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April 08, 2008

Iron Chef Berry RIdes Again

So last night I get a SMS from my wife that she's working a bit late and I should make dinner. After a bit of a thought and remembering that we had some vacuum-packed boneless-skinless chicken breasts in the fridge, and remembering that she had said a certain recipe looked good, I settled on chile-chicken skewers. Googling to see if I could find the recipe and check what I needed to fetch on the way home, I came across Laurie Johnson's blog entry on just this recipe.

It's pretty simple, and wonderfully tasty. I cut the chicken (three breasts worth; must have been a mutant chicken) into chunks and marinated it with a bit of brown sugar, pimentón (spanish smoked paprika; substituted for chile powder) kosher salt, a bit of freshly gorund black pepper, and olive oil. Stir up well and set aside while the rest is prepared.

I set the rice cooker going, and made the cilantro-lime pesto. Three cloves of garlic, a handful of walnuts (because we don't have peanuts and I couldn't find my first choice, pinenuts) and half a pasilla pepper (since the store was out of anaheims). Buzz that in a "food processor fitted with the steel blade, or in a blender", add a bunch of cilantro and half a bunch of flat or Italian parsley, and drizzle in olive oil until the consistency is right. At this point I tasted it and corrected seasoning; it needed about half a teaspoon of salt to mute the bitter parsley taste and tranform it into bright herbal notes.

Scrape into a bowl, rinse the food processor work bowl and dump in the dishwasher.

At this point, pretty much everything was set. I peeled an onion, cut it into wedges and skewered it for grilling. About 15 minutes before the rice was done, I fired up the gas grill, and while it was heating I skewered the chicken chunks, now a nice reddish color from the pimentón, and when the grill was hot grilled them and the onions for about ten minutes, turning about every 2-3 minutes.

For plating, I chose two small fish-shaped plates (because they were clean and matched!), filled a small rice bowl with rice and inverted it onto the tail end of the fish. I put a heaping tablespoon of the cilantro pesto on the head end, spread it out a bit and put four chunks of chicken on, flanked by two wedges of the grilled onion. A parsley leaf on the rice mound completed it, and I called Alene for dinner.

It was very tasty, the herbal pesto complemented the smoky pimentón well, and the chicken was tender.

This would make a nice quick summer dinner, since the only appliances I used were the food processor, rice cooker and outdoor gas grill. No oven or stove action to heat up the house.

I recommend a nice pinot grigio with this. A light salad would work too.

I recommend NOT watching a TiVo'd episode of Dirty Jobs where Mike learns to sex chicks, since it's not nearly as much fun as it sounds. It's pretty gross, actually.

(Next time I do something like this I'll take a picture before serving. Of the plate, not the chicks.)

Posted by Berry at April 8, 2008 02:30 PM

Comments

Posted by: Laurie at April 11, 2008 07:19 AM

Posted by: Berry at April 11, 2008 12:58 PM

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