When I looked at this video it reminded me of our spiritual lives as we “study to show ourselves approved” like the pilots studied to perform this maneuver.
But there are times when we, like the pilots, can’t “see” what’s around us. The pilots heard a voice telling them to “go” and they moved out in faith and trust just as we must do at times.
God is always showing us the way. We just have to listen.
There are a few recipes that are similar to the one I’ll be posting that are called Chicken Vesuvio and all vary greatly in their ingredients.
I decided to give this paleo dish a more simple name ~ Baked Chicken With Sweet Potato ~ so that you would have a pretty good idea of what was in the recipe.
Here are the basic ingredients you’ll be using:
Ingredients for Baked Chicken with Sweet Potato
And here’s the second set of ingredients (Olive Oil not shown):
Ingredients (2) for Baked Chicken with Sweet Potato
I prepared the chicken by trimming, cleaning, drying then adding the spices to it.
Prepare the Chicken
In a cast iron skillet, I added a small amount of olive oil. After the oil was hot, I browned the chicken on both sides.
Brown the chicken
While the chicken was browning, I cut up the onion and the sweet potato.
Dice Sweet Potato and Slice the Red Onion
After the chicken is browned on both sides remove it from the skillet and place it in a glass baking dish. Â Next, add a small bit of olive oil to the skillet then add the garlic, diced sweet potato and sliced red onion and cook this through for a couple of minutes. Then add the olives along with a a small bit of the olive juice.
Cook the potato, olives, red onion and garlic
The mixture will be added to the top of the chicken and baked in a pre-heated 375° oven for approximately 40 minutes or until the chicken’s juices run clear.
Ready for the recipe?
Ingredients
4 bone-in skin-on Chicken Thighs, cleaned, trimmed and dried on paper towels
1 medium sized Sweet Potato, peeled and cut into bite size pieces
1/2 Red Onion, sliced thinly
4 Garlic Cloves, minced
1/2 cup Black Olives, whole with a little bit of the juice
Thyme, to sprinkle on the chicken
Red Pepper Flakes, to sprinkle on the chicken
Salt, just a dash
Olive Oil
Directions
Preheat the oven to 375°F.
After preparing the chicken, season it with the salt, red pepper flakes and the thyme.
In a cast iron skillet on medium heat, add a little bit of olive oil, add the chicken and brown it on both sides. When they are ready, put them in a large glass baking dish.
Add the garlic, potato and the red onion to the skillet and cook this through for a few minutes. (Note: You do not want the potatoes to be cooked all the way as they will bake in the oven.)
Add a small bit of olive oil to the potato mixture, mix everything together then add the olives and stir until all is combined. Turn off the heat to the skillet.
Transfer the potato mixture to the baking dish and distribute it evenly around the chicken.
Cover the dish with foil and bake for 40 minutes or until the juices of the chicken run clear when a knife is inserted.
If you want an even crispier skin, remove the foil about 10 minutes before the chicken is cooked through.
A new year … a new recipe. Â Have you resolved to eat better this year? I hope so. Health is so important and one thing I learned is that what you eat definitely affects how you feel.
Eat sugar and you’ll start feeling sluggish with little aches and pains running throughout your body. Just saying …
This Paleo Salmon Patty recipe was adapted from one found at OurPaleoLife but they call them Salmon Filets.
The patties use fresh salmon instead of canned and came out delicioso (delicious).
Here are the ingredients you’ll be needing (salt and coconut oil not shown).
Ingredients for Salmon Patties
Make sure to have your eggs at room temperature as that affects how the patties will cook through. If you forgot to take the eggs out early, just put them in warm water for 3 minutes or so and that will work just as well.
I used two pieces of salmon that in total weighed 9 ounces. After baking them in the oven until cooked, I allowed them to cool and then used my clean hands to shred them into pieces.
Smush the Cooled Salmon
After I hand shredded the salmon, I set that aside in a bowl and grated 1/4 cup of raw sweet potato (peeling it first). A side note: I peeled and boiled the rest of the sweet potato and made a sweet potato mash to have as a “side” dish (don’t want to waste any food).
Grate the Raw Sweet Potato
Then it was a matter of adding the diced onion, eggs, minced garlic, and the sweet potato into a bowl and mixing it all together.
Mix all ingredients in a bowl
Once that was mixed, I added the red pepper flakes and fresh ground pepper and combined this into the salmon mix.
Add Black Pepper and Red Pepper Flakes
And then it was just a matter of adding a little bit of coconut oil to a skillet (how much depends on how big your skillet is), using your hands to make the patties as small or as large as you want them and frying them up. I made palm sized patties.
Ready to see the recipe?
