Alysha’s Crispy Chicken Thighs & Veggies

So this fine specimen of dinner is a creation of Alysha’s – and boy was it tasty!

And simple.

So I am going to share it with you:

Ingredients: (Makes 2 servings)

2 chicken thighs, skin on

2 cups brussels sprouts, washed and halved.

2 onions, sliced

1 teaspoon coconut oil

2 tablespoons Tony Chachare’s seasoning (or really, ANY seasoning you want!)

Cooking: 

1. Preheat the oven to 350. In a large skillet, heat the coconut oil. Make sure it is very hot – you can do this by doing the water droplet test (a drop of water should sizzle in the oil!). While the coconut oil is heating, rub the seasoning on the top and bottom of chicken breasts.

2. Once oil is hot, place the chicken skin-side down in the oil. It should sizzle. Throw in the onions around the chicken. Let the chicken cook about 5-7 minute or until skin is browned and crispy.

3. Flip the chicken over and let the under side cook about 2-3 minutes, so the chicken no longer looks raw.

4. Move the chicken skin side up to an 8×8 baking dish. Put onions around the chicken. Leave stove ON.

5. Put the brussels sprouts in the still hot skillet that the chicken was in. Saute for 2 minutes. Turn stove OFF. (I always forget to do that 😉 )

6. Put the sprouts in the 8×8 dish around the chicken. The chicken skin should not have vegetables on top or it will get soggy.

7. Put the baking dish in the oven and cook for 20 minutes.

Voila!

Here are some extra notes about this recipe:

• You can swap out the seasonings for ANYTHING you want, and make the chicken whatever flavor your heart desires!
• You can swap out the veggies! We did sprouts. We also did green beans. You could do just onions with the chicken for flavor, and then cook another veggie on the side or have a salad. the possibilities are endless!
• This can easily be scaled up for a family by adding more chicken thighs and more vegetables, or scaled down for one.. or you could make six at once and have leftovers!  Reheats nicely in the oven!
• You could do this without the chicken skin — its not as tasty, but it does make it a smidge healthier. I say a smidge because I built out this recipe in LoseIt and here is what I found

Super filling and UNDER 500 calories!  This assumes you eat 1 chicken thigh, half a cup of onions and 1 cup of brussels sprouts.

• This is gluten free, dairy free, and it can be paleo if you make sure to use a paleo friendly seasoning.
• this was also inexpensive! We bought a big pack of chicken thighs. If I scaled out the costs of all the ingredients, this was under $5 per person!
• In conclusion: healthy, tasty, easy, inexpensive, and able to modify for endless options. Sounds like the perfect dinner to me!

Spicing Up That Salad

I like to poll my facebook friends for ideas, suggestion and advice. I usually get an assortment of types of answerers – close friends, acquaintances, former classmates, people I forgot were even on facebook…. but this post was one of my most popular posts in awhile (popularity, of course, being judged by the number of comments):

Facebook poll: what fruits, veggies, or seasoning would you add to a salad to give it some kick? I don’t care for salad dressing or nuts, and trying to avoid dairy and processed foods. Any ideas?

So you can see, I explicitly asked for suggestions that would take my daily lunch to a new level, but without adding the extra sugars, processed foods, or other junk that is honestly calories wasted on a salad and better saved for dessert (oh, how I wish I had taken a picture of the gloriousness that was the pineapple upside down cake that I made for a coworker’s birthday today!)

The ideas ranged the gamut, so I thought I’d share some tidbits with you guys:

Thanks for the warning – I will not be trying Mac & Cheese.  However, I do love STRAWBERRIES!

I paired that with this tidbit of advice:

And the end result was this beauty:

What I had for lunch all week after asking for advice — It’s a romaine/kale blend (the kale is on the bottom, I should have tossed that a bit better) with sliced strawberries that have been tossed with mint and sat over night.

Yum!

Here are some other responses to my poll — some of which I may need to be trying in the very near future!

Great ideas!  I love jicama. I usually just eat it raw. I never thought about toasted oats or barley!

