Cheever Sauce

I’ve kept this chili recipe on the back burner for a while. I was waiting to post it on that unbearably cold day that usually comes around this time of year. You know, to remind us that winter isn’t finished with us yet, usually freezing one into a depression because you begin to believe the cold will engulf you forever. Whelp, it’s now looking like we’re being spared this misery, so I am posting this as an au revoir to Winter: “Thanks! It’s been great. I appreciate the brief visit…I never really got wear my new snow boots but maybe see you in November? If you decide to even show up at all next year.”

Cold weather or warm weather, this recipe is the best chili you will ever cook in your life. My mom made it often for our family growing up. I. Could. Not. Get. Enough. It is incredibly flavorful and delicious, yet also surprisingly light for a hearty chili with not one unhealthy ingredient in the recipe. The chicken and beans give it its sustenance and ingredients like onions, jalapeno peppers, dijon mustard, and Worcestershire sauce add a lot of kick and zing to the dish.

I was originally motivated to make this chili on my own (typically I ask…or beg for it on visits home to CT) when I couldn’t help but buy one of those “raised on an organic farm, happily fed and taken care of, lays golden eggs every morning” chickens from the Union Square Farmer’s Market and the vendor instructed me to boil this chicken “as long as I could possibly bear to.”  Ummm ok….

Nevertheless, I’m a sucker for slow cooking and I knew that I wanted my chili to have that pulled chicken consistency. Boiling the full chicken for 4 hours also allowed me to use homemade chicken stock where it called for it in the recipe, which really amped up the flavor. You could of course just boil your chicken normally and use store bought stock, but if you have the time, I would definitely recommend trying out the slow cooked route….as long as you can possibly bear to. 

Read on for the recipe:

Cooking comes pretty natural to me. Am I coming off too arrogant? I should pat myself on the back a couple more times and submit my blog to the James Beard Foundationwith a statement like that. But what I mean by that is, cooking just makes sense to me. I get it. Chess? No. Cooking? Yes. So it came as a surprise to me that while I was surfing other food blogs for recipe ideas, a pretty basic Italian dish…sort of stumped me. I can’t put a finger on exactly what was so confusing to me about the idea of a rollatini, it seamed simple enough, but I nevertheless felt uncomfortable with the idea of rolling up some ingredients, in a breaded additional ingredient, topped with some more ingredients, and then baking it. Would this even work? Even the name of it -rollatini - sounded so foreign and uncertain to me. #foodbloggerproblems

 I guess because I never ate rollatinis growing up, and wasn’t familiar with the dish, (I’m guessing I spent my whole life scanning over it at Italian restaurants, in between the veal parmesean and pasta bolognese) I was sort of stumped out of pure jealousy. As a huge fan of stacking, why hadn’t I ever thought to roll up my ingredients and bake them all together? It’s genius. All of the sudden everywhere I looked I found a rollatini On menus, my interns leftover lunch, even a friend posted it to her food blog (Jewtalian - check her out!). So I decided it was time to buckle down and make some rollatini. With a protein craving paving the way, I decided to go the chicken route.

Apparently, you can roll anything inside a chicken. Chicken rollatini with zucchini and mozaarella, chicken rollatini Alfredo, Chicken rollatini with asparagus and pancetta…the sky’s the limits with this poultry, and while the options are endless, I decided to go basic. I found this recipe on Skinny Taste and boy does that Gina know how to lighten up a dish without sacrificing flavor. The whole process was extremely easy and painless and the end result was a perfect winter dish. The best part is that you’re getting all your flavors in one bite, and everything comes together in a simple and elegant way. I can’t wait to try a different version next time I cook it - and now that I am no longer a rollatini virgin, it’s time to get down and dirty - eggplant I’m looking at you.

Read on for the recipe adapted from Skinny Taste!

¿Te gusta la comida Mexicana? Same here. After recently getting back from a work trip in LA, I find the city’s culinary triumphs usually stick with me upon my return. Yes, NYC is home to some of the best pizza, bagels, and pasta in the country, but I have to say, Los Angeles has got its Mexican food down to la perfección. Even the Manhattan favorite La Esquina pales in comparison to the mom and pop restaurants that line the Hollywood hills.

Still in a full craving mode this week, I wanted to cook a delicious Mexican meal, but still keep it CheeverSauce friendly. Also, Mexican food is great to make for dinner because it still tastes delicious (if not better) the next day for lunch. And we all know how I feel about lunch.  I decided going the salad route was the safest bet, but because I sacrificed tortillas and cheese in this recipe, I had to make sure all the other ingredients popped with flavor. This meant sautéing shredded chicken with chili powder and spices, and adding other hearty yet healthy ingredients, like a black bean and yellow corn salsa. I also swapped sour cream for Fage 0% Greek yogurt and I swear (trust me, my roommate was originally skeptical at first, only to completely take back her original doubts once she ate it) you can hardly taste the difference. While completely eliminating the fat, yet still offering a creamy texture and sweetly sour taste, Greek yogurt is the best healthy replacement to sour cream. 

I know a lot of you die hard Mexican fans may think this salad isn’t true Mexican fair and I can’t agree with you more. Trust me, I wanted to melt cheese all over this. But I can promise you it is an amazing healthy alternative packed with authentic flavors, and it completely satisfied my Mexican food cravings until I get to fly back to LA - or even Mexico - for the real thing. :) 

Onward to the recipe:

Lately I’ve been trying to take advantage of twitter (a social media outlet I used to roll my eyes at but now obsessively check every 15 min) by following other food bloggers. American’s Test Kitchen tweeted this recipe and I was immediately drawn to the lima beans it called for. Lima beans were like a one time a year treat my Yiayia would make at Christmas (my bet is on she boiled them in butter versus broth). I never really knew where to find them in the grocery store or how to cook them (I tend to steer clear of the frozen vegetable isle). 

