Lessons learned:
- When buying chicken thighs, multiply the number of people you'll be serving by how many pounds of meat you think each of them might want to eat. Then, add at least another half pound to that.
- Plain macadamia nuts = "why do people get excited about these?" Macadamia nuts in tropical rice salad = very exciting!
- Brown rice was MADE for this salad.
The main question was, were we really going to go ahead and grill all 2.5 pounds of chicken I'd bought, or should I freeze half of it? We decided just to go for it... whatever we didn't eat would keep for lunch the next day.
Let me back up. We haven't made this in a while because of my no-meat-in-dinner experiment, but before that, grilled chicken thighs was one of our very favorite meals. My mom used to make this amazing chicken when I was a kid, and I didn't realize that the reason it was so delicious was mainly because it was all dark thigh meat! All she would do was make a recipe of Good Seasons Italian dressing, dump it in a bag with some chicken thighs, and bake. SO good. Most chicken recipes I see call for white meat -- I suppose because it's healthier -- so for a while, that's all I bought. But forget that. Thigh meat is more delicious and less expensive. Once that light bulb went off, I've never gone back.
Anyway, I don't ever really make the same marinade twice; I always just start with sort of a general theme or inspiration, see what I have on hand that seems to fit with that, and throw everything in a bowl haphazardly. Definitely no measurements. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. Last night, though... um, yeah, you might say it worked. You might say it totally rocked that chicken, and you would be correct. You might also say it's a good thing that nobody else came over wanting any chicken after all, and that would be correct as well.
When I stopped cooking with meat, I wasn't really sure where or how long the experiment would go; I mainly wanted to see if it was possible, and I wanted to adjust the extent to which we (I) crave meat. I'd say on both scores, it's been more successful than I anticipated, with the exception being that we eat bacon probably once every couple of weeks. But two things happened yesterday that made me come to a decision about how far to take this.
First, I got a rare chance to go to the library by myself, where I naturally made my way to the cookbook section. I discovered that the vegetarian cookbooks are relegated to the "health food" section, and are mostly filled with recipes that my family and I are just never going to be excited about eating. I know that the library's selection isn't necessarily representative of everything that's out there, but it made me a little sad to realize that so many of the wonderful recipes in the majority of other cookbooks were no longer conducive to my diet.
Second, it's been a long time since I've seen my kids so focused on a meal. As soon as they heard we were having chicken -- I mentioned it while I was cooking -- neither of them could stop talking about it and asking for it. Chicken has always been one of the few things Sophie actually eats consistently, so cutting that out was a significant sacrifice (although we have mostly made up for it with Quorn). After she ate all of her chicken, she came over to our plates to get more. Ben, who is normally up and down during dinner, just sat there very quietly for several minutes on end, just eating and enjoying. Now, I don't think the kids are deprived. If I wanted to keep meat completely out of our dinners, they would be fine, as they have been since the beginning. But seeing them eat like that just made me so happy.
So I think that sometime soon, I'm going to designate just one day a week where I make meat for dinner. Maybe Saturday or Sunday, and it can be a special meal. That way I can still try out delicious-sounding recipes for carnivores from time to time, and I think it would make my family a lot more excited about dinner -- always a good thing. And to balance, I might also (more discreetly) designate one night a week as vegan.
Back to last night's divine chicken: unfortunately, as I said, I don't measure, but I'm going to attempt to reproduce what I did for the sauce here, because I'd like to be able to do it again next time. If you make this, I strongly suggest that you read the amounts below as mere guidelines, and just put in what feels right to you. Also, my husband is the grillmaster at our house and his technique is similarly ad-hoc, so keep that in mind.
The rice salad was really wonderful, too; I will address that in the next post.
Grilled Peanut Chicken
2.5 pounds chicken thighs (I used to spend a lot of time trimming the fat off, but now I don't bother... most of it melts off on the grill anyway, and you can always cut off whatever you want when you're eating)
3/4 cup creamy peanut butter
3 tablespoons rice vinegar
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 teaspoons garlic powder
1 tablespoon powdered ginger
2 tablespoons orange juice
Put the chicken thighs in a large marinating bag. Mix up the remaining ingredients in a bowl and pour it over the chicken in the bag, mixing it in evenly to coat all of the chicken. Let it sit for about an hour.
Preheat the (gas) grill on high. When it's ready, add the chicken and let it sear. My husband does a lot of flipping unless I give him explicit instructions not to; some people say to flip only once, but his method seems to work for him. He did lower the heat after a few minutes, and kept the meat covered when he wasn't flipping it. The thickest pieces were on the grill for about 15 minutes, with the thinner ones coming off a couple of minutes before that.
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