Miso-Marinated Chicken Breasts and Roasted Japanese Sweet Potatoes with Scallion Butter

For the record, Alex rocks.  Sometimes my job explodes and I basically disappear.  I would say that it's like magic, only the use of the word "magic" makes it sound fun and exciting when it is often exhausting for both of us.  Last Sunday he did the laundry, made us both dinner and cleaned up after dinner while I was on an epic conference call for work from 6:00 pm to nearly midnight.  And that's after I basically worked all evening on Saturday as well.  He also made me this Red Cabbage Salad with Warm Pancetta-Balsamic Dressing for lunch.  I picked out all of the recipes and bought most of the ingredients, but he handled everything else and there is a lot to be said for a meal magically appearing in front of me while I tap away at my laptop.  It's pretty awesome.  This meal started with the Japanese sweet potatoes that I picked up at a little Japanese deli near my office.  Once I had the sweet potatoes I needed to figure out what to do with them.  This sweet potato recipe seemed like a perfectly simple recipe to feature the Japanese sweet potatoes but not drown them in sugar and other stuff.  And the chicken naturally followed.  If we were making a miso-scallion butter for the sweet potatoes, why not marinate the chicken breasts in miso and aromatics? 

In some ways this dish was exactly what I needed to get me through that conference call.  It was warm, conforting and had good flavor.  It was also easy to eat one-handed (and relatively easy for Alex to prepare on his own).  I really liked the combination of miso-scallion butter with the sweet potatoes.  The delicate sweetness of the sweet potatoes worked really nicely with the savory butter.  I was surprised by how the texture of the sweet potatoes differed from the American sweet potatoes that I am used to.  The flesh was a little drier and starchier (which required more butter than I typically use with sweet potatoes).  I also liked the marinade for the chicken and was pleasantly surprised by how much flavor the chicken picked up.  I could imagine using these chicken breasts in a number of dishes.  They would be delicious either in a salad or a sandwich.  They were also quite nice as a stand alone entree.  They didn't have any noticable heat to them, but I was ok with that.  I think that the addition of more Korean red pepper flakes would have detracted from the overall comforting quality of the dish.  And after hour 3 of my conference call I was dying for some comfort.

Recipes after the jump!

Thanksgiving 2012 - Soy-Sauce and Honey-Glazed Turkey, Mark Bittman's Green Beans with Crisp Shallots, Cranberry-Reisling Compote and Sweet Potato Gratin with Chile Spiced Pecans

I came up with the menu for Thanksgiving back in mid-November after spending a little while pouring through the Food & Wine website.  I quickly realized that they had a slideshow for various ethnic and regional Thanksgiving feats, including an "Asian-American Thanksgiving."  I was instantly hooked.  Alex's favorite thing about Thanksgiving with my parents has always been the Sichuan cucumbers that my mother makes and the Soy-Sauce and Honey-Glazed Turkey sounded like the perfect centerpiece to a meal featuring my American father, my Chinese mother, a number of her Chinese siblings and a batch of Sichuan cucumbers.  We only ended up making one dish from the slideshow, but since it was the turkey I think that deserves a shout out. 

