Spicin' It Up

The other week, we went out on a whim and decided to make an Ethiopian spiced chicken stew. I'd never had anything like it before, but something about the recipe just seemed appealing. I figured that since I liked all of the ingredients individually I would like the meal itself, so why not try it.

It's a recipe I had pinned on Pinterest quite some time ago and finally got the nerve to try. You can find the recipe here (I just made a few small changes).

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups lentils
• 2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken breasts
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
• 1 cup chopped red onions
• 5 cloves garlic, finely chopped
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 5 tablespoons berbere spice blend 
• 1/2 cup dry red wine
• 1 can(14-ounce) diced tomatoes
• 2 cups reduced-sodium chicken broth

Directions:

This one took a little bit of prep work, which I usually oppose, but it wasn't too bad. 

First, put the lentils in the crock-pot, and place the chicken on top of the lentils.

Heat the butter and oil on the stove. When the butter melts, add in the onions. Add the garlic and ginger once the onions have cooked for a few minutes and become pretty translucent. Mmmm I love the smell of onions and garlic cooking in butter. Cook for a few more minutes and then add the berbere spice. At this point, you may want to turn on your range hood or vent to combat the strong fragrance. We don't have a vent over our stove, so I decided to open the window.

The mixture on the stove should look something like this:

Stir in the wine and tomatoes, and then it should look like this:

Add the mixture to the crock-pot, then pour in the chicken broth. Cover and cook on low for about 7 hours.
After that, the chicken should shred and mix together with the rest of the stew:

Just a couple of notes:

• I thought 4 cups of onions was a bit excessive, especially considering I really don't like onions (I like the flavor, but not the texture) so we decided to use 1 cup instead
• I'd never heard of berbere spice blend until I saw this recipe. It was a little bit hard to track down, but we finally found it at Whole Foods.
• And man is it SPICY.
• This dish made the house smell amazingly good while it was cooking and even for the following two days.
• I have to warn you though, it is really, really spicy. With the 5 tablespoons of berbere spice, it was actually a little bit hard for me to eat. Bart loved it and gobbled it right up with our favorite bakery bread, but I only managed a few bites. I was bummed because I really enjoyed the flavors, but couldn't handle the spice. I think I'll be up for trying this again, but may make two separate, smaller dishes so I can put less of the spice mix in mine and Bart can keep his dinner hot, hot, hot.

Now that the dust has settled...

Happy 2014 everyone!

We had quite a busy end to 2013, as I'm sure many of you did as well. In fact, I started this post way back on December 17th, but am just now actually posting it. You see, we decided to do some "minor" house renovations the week before Christmas. I was initially pretty reluctant about this, just given the timing and the fact that I didn't want my Christmas tree or decorations to get messed up. But alas, we went ahead with the work, and I held on to hope that it wouldn't be too disruptive.

I'll try to make a long story sort of short here. Since we have an older house (circa 1930something), we have plaster ceilings, a few of which had some sizable cracks (which just happens with plaster over time), a number of which had been poorly patched in the past. In an effort to sell our house in the spring, we decided to put in new ceilings. We had this done in our living room a few years ago after water from a hurricane caused damage to the ceiling, and the guys who fixed it were able to put sheet rock right over the plaster. So we wanted to do the same thing in our dining room, kitchen and guest bedroom. Simple, right?

Oh, hello attic.

Sure it was, until the renovations got started. We had the same guys in who did the great work in our living room previously. After testing to see where the studs were in the guest room ceiling, the entire ceiling in that room fell down. IT FELL DOWN. Plaster ceiling, loose attic insulation and all. Thank goodness no one was in the room at the time, it just created a giant mess and took a chunk out of the top of our solid wood dresser. In retrospect, it was probably a good thing that it came down if it was that unstable, but gees, how crazy. After that, our home owner's insurance agent recommended we take down the kitchen ceiling also as a precaution.

Thanks for the replacement top, IKEA!

For an entire week we were living with layers upon layers of dust and furniture in all the wrong places. I thought the house would never get clean or back to normal. While a little stressful, the timing before Christmas actually worked out well because Bart and I were off that whole week. With all of the holiday festivities, we were still able to paint each of the three rooms and clean, clean and clean some more. And in the end, after watching a lot of HGTV on New Year's Day, I realized that a week of disheveled living conditions wasn't really all that bad.



But anyway, back to that meal we had 3 weeks ago. Now, I'm not usually a fan of pot roasts, and not for any reason that I can really pinpoint. I guess I just think of them as being really heavy meals. I'm not usually a meat-and-potatoes kind of gal. But let me tell you, this one is really good. It's heavy on the veggies, so feel free to use less if you don't want to have a ton of leftover. It looks like a lot of ingredients, but check it out - only 3 steps!

Ingredients:

• 3lb pot roast
• 5 small carrots, peeled
• 1 large parsnip, peeled
• 24oz bag of fingerling potatoes
• 1/4 of a yellow onion
• 3 tbsp flour
• Salt & pepper
• 1 15oz can tomato sauce
• 2/3c light brown sugar
• 2 tsp chili powder
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tsp ground mustard
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp onion powder

Directions:

Chop the carrots, parsnip, potatoes and onion; place in the crock-pot.

Coat the roast in the flour and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Place on top of veggies in the crock-pot.

In a medium sized bowl, whisk together the remaining ingredients.

Pour the sauce over the roast and veggies. Cover and cook on high for 8 hours.

Enjoy! We served it with warm, crusty bread (my fave!).

After dinner, we had a lot of leftovers and decided to store the meat and veggies separately as much as we could. The next night we actually used the meat to make soft tacos with spanish rice, avocado and cotija cheese.














This was also the first week that I used slow cooker liners. A genius invention and I'm not really sure how I overlooked their existence for so long. Thanks to a certain family member for the suggestion to use them - cleaning up is so much easier when you don't have to scrub that giant crock-pot!