Turkey Curry

Today I realized I am lacking in our good friends fruit. Now, I'm not a fan of many fruits nor do we keep many on hand. One thing we do keep around are are cranberries. Then I got the idea to combine cranberries with pine nuts and ground turkey. This precipitated a recipe search, and not finding anything I liked in particular, created something based on this.

Ingredients:
1.25" of fresh ginger
3 cloves of garlic minced
1/2tsp cinnamon
1/4tsp cardamon
1/2tsp cumin
1/2tsp coriander
1lb ground turkey
4oz dried cranberries
2 small onions, sliced
1 carrot
1 package couscous
1/2c frozen peas
1c chicken broth
2oz pine nuts
2oz olive oil
salt and pepper to taste
Greek yogurt to taste

1. I started by sweating the garlic, ginger and pine nuts (to toast them). I think I should have actually saved this for closer to the end to get a better flavor punch from them.
2. I then added the onion and carrots until the onion was soft.
3. Once that was done, I should have taken everything out but didn't. I then added the turkey.Once the turkey was cooked through, I added the spices (which I had mixed and ground together with my mortar and pestle,) mixed it all together, added the broth, peas, cranberries, and couscous, gave it another mix, covered and took it off the heat.
4. After a few minutes, I spooned some into a bowl, and added salt and pepper to taste. I realized some yogurt might be good, so I added that too.

The result: the taste and smell is amazing! The smell was like stepping into an ethnic restaurant (take your pick of North Africa and midEast.) The taste was actually fairly mild, if complex.

Ghetto Chicken Cordon Bleu

Many years ago I learned this recipe when my father's wife's brother got married. His wife's family had this recipe for years and it is amazingly tasty.

Ingredients:
4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
1 package of sliced ham
1 package of sliced cheese (Swiss preferred)
1 package Stove Top stuffing (you'll need 2tbs butter)
1 can cream of mushroom soup
2tsp Dijon mustard

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees
2. Cook stuffing per instructions
3. Trim chicken breasts and cut in half both ways (so that it is thin and uniform length/width)
4. Place slice of cheese and slice of ham* inside chicken and roll it up. (You can use a tooth pick to keep the shape. The best you'll get is a U anyways.)
5. Mix mustard into soup and pour over chicken
6. Spoon stuffing over top
7. Bake for 30 minutes

*I prefer chicken-cheese-ham so that the cheese doesn't melt out altogether and acts as an adhesive keeping the chicken and ham together.