and just threw them in whole and they tasted fine

~1 cup of whole crispy or raw almonds (crispy almond per Nourishing Traditions recipe- soaked and dried to help with their digestibility)

In a small bowl toss the chicken with flour and salt... brown in the oil on med-high until cooked if you aren't using already cooked chicken like I am.  You can skip this step if you like and just use your chicken plain.

Reduce heat to med-low and add onion.  Saute until tender.  Stir in garlic, ginger, coriander and cumin and return chicken to the pan (or add for the first time if you skipped the flour and browning step).  Pour in first amount of chicken stock (or use dry white wine instead if you like) and increase heat to high.  Boil until the chicken stock has reduced by half.  Stir in the 2nd amount of stock, apricots and olives and reduce heat to low.  You can also add the almonds here as well if you like, I did.  Or you can just sprinkle almonds on top when you are finished.  Cover and simmer for 45 mins.  Serve over rice.

That's it!!  It's really tasty!  I made it last week for dinner and just finished off the rest of the leftovers today for lunch.  I like it even when it's not over rice.  Yummy!!  The combination of salty and sweet if fabulouso in my opinion.    

I think I'll start doing recipes on this blog frequently... but I'll start adding pictures!  This is gone, so no pictures of this one, but stay tuned (if anyone even reads this haha) and I'll have pictures next time perhaps.  

~Linz