Until recently I was in Germany. Last summer I moved back to Canada and now we are in Ontario. Before that I was living in northern then southern Alberta. I had packed up much of my stuff already from a previous move. When I decided to go to Germany I put all my things into storage and hopped on a plane.
Now that we are back in Canada we had to get all that stuff from Alberta to Ontario. Stuff like my entire kitchen, all my cook books, everything. All I took to Germany was clothes, computer, and the books I need to finish my study. We hired movers who loaded my stuff onto a train and 5 weeks later it's here.
Now that I have all my stuff back I'm really digging in, like using cook books that I haven't seen in over three years. I have an old slow cooker I bought at a garage sale year ago and have really been wanting to break it out and revisit that wonderful feeling of knowing my meal is making itself with little effort from me.
As you can see I have a bit of a selection, I have a lot of cook books. Some would say it's a problem, I say, I haven't bought any for years and I'M SO BEHIND!
All I knew for sure when I was going through these books looking for options was that I'm out of potatoes, I wanted it to be mostly if not entirely veggies, and I also needed something to do with two chicken thighs I had left over from the previous night.
I found a recipe for a veggie curry but I was missing a lot of the ingredients. I did a massive veggie shop awhile ago now but I'm getting low. I felt that I could modify the recipe really easily to use what I had. I will be making this again, it turned out great. I would be interested to try it as the recipe suggested but this way was just fine too.
Gather all your ingredients, or at least what you have that you'll be using, heh. Chop up the onion and pepper into bigger pieces, the carrot into coins, and the celery into one inch long bites.
First, I mixed up the curry, coconut milk, and flour. Set aside.
I figured the chicken would happily stew under the veggies with all that yummy sauce so I just lightly seasoned them on both sides and tossed them in first.
The recipe called for garlic and ginger. Unless I need big pieces for some reason I usually use a grater to take care of these. Just peel back what you think you'll need of the ginger and get it going. I always peel and leave the end on the garlic when grating it. You have something to hold onto that way and just chuck that bit away when you get down to it. I grated these both straight into the sauce.
Just toss all those chopped veggies in on top of the chicken.
Now the sauce.
My good friend Laura made a wonderful dish for me that had roasted chicken, apricots, raisins, and veggies with this dreamy sauce. I loved it. I wanted to get something sweet to go along with the coconut milk sauce that I just knew was going to be awesome. I remembered that I had raisins and craisins in the cupboard and thought they would be pretty good, sweet and tart, just what I was looking for. I also wanted to get some quinoa going so I looked up a recipe for quinoa and cranberries. I found this recipe that wasn't a perfect fit but was close enough.
I use two cups of water, 2/3 cup craisins and 1/3 cup raisins and got that boiling before I put in one cup quinoa and 1/2 tsp salt.
Part of this recipe called for 1 tbsp each oil and lemon to be added to the cooked quinoa so I prepared that so I wouldn't forget to add them.
Let that cook for 20 minutes until the germ part of the quinoa is clearly visible and all the liquid is absorbed. The fruit re-hydrated some and swelled up to sweet and tart little gems.
Check on your veggies and chicken. I let this cook about 4.5 hours total. It made my whole house smell amazing!
This was so satisfying. Phoenix loved it. The curry, the veggies, the sweet and tart hits in the quinoa. This is going to happen again. The chicken was so tender and flavourful. The lemon and oil in the quinoa just brought it back to life and gave it a really satisfying feeling in your mouth.
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