Yesterday I decided to finally try a recipe that I had heard of on a recent Robb Wolf podcast.  The topic of discussion was the common one of “is paleo just a low carb diet like Atkins?”  Robb reminisced on a dish that Greg has made several years back, so far back that it seemed that Robb remembered the details of it better than Greg did.  The gist of the recipe was cutting up some apples and sweet potatoes and baking them all covered together in the oven for a few hours.  As for spices, the vague recollection was that it called for a healthy portion of nutmeg and cinnamon.  It was starting to sound like a great dish for Thanksgiving.  Since the seasons are turning, and I don’t like to risk making a dish for the first time on Thanksgiving, I decided to give it a shot last night.  Greg also mentioned that you could add some chicken to the dish, which I also did.

So here is what I went with for the “recipe”:

3 granny smith apples

1 large garnet yam

2 large sweet potato

4 chicken breasts

cinnamon

nutmeg

ghee (optional)

I decided to mix up the yam and sweet potato together for no particular reason.  I thought it might add a little variety, but to be honest, once it all bakes together, the flavors merge so much that it really made no difference that I used too different ingredients.  The see-saw in this recipe is the ratio between apples and yams/sweet potatoes.  The more apples, the sweeter the dish will end up.

Here is how things looked at the beginning.  I peeled the potatoes and apples, and diced them up.  These pieces may look on the large side, but as they baked, they reduced.

I decided to attempt to fill the dish in layers to make sure things were even.  Here is the same casserole dish after I tossed in the cinnamon and nutmeg, but pre-chicken.

In terms of the chicken, the key is cutting up the pieces as small as possible.  Chicken by itself is bland.  The best way for the flavor of the apples, potatoes, cinnamon and nutmeg to absorb into the chicken, is to cut up the pieces small.  Think bite size, and then a little smaller than that.  Once you fill up your dish with all of the ingredients it will look like the full casserole dish below.  Now before I threw it in the oven, I got a little nervous that there wouldn’t be enough moisture in there.  This concern was unfounded, as the apples provide plenty of moisture.  However, I decided that I would drizzle three tablespoons of ghee over the top of things.  I don’t think this either helped or hurt the recipe, so it’s up to you if you really want to include it.

And then when it was done it looked like this.

We ate this last night as our main course, with a side dish of bacon-sauteed brussel sprouts.  Those 2 dishes fed 3 people with a small amount of left overs.  I don’t know what the macro nutrients of this dish are, but given the ingredients, I’d say its moderately high in protein from the chicken, and a very healthy portion of carbs from the apples and potatoes.

Every year on thanksgiving I make sausage stuffing with the turkey.  I’d probably be in the dog house if I didn’t make it again this year, but I might also make this next to it.