But what really grabbed my attention was…ragoût. Ooo I’ve never made a ragoût before. How wonderfully French of me it would be.

Now I made this dinner last week (it’s been a busy week and I’ve been lagging behind in my blogging) when it was raining, and the dish was a perfect, classic, hearty dinner for a rainy day. When roasting a chicken the conventional way, one will season the raw whole chicken or chicken part, and then roast the meat in the oven. This recipe gave me a little quick tip, which I always appreciate, instructing me to brown the bone-in chicken pieces on the skillet before finishing them in the oven. This step is literally genius because not only does the skin get crisp on the stove, it also quicken the time the meat needs to be cooked through in the oven. As it cooks the ragoût simultaneously comes together in the stove. 

The beauty of this dish? After the chopped onions and mushrooms are sautéed with garlic, the sauce comes together with a wine and chicken broth reduction and a finishing toss-in of lima beans and olives. The ragoût and the roast chicken are then reunited on the serving platter.

This dish was amazing - the first night I cooked it my friend Skye inhaled it and the same goes for the next night when Sophie (who gave me the French approval) did the same thing. Literally - didn’t look up from her plate once while she ate. 

Onto the recipe:

It has taken me four days to get around to posting this meal. I was so exhausted from the night’s events and have finally calmed down enough to relay what went into this dish. Let me first mention that my mental exhaustion certainly didn’t come from the recipe itself, (this is CheeverSauce after all and as promised everything is easy to make) but rather certain…unfortunate “causalities” that were taking place around me in the kitchen as I was cooking. 

The night started off on a positive note because I was super excited to have my cousin Taylor over for dinner. There’s nothing that excites me more than a dinner guest. I feel the same way about dinner guests as Anthony Weiner feels about the unlimited uses of social media (and no, that doesn’t mean that I send inappropriate pictures of myself to them via twitter). 

Wanting to impress Taylor, I decided to step it up a notch and research some recipes that would really justify my position as a food blogger in his mind. I love recipes that combine foods you wouldn’t normally think to cook together because they usually create fresh, intense, mouthwatering flavors your palette has yet to experience - which is why as soon as I read this recipe I knew it would be a CheeverSauce winner. The original recipe called for skewers which I thought was a GREAT idea - unfortunately I forgot to buy skewer sticks so I had to end up just cooking it all together. 

Read on for cooking directions and all my kitchen mishaps.

To Prep:

1. Peel and cut 1 large sweet potato. Steam your cubed sweet potatoes until almost fully cooked. (Casualty 1 & 2: A melted colander and burned/charred saucer pan. Caution: If you don’t have a steamer never try and improvise by placing your rubber-rimmed colander on top of a pan with boiling water) (Casualty #3 : two burned fingers from trying to lift and carry the colander off of the pan to the sink) USE A STEAMER PAN OR JUST BOIL THEM
2. Slice 4 peaches, 1 medium large onion
3. Cube 4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts (or have your deli guy do this for you like I did!) 
4. Combine in a small mixing bowl 1 tbsp. of honey, 3 dashes of pumpkin spice, 2 dashes of cumin, a tiny bit of extra virgin olive oil, and two handfuls of chopped walnuts. Mix until walnuts are evenly coated. 

To cook:

1. Cover the bottom of saucer pan with honey (around half a cup), add a cup of red wine vinegar, some olive oil, 5 dashes of cumin, and some lemon juice. Let your mixture simmer until it reduces. (Its consistency should be thick enough to glaze over your ingredients. If it is too thick add some drops of water to the mixture until it loosens)
2. Glaze your cubed chicken with half of your honey mixture and let sit for 5 minutes on a separate plate away from your other ingredients. 
3. Lightly coat a large sauté pan with olive oil over medium heat (I used my grill pan for this one!) (Casualty #4: Two stove burners that won’t light. Damn these gas stoves. And yes, I did have to cook the rest of this meal with half a stove top). 
4. Add all your ingredients to your sauté pan and then pour your remaining glaze over the peaches, sweet potatoes, and onions. (Casualty #5: 1 broken plate all over the kitchen floor. Lesson: Don’t hang your dishes half off your counter as you transfer ingredients.)
5. Cook all the ingredients on one side until golden and slightly charred (The chicken will take a little longer then everything else - around 4 minutes) 
6. Flip ingredients so the other side gets cooked through as well. (Here I really had to play around with how much each ingredient would cook as I didn’t want my peaches too wilted, or my sweet potatoes to burn. Just make sure you watch the food as it cooks to prevent overcooking.) 
7. Toast your walnut mixture in a small sauté pan until warm - around 2 minutes. 
8. Arrange the chicken, sweet potatoes, peaches, and onions on a plate so they are all combined next to each other. 
9. Top it all of with your candied walnuts and serve!

CheeverSauce suggestion: stack ingredients on skewer sticks like recipe originally called for. Makes this 10 times easier to prepare and cook.

Was worth all the trouble - this dish tasted AMAZINGGGGGGG. Will for sure make it again, which will hopefully be a more easy breezy experience. 

Special thanks to Jess for helping me prep and Taylor for stopping by and bringing the wine. I really needed it once this was all through. 

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