Chicken Tacos with sweet potato

1 or 2 lbs chicken thighs, skin removed (boneless is easiest to use)

1 medium sized sweet potato, peeled and diced

flour tortillas (small)

canned corn (optional)

lime crema or sour cream

baby spinach leaves (optional)

Marinade:

4 Tbsp olive oil

2 tsp white wine vinegar

2 tsp chili powder

1 ½ tsp salt

1 tsp onion powder

1 tsp garlic powder

½ tsp ground cumin

½ tsp black pepper

the juice of 1 or 2 limes

Combine ingredients in a large bowl and place chicken in the marinade. Turn chicken several times to coat. Cover the bowl and put it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes up to about 24 hours.

When ready to cook the chicken, heat a large skillet over medium heat. Add a little oil and the chicken. Cook five to eight minutes per side, until cooked all the way through. Remove chicken from skillet to a plate lined with paper towels to soak up excess grease.

Peel a sweet potato and cut into cubes about the size of dice. Toss these into the skillet in a single layer and add a little water. Cover, stirring frequently, and add more water if the skillet starts to dry out. When the potatoes are tender all the way through, remove them from the skillet into a bowl.

Toss a flour tortilla into the skillet for a minute or so, then turn with a spatula and let sit for another minute or so. Remove and do the same for another tortilla until you have as many as you need.

Open a can of corn, drain, and pour as much of it into the skillet as you want. Saute briefly until it’s warm through. Add a little salt and pepper if you like.

While the corn is warming, use the tortillas to make tacos. Add generous dollops of lime crema (or sour cream), then place chicken and sweet potatoes on top. You can top with baby spinach if you like.

When the corn is warmed through, you can have it as a side dish or toss some into the tacos. Or both.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re making an amazing meal that looks complicated but is actually simple. You make the lime crema in advance, you prepare the chicken in advance, and when you’re ready to cook everything, you only need a single skillet. It’s chicken tacos with sweet potatoes and lime crema, pretty much all my favorite foods in one dish.

You’ll start with a marinade for the chicken. A marinade is a good way to season and tenderize meat before you cook it. The marinade in this recipe calls for a lot of ingredients and many of them are ones you may not already have on hand. The ingredients you really need are the olive oil, the white wine vinegar, the chili powder, and a lime. I trust you have salt and pepper on hand. White wine vinegar is actually pretty cheap. You don’t need to get a big bottle. You can use red wine vinegar if that’s all you have, or even just regular white vinegar. Olive oil can be super expensive, but again, you can get a small bottle of the cheap stuff and it’ll work just fine. If you absolutely can’t get olive oil, you can use regular vegetable oil. Basically you just need something that will help the other ingredients stick to the chicken. You can substitute various things for the onion and garlic powder and the chili powder and cumin. For instance, if you have fresh garlic but not powdered, just mince up a clove and add it. If you have literally any kind of taco seasoning, whether it’s actually chili powder or something else, like a packet of dried-out Taco Bell seasoning that came in something you don’t even remember buying, use that in place of the chili powder and cumin. You can substitute lemons for limes if you don’t have limes. You just want citrus in there of some kind. When I made this, I left out the onion powder because I didn’t have any, and it was fine. Marinades are flexible.

If you can find boneless chicken thighs, get them. Sometimes there will still