Kai’s Lemony One-Dish Dinner

A while ago, I mentioned that I wanted to try Kai’s Lemony One-Dish Dinner. Actually, Kai said the recipe comes from Real Simple magazine, and it was actually named something else, but I’d prefer to give the credit to Kai (and that, friends, is why traditional print media hates the blogosphere!).

Here’s what I did (note, it’s slightly different from Kai’s version):

Ingredients:
8 small red potatoes, cut into eighths (recipe calls for quartered, but I wasn’t sure they were small enough)
Big heap of greenbeans
2 lemons – 1 sliced thin, one juiced
Olive oil (about 6 Tablespoons worth)
4 cloves garlic, sliced thin
Just under a pound of turkey cutlets (recipe called for chicken breasts, but I found some local turkey on sale)
Bunch of shakes Konriko Greek seasoning (my default seasoning of choice, recipe called for salt and pepper)

Spread about a Tablespoon’s worth of olive oil at the bottom of a pan. Cover with lemon slices. In a separate bowl, combine juice of 1 lemon, remainder of olive oil, garlic, and several shakes of seasoning. Coat greenbeans, and place them on top of the lemon slices. Then, coat potatoes, and put them around the side of the pan. Finally, coat poultry, place it on the greenbeans in the center of the pan. Pour the remainder of the lemon/oil mixture on top. Bake in preheated 450-degree oven until everything is golden brown and has that happily-roasted look about it, about 40 minutes. The recipe mentioned removing poultry and doing some additional roasting to the potatoes/beans, if necessary; thankfully, it wasn’t, maybe because I did cut the potatoes smaller.

Conceptually it’s easy: greenbeans, red potatoes, and poultry, baked in a single dish with lemon, garlic, and olive oil. Something green, something starchy, something protein, and only one pan to clean. Easy, breezy, just how I like it. It took a little longer than planned, though, I think because scrubbing/cutting potatoes, and washing/snipping the ends off the greenbeans can take a while. If you could find the really tiny new potatoes (so they didn’t need cutting), and if you had a better system for cutting the ends off of green beans (or if you used frozen green beans…though of course you can’t buy those at your local farmers’ market), you could cut the time down considerably. In which case it would be really, really easy.

It was pretty tasty. The lemon flavor was strong, and bits of roasted lemons mixed right into the rest of the food — so if you don’t actually care for lemon, this isn’t the recipe for you. Also, I thought it needed a fair amount of Greek seasoning, though I suspect that it was the salt I was after. Blair and I both had seconds, and the leftovers were even better 2 days later. The kids didn’t try this one — it was a dinner-in-front-of-movie-after-kids-are-sleeping kind of night. But overall, the ease-to-tastiness ratio was pretty good (and would be very good if you could cut down the prep work).

When I was slicing the lemons, I felt sort of stupid, because I wasn’t 100% sure how to slice them. I mean, I know how to cut lemons, but I wasn’t sure if I should leave the peels on, or if they should be wedges, or whatever. Anyhow, this is how I sliced them and lay them in the pan:

And here’s the finished product:

And, yes, that one pan clean-up is totally the way to go. Thanks, Kai!