Ingredients
9 ounces Salmon Filet, baked, cooled then shredded into small pieces
1/2 cup Almond Flour, sifted so there are no lumps
1 small Onion, minced
1 clove of Garlic, minced
2 Eggs at room temperature
1/4 cup raw peeled and grated Sweet Potato
A pinch of fresh ground Black Pepper
A pinch of Red Pepper Flakes
Coconut Oil for frying
Instructions
Bake your salmon filet until it is cooked through then remove it from the oven and set it aside until it cools. (I cooked mine at 350° Fahrenheit for 25 minutes but ovens vary so check and re-check to make sure you don’t bake it too long.)
Once the salmon cools, shred it with your hands into small pieces inside a medium sized bowl.
Add the minced onion and garlic to the top of the salmon in the bowl.
Next, add the eggs, almond flour and the grated sweet potato to the salmon bowl then mix everything together until it’s all blended.
Add the black pepper and red pepper flakes to the salmon mixture then taste it until you have the right taste for your “buds.”
In a medium or large skillet, add a little bit of frying oil ~ just enough so that the patties will be able to fry in it ~ and wait until it gets nice and hot.
Once the oil is hot, make palm size patties with your hands that aren’t too thick and place them in the oil to fry.
When one side of the patty is fairly browned, turn it over and fry the other side.
And that is pretty much it. These patties were delicious.
I served my Paleo Salmon Patties with Garlic Aioli, Guacamole, Mashed Sweet Potato (from the leftover potato) and fried Plantains.
So, did you make a New Year’s resolution for 2015? I haven’t made a resolution in a few years but this year I wanted to do something different. Something more intentional.
What did I come up with, you ask?
I’ve decided to live my life less “technologically inclined” and more “people inclined.” That is, with a more personal and less “over the waves” kind of relationship.
What exactly does that mean? I’m hoping to do less texting and emailing and more, dare I say it?, calling people to hear their voices or sending snail mail so they get more than junk and bills in their mailboxes.
I know there are some benefits to technology but I have found that, quite frankly, it’s a bit too much. On Facebook, there is almost an “air” of expectation to “like” peoples posts for fear that, gasp!, they might believe that “no one is listening to me.”
A friend recently went on Facebook and said that what normally would take 10 minutes to read through a days updates was taking more than 30 minutes.
What goes on in peoples lives is important as everything influences us for good or for bad but seriously, there are so many pictures with captions that it’s hard for me to understand why people can’t just say what they mean instead of looking for all these pictures to state and re-state the same things.
So ~ I’d like to add “less” to the problem. Hmmm … can you add less? (laughing)
You suppose it’s a middle-age mindset I have?
It is refreshing for me to get cards in the mail or notes from people telling me they thought about me. Even a phone call recently from someone I haven’t seen in 4 years was welcome this past Thanksgiving.
No worries though ~ I’ll still be updating my blog.
At the same time though, I’d like to have more intimate relationships with people because, after all, that’s what life is all about.
Wow~ It’s been over a month since I’ve posted anything. Between Thanksgiving travel, getting sick, the Christmas holidays and trying to finish a quilt, I’ve been quite busy and have kept my cooking to a “simple and easy” minimum using tried and true recipes.
My decision to tackle/make a queen sized quilt at home and give it as a Christmas gift has been somewhat problematic as I’d never done it before and encountered obstacles that tried my patience. But, patient I am ~ even if I have to remove every single stitch and start over again which happened a couple of time. Â Egads!
To add some excitement to one day, I walked into the garage from the house (it’s connected via a door) to take the trash out and saw a mouse scuttle across the floor. Eeeekkkkk!!! Â I’m not sure who else heard my shriek although the mouse was as scared as I was and wasn’t sure where to turn as every time he turned I shrieked again.
A few days later, I found a dead mouse (a different one ~ much smaller) next to a cabinet in the garage. Â Oh the joys of living in the woods ….
Well, January will roll around soon enough though ~ can you believe it? Then, hopefully, things will be back to “normal.”
I adapted a Closet Cooking recipe to paleo-ize it. It was quite good. No, that’s an understatement. It was magnificent! Perhaps it was the beef that came out extra tender … I don’t know. This is one of my favorite go-to recipes now.
I downplayed a lot of the spicy ingredients so that anyone, even those who don’t like too much spice, will be able to enjoy Mongolian Beef.
Ready to check out the recipe?
Ingredients
1 tablespoon olive oil
 1 pound steak (sirloin or flank), sliced thinly
3 tablespoons amino acids
1 tablespoon pure maple syrup
1 teaspoon chili powder
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ginger, minced
1 tablespoon tapioca flour
 1/3 cup water
 1 teaspoon sesame oil
1 yellow squash, sliced thin
1 red or green pepper, sliced thin
1/4 cup green onion, sliced
Directions
In a small bowl, mix the amino acids, maple syrup, chili powder, garlic and ginger together then set this aside.
