Turkey Cranberry Sweet Potato Stew

As promised in January (of last year), here is a recipe involving cranberries.  Basic idea taken from here.

Defrost:
A bag of cranberries.
A thing of cooked turkey.

In a stock pot:
Saute up some onion, garlic, and celery.  Add salt, pepper, and ginger.  Add chopped sweet potatoes and a splash of honey vinegar.  Add a bunch of chicken stock.  Bring to a boil, let it simmer for 15 minutes.  Add the cranberries and turkey, bring to a boil, let it simmer for another 15 minutes.

Pretty good - interesting combination of the sweet potatoes and the tart cranberries.

Scooter

Oh yeah - I also put in a couple crumbled strips of bacon.

Backpacking Dehydrated Curry - at 100 posts!

Decided it was time to get serious about testing some potential backpacking dried meals.  Found one for Thai Curry at Brett on Stuff and decided to follow it a little bit.  Sort of.

So, instead of getting coconut cream, I thought I'd take coconut milk, and try to get the cream from it.  You can do this by opening the can, and letting the cream solidify on top.  I tried to do it fast by putting the entire can in the fridge, which basically makes solidified coconut milk, not coconut cream.  Ah, well.

Put about 1/2 cup in a dish over medium high heat and let it bubble away for a while.  Added some green curry paste and similarly let it bubble away for a while, stirring occasionally.

Delicious Curry Paste!

Bubbling milk.

Meanwhile, open and drain two cans of chicken.  (Costco-sized cans).

Peel and shred a sweet potato.  Put it in a microwave safe bowl with some water, cook for about 3 minutes.  Drain as best you can, press some of the water out.

Open a bag of frozen veggies.  I did the "spring mix" from Smiths.

Pull out your dehydrator and make additional "screens" for it with parchment paper.  Spread all ingredients out on screens, parchment paper, or trays.

2 trays of chicken, 1.5 of veggies, 1 of sweet potato, and .5 of curry paste.  This still left over some chicken, some sweet potato, and about half the bag of veggies.  Huh.

And you might be thinking that the veggies seem giant.  You are correct, but I was too lazy to try to chop them down more.  And everything in general might be a little crowded.  Whatever.

The idea for this recipe is to add some dried minced garlic and onions, some spices like turmeric and ginger, and see where it goes when I re-hydrate it.  We'll see.  Stay tuned for updates.

Scooter

24 hours later: The sweet potatoes seem to be dry, the chicken is getting there, I'm not sure the paste will ever actually be dry, and I was right about the veggies being giant.  They are close.  I will let it spin overnight just to make sure on everything.

Trays after drying.

Rehydrated spicy goodness!

The bag o' dried stuff.

36 hours later:  I put everything (dried stuff, some dried garlic, dried minced onions, turmeric, ginger, and salt) in a gallon ziplock bag, and tried to smush it all together to break down some of the bigger pieces.  Will taste test tomorrow.

Taste Test: Added the dried mixture (which came to 9.4 oz in the bag) to 6 cups boiling water.  Covered, let simmer for 10 minutes.  At 10 minutes the chicken was still a little chewy.  At 20 minutes it was a still a little chewy, but we called it good.  And called the whole thing good overall.  Super spicy.  Like, really, nose-blow-inducing-make-you-fan-your-mouth-spicy.  Next time, less curry paste.  And that's a long simmer time for backpacking.  Might try chopping the chicken into much smaller pieces to see if that helps the re-hydrating process.  Made about 3 servings.

Pesto Meatballs!

I'm pretty sure the pesto I defrosted was from here.  About 1/2 cup.

Mix it up with 1 lb. deforested* ground beef

Form into spheres about 1" in diameter.

Bake in the oven at around 375 for 25ish minutes.

I'd placed parchment paper on the sheet, but should have done aluminum foil to really catch all the drips.

Still as garlicky as ever!  They held their shape, but they're not the most sturdy and bound together of meatballs ever.
scooter


* Somehow I typed deforested instead of defrosted.  And since I think it's funny, it's staying.

Superbowl game changer appetizers

So not paleo:
Cherry tomato + cheese (either fresh mozz or smoked gruyere in this case) + leaf of basil + salame = heaven on a toothpick.

So paleo:
Chicken wings maybe 2 lb package: put in salt, pepper, 1/4 cup chipotle olive oil, 1/4 cup garlic olive oil.  Put oven on broil. Broil on middle rack for about 50-60 minutes total on a cookie sheet covered in foil, turning half way through, or when house-mate says "is something getting scorched?".  Thoroughly neglected to make a sauce for these, but they were crispy and delicious.  Way easier than expected.

The bomb:
Cook a bunch of bacon.  Pit and smush (chunkily) a bunch of avocados with a little bit of salt, pepper, and lime juice.  Halve and core out a bunch of tomatoes on the vine.  Crumble bacon into avocado, steadily increasing bacon-to-avocado ratio as the day goes on.  Fill tomatoes with bacon/avocado mixture, and revel in deliciousness.  The avocado did start to turn brown by the end of the game, maybe more lime juice is in order.

Very pleased with these appetizer selections, although once again it took me twice as long to make anything as I had planned.

Scooter