Chicken Recipes, Please?

Yes, grilled chicken—again! It’s unlikely that I’ll ever get tired of it. And, as much as I like it, I’m never satisfied to simply throw it on the grill and eat it as is—it’s always better when it’s seasoned with various herbs and spices or when it’s topped with barbecue sauce or salsa or whatever.

Herb Grilled Chicken

Today’s grilled chicken recipe is a quick and easy dish from RecipeTips.com, named simply, “Herb Grilled Chicken.” Brushed with a paste of fresh basil, fresh lemon thyme, black pepper, and olive oil, the chicken was moist and delicious. The recipe called for skinless chicken breasts, which I used, but I also used some thighs, leaving the skin on. The herb mixture made the crispy grilled chicken skin even more delicious. Since I doubled the amount of chicken called for in the recipe, I also doubled the herb mixture—duh.

I served the chicken with the “Spring Vegetable Medley” that RecipeTips suggested would be a good accompaniment. I think they should have provided a link to it from the “Herb Grilled Chicken” recipe, but I suppose we can’t have everything. Anyway, the “Spring Vegetable Medley” was very good. Among the vegetables in the ingredients list of the recipe was edamame, a type of young green soybean, which I had never tasted. I picked some up at the Asian market and found that they were quite good and worked very well in the recipe. I hope you’ll give this meal a try.

By the way, I entered my “Curried Chicken Salad with Pineapple” recipe in the “Char-Broil Summer of Grilling Giveaway” contest featured on RecipeTips.com. Apparently, they have their first drawing at the end of May, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I want that Quantum grill!

I’m still in an outdoor grilling mood, and I’ll probably remain in that mood until November—I mean, after all, what beats the taste of grilled food—but yesterday’s rainy weather convinced me to forget about it until the sun reappeared. Yes, I know lots of people wheel their gas grills into the garage on such days, but I’m not so obsessed with grilling that I would risk burning down the garage in order to have grilled chicken on my plate. Besides, I don’t think outdoor grilling is any fun unless the weather cooperates; otherwise, it seems more like a chore. Who wants to stand outside in the middle of a monsoon, holding an umbrella and flipping burgers while everyone else is inside having a good time? Not me.

Anyway, now that I’ve explained what I didn’t do outside yesterday, I’ll tell you about the terrific chicken dish I prepared inside: a tasty chicken stir-fry called, “Spring Onion Chicken” that I came across on the Website, GroupRecipes.com. It’s very easy to prepare and has only a few ingredients, but it was so good. The flavor of the spring onions, ginger, and dark soy sauce are quite apparent in the dish, and the rock sugar adds just the right amount of sweetness and complements the other flavors so well. The author who submitted this recipe, simcooks, has several other delicious non-chicken dishes that I’m anxious to try, including one with scallops and shrimp that looks fantastic. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this chicken stir-fry recipe.

Today’s entry has nothing to do with chicken recipes. Since I haven’t shared a food memory for a while, I thought it would be fun to write the first of several anecdotes concerning my late grandmother’s cooking ability—or lack of it. Forget those wild rumors you hear about all grandmothers being good cooks, because my grandmother definitely was not, but she did have a good sense of humor about it. She was always the first to say that she was a lousy cook and that she should not be permitted in the kitchen.

One often told story concerning Grandma’s total lack of culinary expertise was the time that my sister, Lori, and her husband, Rick, visited Grandma shortly after their marriage. My sister warned her husband, “If she offers food, say no! Don’t eat anything!” But, against her advice, Rick accepted one of Grandma’s infamous hard-as-steel rectangular icebox cookies, apparently prepared with equal parts of flour and Portland cement. When he clamped one between his teeth, he finally understood what it must be like to bite into a piece of floor tile. The only way that he was able to conquer it was to soak it in the mud-like coffee that had been on the stove for ten hours.

When Grandma offered seconds of the concrete cookie slabs, Rick said, “It’s tempting, but no thanks.”

Lori was not given that option. She had declined to have one on the first go around, but this time she was ordered to “Eat it!” My brother-in-law thought, this woman is a sadist!

