Margarita Chicken

This is going to be one of those years with my boys. We've already had way too many conversations with their teachers and Abbott's testing my laundry abilities by wearing the same outfit everyday for a month! Abbott wants to be a doctor so my parents bought him a set of scrubs for his birthday. He wants to wear them everyday so I have to sneak into his room to launder the outfit while he sleeps! This is my doctor... ...or as a girl in his class calls him, "nurse boy"! Being a mom is so stressful but thankfully my wonderful sister-in-law understands, she shared this hilarious video last week...


This video does a pretty good job of summing up my life! It's crazy!
However, the upside of Abbott's determination to wear his doctor outfit everyday is that I don't have to buy him a Halloween costume! Have you ever noticed that something weird happens on Halloween? I'm not talking ghosts and goblins... I'm talking about the weather! It feels like summer right up until Halloween blows in and it's frigid every day after! I won't be fooled this year though! It may have been 80 degrees today but I am on to you Halloween... I know this is the last week of warm weather so I wanted to slip one more summery recipe in before it's all soups and spiced breads!

Ingredients
5 boneless skinless chicken breast halves
1 can (10 ounces) frozen non-alcoholic margarita mix, thawed (I used Bacardi)
3 tablespoons lime juice
3 garlic cloves, minced
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

Directions
In a small bowl, combine the margarita mix, lime juice and garlic. Pour 1 1/4 cup marinade into a large resealable plastic bag. Add the chicken; seal bag and turn to coat. Refrigerate for 4 hours. Rotate half way through marinading. Cover and refrigerate remaining marinade.
Drain and discard marinade, sprinkle chicken with salt and pepper, and grill or saute the chicken to cook. As the chicken cooks baste it with the the remaining marinade (that you covered and saved in your fridge).

Country Bob's Marinade

I got a new grill from Walmart and I LOVE IT! The pan sets over two stove burners so I can easily make 8 pancakes (on the griddle side) or lots of meat (on the grill side). The best part is that it was only $20 and washes up easily in the dishwasher!! You see, anything I grill tastes like lighter fluid (my family prefers I never grill) so to be able to cook on my stove and have those beautiful grill lines... it's a miracle! I wanted to cook some chicken and steaks so I went to go look at the marinades and saw Country Bob's All Purpose Sauce, I looked on the back and sure enough there was a marinade recipe! We've never tried Country Bob's before and honestly it isn't something I would use often but it was nice for a change, it's like a mix of A1 and BBQ sauce. So yeah, the grill pan ended up being a better find than this marinade, but that's ok... not every recipe is a winner.

Ingredients
13 ounce bottle of Country Bob's All Purpose Sauce
3 cloves of garlic, minced
Salt and Pepper

Directions
Place your meat (we used chicken breasts and thinly sliced sirloin), garlic, salt, pepper, and Country Bob's sauce in an airtight container or bag and marinade for 6 hours or overnight. Grill and enjoy.

Here's my grill pan in action, I really do love it!!

Asian Meat Marinade

I am addicted to ginger and garlic, so it's no surprise that I like this marinade. Before Chad gave us our steak lesson I used to marinate our steaks and chicken in this marinade. I know I am breaking some sort of cross-contamination rule but I put the steaks and chicken in the same bag to marinate and then grill the meat. It makes it easier because we can't have steak in this house without cooking chicken as well (for the non-steak eaters). Justin's lucky I cater to dietary requests at all... he's been ornery lately, embarrassing our children every chance he gets. We were in the diaper isle at Walmart and Abbott secretly pointed and giggled at the "Boudreaux's Butt Paste" and Justin loudly announces "What's wrong Abbott, you don't like butt paste? I love butt paste". It was funny to see Abbott fast and furiously try to hush his father. Poor Abbott...

Ingredients

1/2 cup soy sauce
1 tablespoon worcestershire sauce
2 tablespoons sugar
2 tablespoons vinegar
1 clove garlic minced
1 teaspoon fresh ginger minced

Directions
Mix ingredients together in a Ziploc bag and marinate meat for 1-8 hours in the refrigerator prior to cooking meat.

