DinnerTool.com

Hi. I'm Ariane Duarte with DinnerTool.com. Welcome to CulinAriane restaurant in Monclair, my restaurant! Come on inside. We have lots of cooking to do today.

Hi. I'm Ariane Duarte from DinnerTool.com and today I'm going to give you some tips on creating a really great, cost-effective, hearty, one pot wonder stew in our crock-pot here.

TIP: Pick out ingredients on sale.

The great thing about this is you can use cuts of meat that are on sale and also things that are in your refrigerator that you need to get rid of or vegetables that are on sale as well. The dish I'm going to create for you is a chicken thigh stew using kale, celery, potatoes, bacon, and white beans.

So what I'd like to show you about these chicken thighs is how to clean them up. They tend to be a little fattier so you want to lose some of the fat-not all of it- because there's lots of flavor in that fat.

TIP: Use cheaper cuts of meat.

So basically you're pretty much trimming around the edges and you'll pretty much see the fat is that yellow jellylike. That's it, you see we're going to leave some of the skin on so when we sear it up you're still going to have that flavor of the skin and it's going to add really nice flavor to our stew.

All right, now we're ready to put our stew together. We're going to sauté these chicken thighs. I like to get a little flavor and brown the skin, get it a little crispy. So we're going to season it up with a little salt and pepper. In a hot pan, carefully place your chicken thighs skin side down in the pan. And basically we're just going to let them sit for a few minutes.

While those are searing nicely and browning up nicely, in our crock-pot we're basically going to throw in all our ingredients, which makes this recipe so wonderful. So I'm going to throw the potatoes in, our celery, our kale, which is washed and chopped, roughly, some onion- large dice, fresh thyme, and a can of white beans. This one pot wonder can actually cost you under five dollars, and it feeds four people. And what's also great about it is you can, you know, put it in quart containers and freeze it for another day.

So now our chicken thighs are looking really good. I'm actually at this point going to throw our bacon in just to render it out, just a little bit. Then we're going to lay our chicken thighs right in there. Just give the bacon a little quick toss, almost just taking a little of that fat out, but also browning it so it has a little more flavor. And then we¿re going to throw this in. This gives the stew a really wonderful smoky flavor, just brings it to that next level. And then we're going to add our chicken broth. This is something else you can always, should always have a box or two of this in your pantry. I'm going to put the top on this.

TIP: Let flavors cook together slowly.

I'm going to set the timer for five hours, and when I get home from work, dinner will be ready.

Well, it's time to check on the stew, and from the smell of it, I think it could be ready. Oh yeah, it looks great. This is so hearty. Really all we serve it with is like some real nice crusty French bread. Enjoy! You can find this recipe on DinnerTool.com