Cheever Sauce

If I am in a rush and find myself with hardly any time to cook dinner, fish is usually my go-to for a quick and easy meal. Line a baking tray with some tin foil, slab on a nice piece of fresh fish, add a delicious topping, bake, and voila! Dinner. Eating fish always makes me feel super healthy and satisfied without leaving me overly full, which is generally the aim I go for when cooking…. even if that doesn’t always happen. 

I’ve been making this dish for myself for some time now, and it’s a classic example of how to make an impressive dish with minimal ingredients. I was inspired to make this after eating a similar plate at Tia Pol in Chelsea a couple years ago. Tia Pol is known for their amazing tapas, and this dish came on a sizzling plate drenched in Mediterranean goodness. I remember being taken aback how delicious such a simple fish could taste and realized the combination of flavorful ingredients like warm olives, capers, shallots, and basil, really brought the dish to a whole new level.

Tia Pol’s dish was also baked in oil and butter which certainly added to its rich flavor, but I decided to lighten up my version by swapping those out for fresh lemon juice. Personally, I love this variation more because the lemon juice ads a sweet tang to the dish, which is a nice contrast to the strong flavors that make up the fish’s topping. This dish is super super easy because it takes just 5 minutes to prep your topping, and only 20 minutes to bake. It’s a great fast solution to a typical “what to make for dinner” dilemma that doesn’t taste like your typical everyday meal. 

Read on for the recipe!

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:

WHAT a beauty right? I was casually shopping at this organic grocery store next to my apartment the other day, and when I sauntered over to the produce section to find what local veggies they brought in for the day, to my delight I see….PURPLE VEGETABLES. 

First of all, call me a culinary delinquent but never in my life have I seen purple string beans and purple peppers. And these weren’t produced in some biotech lab in Texas, these were locally farm grown!! I could hardly contain my excitement and knew I immediately had to use these veggies in my next post.

I prepared them in a salad so I could eat them raw and in all their purply glory. The kale looked amazing as well and was eager to make a raw kale salad since I had only been eating the green cooked.  Kale is a “meatier” green when raw, and I love it in salad because I feel it gives it more substance. (P.S. One cup of raw kale offers more than a full day’s recommended value of vitamins A, C and K. It is also a source of calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, phosphorus, copper and manganese - aka time to get on the kale bandwagon)  I threw in some yellow cherry tomatoes, (for both taste and aesthetic reasons) toasted some sunflower seeds and made my own sunflower lemon dressing in a mason jar, which topped the salad of perfectly. 

How to make…