"African" Chicken Peanut Stew

We were in the mood for something new, creative, and well, different for dinner the other night.  I'd seen this on Simply Recipes last week and it looked like something that would be right up our alley: Peanut Butter?  Chicken?  Sweet Potatoes?  Hells to the yeah!

I did make some subsitutions to allow what we had in the pantry.  Mostly, switched out spices for what was easily available.  The original recipe calls for fresh ginger root, coriander, and cilantro.  Which I'm sure tastes fantastic.  But we don't have these in the pantry.  So I used cayanne (in the recipe), curry powder, "Chili 3000" (blend of ancho chili, garlic, cumin, onion, cilantro, paprika, cayenne, lemon peel, mexican oregano, black pepper and jalapeno), and a bit of dried powdered ginger.  When I first tried this, it was far spicier than it ended up being.  After it's been cooking for a while, it actually lost most of the spiciness, so that it was well within the reasonable limit that I can have J eat without problems.

African-ish Indian-ish Chicken Peanut Stew.

• 2-3 lbs bone-in, skin on chicken thighs
• 2-3 lbs sweet potatos, peeled and cubed
• 3 Tbsp vegetable oil
• 1 large yellow or white onion, cubed
• 8-10 garlic cloves, chopped roughly
• 1 15-ounce can of crushed tomatoes
• 1 quart chicken stock
• 1 cup peanut butter
• 1 cup roasted peanuts
• Salt and black pepper
• 2-3 tsp curry powder
• 1 tsp "Chili 3000"
• 1/2 tsp ground ginger
• 1 tsp cayenne pepper

1 Heat the vegetable oil in a large soup pot set over medium-high heat. Salt the chicken pieces well, pat them dry and brown them in the oil. Don't crowd the pot, so do this in batches. Set the chicken pieces aside as they brown.
2 Sauté the onions in the oil for 3-4 minutes, stirring often and scraping any browned bits off the bottom of the pot. Add the garlic and sauté another 1-2 minutes, then add the sweet potatoes and stir well to combine.
3 Add the chicken, chicken broth, crushed tomatoes, peanut butter, peanuts,  and spices and stir well to combine. Bring to a simmer and taste for salt, adding more if needed. Cover the pot and simmer gently for about 1 hour or until the chicken meat easily falls off the bone and the sweet potatoes are tender.  It should look similar to red curry at this point.
4 Reduce heat even further (medium low to low).  Remove chicken pieces from pot, remove skin and bones and shred meat.  Check spice level and add more if wanted or needed.  Add meat back to pot and bring back to simmer.
5 Serve over plain steamed rice.

We served 4 with plenty of left overs (I think we have enough left for 4 more bowls?  I didn't get any of the leftovers) Yummy tastiness.