No I wasn’t sitting around on Saturday afternoon and thought, “Hey why don’t you grill up a cornish game hen and serve it with Thai Red Curry.”  It’s just not something a person would think about putting together.  At least not a sane one anyway.  And when you toss in some green beans, sweet potatoes and cranberries you’ve got a interesting combination of ingredients.

Followers of this blog will know that each month I join a fellow group of BBQ enthusiasts for a “4 Ingredient Challege.”  The challenge requires us to use four randomly selected ingredients to great a meal.  This month the ingredients selected were:

• Cornish Game Hen
• Cranberries
• Green Beans
• Sweet Potatoes

I’ve never made Thai Red Curry and since I’ve only eaten it one time I wasn’t comfortable experimenting on my own with a recipe so I found one on the internet that look interesting.  I used the recipe from the blog What Did You Eat.  Now that I’ve made it once I think I can do a little experimenting with some tweeks of my own.

Peel the sweet potatoes and cut into 1 inch square cubes.  Make them as uniform as possible so they cook evenly on the grill.

Put the sweet potatoes in a bowl and spray them with non-stick spray and season them lightly with a Thai seasoning blend.

Spatchcock the cornish game hens by removing the breast bone and laying them out flat.  Season the hen, lightly again, with the same seasoning you used on the sweet potatoes.

Grill both the hens and sweet potatoes until done.  Remove the hens and let them rest a few minutes while the sweet potatoes finish up.  I like to grill the sweet potatoes on high heat, getting the grill marks I want and then move them to indirect heat.  This allows me to get the crispy outside while allowing them to cook slowly.  This cuts down the risk of ending up with over cooked mushy potatoes.

The biggest challenge was how to incorporate cranberries into a red curry dish.  There was one recipe I came across that used dried cranberries in the red curry but that just didn’t seem to be the direction I wanted to go.  I love tempura veggies and had already decided that tempura green beans would be a nice addition.   But still no way to incorpate cranberries.  While I was at Whole Foods picking up the Thai Red Curry paste I saw some Cranberry Italian Soda.

I knew to make a good tempura you needed to use club soda to mix your batter so I came up with the idea of using the Cranberry Italian Soda as the liquid in the batter.  This actually worked better than I thought it would.  I was able to get a different flavor into the tempura that was a little sweeter than normal.  This worked quite well the the spiciness and heat of the red curry.  I had hoped it would give the finished tempura a little red or pink tint, but it didn’t.

So, that’s how you come up with interesting fusion meal.  All and all it worked out pretty good.  Although the Thai red curry sauce was good, it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for.  I’m going to have to experiment with this and see what else I can come up with.

Additional participants in this month’s Ingredient Challenge include:

Paul Haight of No Excuses BBQ – ENTRY HERE

At our house baked potatoes or french fries are the standard side dish with steak.  This time we decided something else was in order.  After consulting one of our many BBQ cookbooks we decided on a version of “Roasted Smashed Sweet Potatoes” from Ted Reader’s King of the Q’s Blue Plate BBQ cookbook.

First step was to put a couple of sweet potatoes on the Traeger at 350 degrees.

When the sweet potatoes had been on for about 30 minutes I started a full chimney of charcoal.  Lighter fluid is never allowed on the property so a couple sheets of newspaper with a drizzle of vegetable oil get the chimney started quickly.

I’m convinced it doesn’t take any longer to get charcoal ready using a chimney than it does using the “lighter fluid”  shortcut.

At 350 degrees it took about 50 minutes to get the sweet potatoes done.

Once the sweet potatoes were cooled slightly they were peeled and combined with a little butter, brown sugar and green onion.  We adjusted the recipe a little by adding a topping of brown sugar and ground pecans.

The sweet potatoes with the topping was put back on the Traeger and then moved over the the Weber kettle while the steaks were grilling.

A couple pictures of the sweet potatoes:

Plated up the steaks, green beans and sweet potatoes:

Kosher salt and fresh ground pepper were the only seasonings on the steaks.  I made a compound butter of unsalted butter and Todd’s Bayou Dirt.  It added a nice subtle extra kick to the steaks.  And a little on the green beans was fantastic too.