Some other popular ideas on my facebook were:

• avocados
• pico de gallo / salsa
•  fruit such as mandarin oranges, pears, craisins, and apples
• herbs such as mint, cilantro, and basil
• alternate dressing ideas such as lemon juice, balsamic vinegars, and tomatoes cooked with a touch of honey

All in all, what I am getting at is that your salad does not have to be plain and boring to stay healthy! There are thousands of combinations. We also don’t need to hide our vegetables under layers and layers of ranch dressing… gross!

And I was glad to see so many ideas and suggestions– and to maybe even inspire some of my friends:

Anyone else having a salad this week? 🙂

Kalbi, Warm Fennel Salad, and Rootbeer Risotto

For dinner tonight, I made kalbi, warm fennel salad and a root beer risotto.

For the kalbi, I used a recipe from Food Network which you can find here.

In case you aren’t familiar with kalbi (or galbi), it is a korean barbecued short rib. To really do this right, you would purchase korean cut short ribs. The cut is sometimes called “flanken.” It’s a smaller cut of meat that grills faster. However, I bought American style short ribs and sliced the meat off of the bone. I also bought a small sirloin steak and thin sliced that to see how the two different types of meat fared in this cooking style.

I pretty much followed the food network recipe to a T, except I could not find Mirin in our local grocery store and didn’t feel like hitting an Asian store in the rain today. So I used white cooking wine instead. Also, in hind sight, I would add three times as much green onion as it calls for, and 2/3 as much soy sauce, as I found the marinade to be a bit salty.

Other than that, I thought they turned out delicious!

Kalbi with warm fennel salad

For the side dish, I wanted to create something light, that would compliment the heavy flavors and feeling of the beef main dish. I decided to create a warm fennel salad. While I don’t think the salad is something I would make on its own just for fun, I thought it was an excellent side dish to the kalbi.

It’s also a Sasha-Original-Recipe! 🙂

Ingredients:
1 bunch fennel, sliced thin
1 stalk celery, sliced into thin half moons
6 baby carrots, sliced into small rounds
1/8 cup cooking wine
1/2 nectarine, diced
1/2 tbspn chili oil (optional, can use any oil)
1 tspn mango vinegar (optional)

Heat a pan with 1/2 tbspn oil. I used chili oil to add flavor, but you can use olive oil, grapeseed oil, or any other anti-stick. Add in fennel, and sautee in the oil for about 1 minute. Add the other vegetables and the cooking wine. Let cook for about 4 minutes. Add in cooking wine, vinegar, and nectarine. Cook until vegetables are slightly tender but still crisp. It’s a warm salad, not a stir fry!

Warm Fennel Salad shown with kalbi.

And finally, the dessert! I made a root beer float dessert risotto!

A recipe completely of my own making! Here it is:

Ingredients

:
Rice:
1 cup arborio rice

Flavoring Liquid:
1.5 bottles of IBC rootbeer (2 cups)

Base for toasting risotto:
1 tbspn butter
1 tbspn brown sugar
1 tspn dark rum

Base Liquid:
3.5 cups 1% milk
5 green cardamom pods
1 stick cinnamon
1 tspn vanilla

Topping:
2 tbspn marscapone
1 tbspn rootbeer

Instructions:
In a pot, put all of the base liquid ingredients in a pot and heat until warm. Take care not to burn or boil the milk. Keep it handy and on a low boil.

In a skillet, heat the base for toasting risotto. Once the butter is melted and the sugar stirred in, then add the rice. Stir the rice until the grains are glassy. Add in 1 c of rootbeer and stir until it is absorbed. Add in .5 cups of root beer and stir until it is absorbed.

Start adding in the base liquid one ladle full at a time, stirring until it is absorbed. Do not feel like you have to stir in ALL of the milk, but keep adding it in until the risotto is cooked, tender, and creamy. At the end, add in 1/4 cup of root beer to create a delicious frothiness.

Serve warm. Use the remaining rootbeer to top off your risotto root beer float (the warm risotto absorbs it pretty fast). You can add a creamy marscapone topping if you’d like. I stirred the marscapone and rootbeer together and then put a dollop on top.

Ta da!