I thought the turkey had really good flavor and was very moist, although I wish that the flavors of the honey and soy-sauce mixture really seeped down into the meat a little more.  With that said, I think it was the best turkey we have made for Thanksgiving to date, although I think we have made better gravies.  Unfortunately the picture looks a little ridiculous - nothing that I did made the turkey lay flat on its back.  It just kept keeling over left and right until I admitted defeat.  The sweet potatoes were perhaps my second favorite dish from Thanksgiving.  They were really good.  I was a little worried about the dish for a number of reasons, including the fact that I bought white sweet potatoes and didn't realize that the flesh inside would be this weird light yellow color (which looked kind of sickly against the roasted marshmallows), but the flavor was really good.  They almost looked like applesauce mixed into mashed potatoes.  The color was really weird and slightly off-putting.  I actually considered leaving the sweet potatoes at home rather than bringing them with me because they were such an odd color. I wish I had taken a picture (even thought the picture would have been horrible), but I didn't have time.  I was also worried that they would be too sweet, but in the end I think they were just right.  Mark Bittman's green beans were nice, although the shallots and almonds tended to fall straight to the bottom and without any shallots or almonds to liven them up, they were a little blah.  The cranberry compote marked our third attempt at cranberry sauce, none of which has been a smashing success.  I'm not sure if the heirloom cranberries we are buying at the farmers' market are more bitter than your average grocery store cranberry or if I am extremely sensitive to bitterness, but the past few batches have been too bitter to eat without the addition of a large amount of additional honey or sugar.  I would say that these cranberries ended up being our most successful to date by far, but I added about 1/4 cup of honey to them after they cooled to get them to that point.

P.S.  Sorry for the delay on this post but there was a whole camera/hard drive debacle.  If you want to read more about it, you can look at my Thanksgiving 2012 Desserts post.  I'm not going to repeat the whole story here, but suffice it to say that I am a wee bit forgetful sometimes. 

Recipes (and more pictures) after the jump!

Fluffy Baked Eggs with Roasted-Vegetable Hash

When I was initially conceptualizing this dish I was thinking about making sweet potato hash with runny egg yolks.  But then I started playing around online and came up with this dish.  It wasn't exactly what I was planning on, but it seemed interesting enough to alter my tentative meal plans.  So we hit the farmers' market to stock up on eggs and mushrooms to go with the sweet potatoes we already had in the pantry.  I'm not sure exactly what inspired me to buy sweet potatoes, but I decided some time ago to pick up a few in an attempt to mix things up a bit more.  I was planning on making a Vietnamese curry with sweet potatoes, but somehow that never came to be.  And then I thought about making roasted sweet potato fries, but that never came to be either.  So today for lunch we finally used our sweet potatoes to make this dish.  And it was lovely - very autumnal, but not heavy and greasy.  The eggs were fluffy and light.  And delightfully cheesy, but not overwhelmingly so.  Alex was actually amazed by how much the eggs rose/puffed up during the baking process.  They almost reminded me of a souffle, but not quite as airy and far less labor-intensive to prepare.  It's not a dish that I will be dreaming about for years to come, but I was very pleased with it.

Recipe after the jump!

Sweet Potato and Kimchi Pancakes

The genesis behind this dish was that I wanted to make sweet potatoes latkes.  I'm not sure why I wanted to make sweet potato latkes, but I did.  I guess it stems from the latkes I had the other night at a friend's apartment on the last night of Hanukkah.  I tend to forget just how much I like latkes until I stumble across them somewhere.  So I started looking for recipes for sweet potato latkes online and found this recipe instead by Andrea Reusing.  Andrea is the chef at my all time favorite restaurant in Chapel Hill, NC - a place called Lantern Restaurant.  Sweet potato pancakes with kimchi?  Sounds delicious to me.  They're not exactly latkes, but that's ok.  Because they are super delicious.  The flavors of the sweet potatoes and the kimchi work brilliantly together.  My only complaint about the pancakes was that the batter was wet enough that it was pretty difficult to get the pancakes nice and crispy.  The texture was a little soggy.  Plus you had to be really gentle with the pancakes while forming and flipping them because the batter was so wet.  But on the plus side, I really don't think the flavor of the pancakes themselves could have been improved at all.  They were a little sweet and a little spicy, with great balance and freshness.  The sweetness and slight acidity of the Soy Vinegar Dipping Sauce really worked with the pancakes.  Pancakes and latkes both suffer from an inherent heaviness and doughiness, but somehow these pancakes avoided that trap.  Man I have to go back to Chapel Hill to eat at Lantern Restaurant again.    Andrea Reusing really knows her stuff.

Recipe after the jump!