Chicken Chili Verde

I finally got it right!

This is one of those recipes that pre-paleo, my family ate often--which is saying a lot since we rarely ate the same dish twice.  Of course, pre-paleo, this recipe required that I fry the cubed up boneless chicken in italian salad dressing, and it was chock-full of white navy beans.

When I first switched to a paleo-type diet, I tried really hard to convert this recipe to something I could still eat.  I tried to "paleoify" it several times, several ways, and each time the results were less-than-great.  Without the salad dressing, the flavour was flat.  Without the beans, the chili was thin and watery--not very sustaining at all.  But when I tried to fill the chili out with turnip or celery root, the taste of root vegetables overwhelmed the delicate flavour of this dish.  When I filled out the dish with green peppers, the texture went all wrong.  Everything about it just went wrong.

Until the other day.

It suddenly dawned on me to try it one more time--and this time I think it tastes just like the old recipe, only without all the crap that I no longer eat.

There's something really delicious about green chili.  Even though it is much more mellow than traditional chili, it can still be quite fiery, and is much more about the unique flavour of cilantro upfront.  The flavour is so delicate that only chicken will do, as far as I'm concerned.

So give it a try, and let me know what you think.  I use bone-in chicken in the recipe, but you could just as easily de-bone the chicken first.  I just find that wasteful, personally, since boiling the meat off of the bone gets the bones cleaner, and allows you some of the benefits of the minerals in the bones, too.

You will notice that I use salsa verde and canned green chilis interchangeably.  While I slightly prefer the taste of salsa verde in this recipe over canned green chilis, the two taste close enough to be used the exact same...

So here's what I did.
Serves 5-6

Ingredients:

1 onion, chopped
2-3 stalks celery, chopped
2 large parsnips, peeled and chopped
1 1/2 lbs bone-in chicken (skinless--fry that chicken for cracklin's instead!)
2 cups chicken broth
1 green pepper, chopped
1 Tbs zesty italian dressing spice mix
1 tsp cumin
2 Tbs apple cider vinegar
1 cup salsa verde (or 2 cans green chilies)
1/3 cup fresh or frozen cilantro

optional garnishes:  cheddar, yogurt, olives, avocado

Method:

On medium heat in heavy dutch oven, saute onion, celery and parsnips in fat until onions are translucent.  Add spices and cook 1 minute more.  Add chicken to pot, along with broth, salsa verde and vinegar.  Add green pepper.  Bring to a boil and simmer for 1/2 hour until chicken is cooked through.  Using tongs, carefully remove chicken from pot and de-bone it, returning chicken to pot to heat back through.

Remove from heat and stir in cilantro.  Taste and add salt and pepper if necessary.  Garnish with cheddar, avocado, and plain yogurt, if using.

Enjoy!

Easy Tomato Soup

Alright, so now that my husband has declared this is "favorite soup right now", I guess I have to post the recipe, right?  I mean, it DOES totally taste like Campbells "Healthy Request" Tomato soup, after all.  And it takes all of 10 minutes to prepare.  And it is so rich and creamy tasting that you could just eat the soup as-is for a light meal--but imagine it with crumbled bacon and some shredded swiss, if you eat dairy at all.  Or bacon and green onions, if you don't.  This stuff is amazing and versatile and uses basic staples that you probably already have in your kitchen all the time.

But I can't take total credit for this recipe.  This recipe was originally posted by Canadian Living Magazine, and can be found online here.  And as you can easily see, all I've changed is the fat I use (I love it made with butter) and I use home made chicken bone broth in place of the stock they suggest.  And I add a bit of cream at the end.  Because when I was a kid, and ate Campbells' Tomato Soup quite often, we always added milk to the can instead of just water.  I find that adding cream to this recipe takes me right back to that memory. 

So here's my version
Serves 4

Ingredients:

1/3 of a Spanish onion, or 1 cooking onion
large pat of butter, for frying
4 cloves minced garlic
1 28-oz can of chopped tomatoes
1 5-oz can tomato paste
2-3 cups bone broth (I use chicken)
salt and pepper, to taste
1/4 cup heavy (35%) cream, optional
bacon, green onions, sour cream, yogurt, cheese for garnish, all optional

Method:

In large Dutch oven (or heavy-bottom soup pot), over medium heat, sauté onions and garlic until onion is translucent.  Add tomatoes, tomato paste and bone broth, and simmer for about 10 minutes.
Using hand blender, remove from heat and blend until smooth.  If you don't have a hand blender, pour (carefully) into food processor and puree until smooth.  (Be careful to add it slowly--you don't want to crack the casing, now, do you?).  Return all to pot.  If using cream, add it now and heat through, if necessary.  Add garnishes after serving.

DIY Pallet Love Project #2--The Bookshelf

And so my love of the humble skid/pallet continues.  Yes, this IS a bathroom that we put a bookshelf in.  Don't try to tell me you never read in the bathroom.  It's quiet in there.

But our bathroom was really boring:  It needed some creative decor.  (This thought only dawned on me after visiting a friends' place, needing to use the bathroom, and finding myself in the coolest, craziest, most whimsical bathroom ever--and wondering why didn't I think of that?  It's a bathroom, people, why not have fun with it???  

So this is really only the beginning...

This pallet project was really simple.

See the curve in the wood on the top image?  They cut those curves into the back of the side supports on the pallets--don't ask me why--but most pallets have those curved notches.  So all I did here was cut the top of the pallet off to the height that I wanted the back of the bookshelf.  What you are looking at is the pallet turned backwards.  I didn't even try to re-space the slats that became the back of the bookshelf--I liked the wonky way they were nailed into place.  I did, however, add screws just to hold everything together better.  I couldn't fit the whole width of the pallet into where I wanted too hang the shelf, so I cut it in half just past  the middle supports.  I pulled off one extra piece of wood and cut it to fit the bottom and screwed it into place.  

I used the top of the back skid--see the uneven and mis-coloured slats?

In it's raw and splintery state, I grabbed an old can of white latex paint--it was actually primer--and barely touched a paintbrush to paint, brushed most of the paint back off on a scrap of wood, then "dry-brushed" a bit more patina onto the pallet bookshelf.  I basically whitewashed it very lightly.  I didn't want to cover the existing patina  of the wood, I just wanted MORE patina.  

This was such a small project that I sanded it by hand.  I just sanded it enough to take all the rough splinters off and round down the worst spots.  I did not sand it until it was perfect.  The sanding helped to make the paint look like it had always been there, too. 

And then I added a latex clear-coat (yep, more of that Benjamin Moore Stays Clear--that single pint can has been used in more projects around here...)--2 coats of it with a very light sanding in between coats with a sanding sponge (you could use 000 steel wool).

And that was it.  Used 2 wall plugs to hang it.

Done.

And yes, that was what I was reading at the time of the bookshelf photos.