While Grandma returned to the stove to fetch the coffee pot, Lori proceeded to slip the cookie under the table and pass it to Rick, who, for lack of a better place to hide it, stuck it in the front pocket of his shirt. When Grandma topped off his cup of tar, she noticed the weighty pocket. “You got a cookie in your pocket.”

“Yeah, well, I liked ‘em so much I thought I’d have one for the road—hope you don’t mind.”

Never before had Grandma experienced such an honor. “Well, in that case, I’ll send along a few more!”

I was afraid of that.

After they concluded their visit, Rick pulled over near the city park and pitched the cookies. He always swore that one struck the band shell and cracked the stucco. My sister was more worried about the possibility of some poor animal stumbling upon the rock-hard cookies, trying to bite into them, and losing half of its teeth.

Subsequent visits to Grandma’s always resulted in Rick having to choke down at least one of his “favorite” cookies. The rest of the batch was always sent home with him, because Grandma knew how much he enjoyed them. My good-hearted brother-in-law could never bring himself to tell her the truth. Several years later, we all learned that Grandma knew all along that he hated the cookies, but she couldn’t resist seeing the look on his face whenever she hauled out another monstrous batch prepared especially for him. Yep, Grandma was quite the prankster.

Yesterday, I was still in the mood to use the outdoor grill (the novelty of using it hasn’t worn off yet), so I made another fantastic chicken dish. It was also the first day this year that the weather was perfect for dining alfresco—lots of sunshine and temperatures in the middle sixties. I know, some of ya’ll in the South probably think sixty-five degrees is too cold to eat outdoors, but believe me, after our horrible Minnesota winter this year, yesterday felt downright hot.

I fixed a really tasty dish called “Thai Cilantro BBQ Chicken” that I found on the Website, GroupRecipes.com. The recipe calls for whole chicken legs (the drumstick and the thigh), but I used a few wings, too. This dish was absolutely delicious, so I hope you will check it out. I served it with rice and a simple salad—what could be better? Oh, and by the way, that RecipeTips.com recipe, “Grilled Chicken with Sautéed Vegetables over Pasta,” that I made the other day was fantastic, and I’ll definitely be making it again.

You can count on one finger the number of really nice days we’ve had in southern Minnesota during this early spring season (that was the day last week when I used the grill for the first time this year), so I still have a bad case of spring fever. Yesterday, we dodged another snowstorm—we just got cold rain. (The snow stayed to the north—they can have it!) The weather this morning was rather bleak—dark, damp, and depressing—but this afternoon the sun reappeared, so now it seems to be a good day for my second round of outdoor grilling, although it is a bit on the cool side.

I found another easy-to-make but intriguing grilled chicken recipe on RecipeTips.com called, “Grilled Chicken with Sautéed Vegetables over Pasta,” and I’m anxious to try it. No, the name of the recipe is not so intriguing but the preparation is: A mixture of tarragon, parsley, garlic, and lemon is shoved under the skin of the chicken pieces prior to grilling, which sounds good to me. The chicken is served with sautéed vegetables and pasta, and the whole thing is sprinkled with feta cheese. The sautéed vegetable medley includes several of my favorites—bell peppers, carrots, onions, and snap peas. I’ll probably put some extra bell peppers on the grill because I love grilled peppers with just about anything.

I have on hand, all of the ingredients that the recipe calls for except the fresh tarragon and the feta cheese. Both ingredients add so much flavor to foods that I don’t think that I want to omit them, so it looks like I’ll be running to the store. I could use a few more bell peppers anyway.

While I was visiting the RecipeTips.com site (yes, it is one of my favorites), I noticed that they are featuring a promotion by Char-Broil for a number of grill giveaways during the summer. The only requirement for entering is that you must submit one of your own recipes to qualify. One of the prizes is Char-Broil’s Quantum Infrared Gas Grill, which I saw recently at Lowe’s and decided that it would be the ultimate in outdoor grilling. Since you can enter the contest as often as you wish, and the winners are chosen at random, I’ve decided that submitting a few zillion recipes might increase my chances to get my dream grill. Anyway, we’ll see what happens—and I’ll let you know if tonight’s grilled chicken recipe from RecipeTips is as good as it looks.