In another small bowl, add water and the tapioca flour and mix this together then set this aside.
Heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium heat then add the beef, pepper and squash and saute until just cooked, 4-6 minutes, then set the stovetop temperature to low.
Add the two bowls of ingredients to the meat and stir. The liquid mixture should get somewhat thick due to the tapioca flour. Once it does, remove the skillet from the stovetop.
Add the sesame oil to the meat mixture and stir.
Garnish with the green onions.
Serve over white rice, ginger pumpkin noodles or with a sweet potato.
I used diced tomatoes instead of crushed tomatoes when I made this recipe but it didn’t make any difference (that I can tell). I also replaced the coconut palm sugar with just a tad of pure maple syrup. Other than that, I followed the recipe to a “t” and the spices melded together beautifully.
The chicken was tender ~ so juicy and tender.
So, head on over to her site and take a look. If the rest of her recipes are this good then I am more than impressed.
I served my Chicken Tikka Masala with steamed carrot sticks on a bed of rice.
I recently came across an article called Be Yourself in Prayer on the Desiring God Blog and I found it quite refreshing.
Many times I hear people praying in the old English as if they had memorized the King James Version of the Bible. And they probably have as their prayers start with something akin to “O Most High Father in Heaven , thou art …”
How a person prays is a personal matter but I do like the way this article expresses a more simple way to pray as if talking to a friend when moments of silence don’t matter between friends.
I recommend you read the article ~ you’ll truly be blessed.
This was a super easy and tasty recipe from Bon Appetit. They call it gluten free, I call it paleo.
I was afraid that the lemon would interfere with the taste of the chicken ~ you know, overwhelm it, but it didn’t.
So ~ here are the ingredients you’ll need to make this (olive oil, salt and pepper not shown).
Ingredients
You’ll be adding the shallot, garlic and red pepper flakes to a large cast iron pot or any heavy pot, then cooking this through until you can smell the fragrance of the garlic. Â Ummmmmm ….
Add shallot, garlic and red pepper flakes
The recipe has you add only 1/3 of the ground chicken to the pot to start, but in hindsight, you can actually add it all in at once. I’ve left the original directions as they are for blog purposes.
Add 1/3 of the ground chicken
You’ll be mixing the ground chicken with the other ingredients then transferring it to a bowl and letting it cool.
Next you’ll be adding the remaining chicken meat, salt, and several grindings of black pepper and mixing this in the pot to just combine it.
Then you’ll be combining this to the other 1/3 chicken and making meatballs from them then adding them back to the pot along with a tad of olive oil.
Cook the meatballs until golden brown then remove them from the pot.
Next, you’ll be adding the remaining shallot and the sliced lemons to the pot and letting the lemons soften.
Add lemon slices and shallot
After the lemon slices have softened, add the broth and the meatballs to the pot and allow this to simmer.
Add broth and meatballs
Looking yummy already, aren’t they?
Lower the heat and cover the pot and allow this to simmer for about 10 minutes then add the kale and cook until the kale is a nice bright green ~ not more than 4 minutes.
Add kale
Season the mixture with salt and pepper and … you’re finished!
Ready to see the recipe?
Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil, divided
2 medium shallots, minced, divided
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 pound ground chicken meat
1 teaspoon kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, more or less
1 lemon, very thinly sliced and seeds removed
2 cups low salt chicken broth
1 large bunch curly kale, destemmed
Directions
Heat 1 Tbsp. olive oil in a large heavy pot over medium heat.
Add one shallot, garlic, and red pepper flakes then cook, stirring constantly until softened and fragrant, about 6 minutes.
Add 1/3 of the ground chicken to the pot and cook just until cooked through, breaking up any clumps.
Transfer to a medium bowl and let cool slightly.
Add the remaining chicken meat, salt, and several grindings of black pepper. Mix just to combine.
Wipe out the pot and add the remaining tablespoon of oil then heat over medium-high heat until hot but not smoking.
Form meat mixture into 8 -10 meatballs about 2 inches around each then add them to the pot (mixture will be soft).
Cook the meatballs until light golden brown on all sides, 6-8 minutes total. Remove meatballs to a plate and set this aside.
Add the remaining shallot along with the lemon slices and cook until the lemon is tender and starting to turn light golden brown, about 2 minutes.
Next, add the chicken broth and return the meatballs to the pot.
Bring the broth to a simmer, lower the heat and cover.
Cook meatballs for about 8-10 minutes.
Add kale to the pot then cook until the kale is tender and bright green, about 4-5 minutes.
Season everything with salt and pepper then remove it from the heat and get ready to serve it.
I served this wonderful dish with basil zucchini and a slice of sweet potato.