Huli-Huli Chicken

**Update- Holly from Hawaii left an excellent comment for this post giving some great tips for making this chicken! I wanted to call this recipe “Huli-Huli Chicken (fail)” but I thought that was a bit too harsh. This recipe isn’t inedible or terrible, it just wasn’t that great and the flavors resembled my Chicken KaChow… but KaChow is much better! I got the recipe from Ezra Pound Cake and it looked so good on the website but we won't make it again, hence the “fail”. Justin doesn’t understand why I would even post a disappointing recipe, but to me this blog is as much about my cooking adventures as it is about recipes. Is every recipe I try a winner? No, not even close! So on night’s like tonight when we all try to eat something that didn’t turn out very good it makes us appreciate the “good recipe” nights even more!

Ingredients
1 chicken, quartered (I used 4 chicken breasts)
1/2 cup shoyu or soy sauce
1/2 cup pureed pineapple chunks
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
1/4 cup ketchup
1/8 cup rice vinegar
1 finger ginger, finely grated
2-3 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Directions
In a medium bowl combine the soy sauce, pineapple, brown sugar, ketchup, rice vinegar, ginger, garlic and Worcestershire. Pour half the mixture into a large resealable plastic bag with the chicken. Set aside remaining marinade for mopping chicken during cooking. Refrigerate chicken for 30 minutes. Ezra's original recipe suggests that the chicken be smoked but it was too cold outside so I baked my chicken in the leftover marinade at 400 degrees for 30-45 minutes.

Brown Sugar Chicken

I hate spring colds and since I’ve been a teacher I have gotten one every year, bluh! I am going on two weeks with this cold and it has really kicked my booty; sinus infection, ear infections, strep throat… I am literally falling apart and have a pile of kleenexes beside me to prove it! I love making crock-pot dinners when I am sick because they are so simple and usually don’t involve me touching/infecting my family’s food. I was thrilled when I saw this recipe on A Year Of Crockpotting Blog, it only took a couple minutes to throw together and was very flavorful!

Ingredients
12 boneless, skinless chicken thighs, or 6 boneless, skinless breast halves
1 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup lemon-lime soda
2/3 cup white vinegar
3 cloves smashed and chopped garlic
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon ground black pepper

Directions
Use a 5-6 quart crockpot for this recipe. Plop the chicken into your crockpot. Cover with the brown sugar, pepper, chopped garlic, and soy sauce. Add the vinegar, and pour in the soda. It will bubble! Cover and cook on low for 6-9 hours, or on high for 4-5. The chicken is done when it is cooked through and has reached desired consistency. The longer you cook it, the more tender it will be. Serve over a bowl of white rice with a ladle full of the broth.

Cilantro Lime Chicken

Mmm… this chicken was good! It was spicy so it’s unusual that I would like it but I ate twice my normal portion of chicken and had no room for a side! In case you haven’t noticed I love trying marinades but because this had lime juice I knew the chicken couldn’t be in this marinade longer than a couple hours. So I made the marinade in a ziploc the night before and added the chicken to the ziploc only 2 hours before cooking, but man-o-man was this flavorful! I think the marinade sitting overnight really caused the flavors to fuse. Besides fanatically trying new marinades lately I’ve also been fixated on flattening my chicken breasts and cooking them stovetop on high heat. I love the caramelized color it gives the chicken and it’s done and ready to serve in 10 minutes (which is a dream come true for a working mom)!

Ingredients
4 chicken breasts
2 teaspoons grated lime peel
1/4 cup lime juice
1/4 cup olive oil
2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro
1 tablespoon sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons of diced jalapeno (I use jarred jalapenos)
1 minced garlic clove

Directions
To make the marinade combine all ingredients except chicken in a ziploc bag or dish. Let the marinade rest in the fridge overnight. In-between pieces of plastic wrap place each chicken breast and gently pound with flat side of meat mallet or rolling pin until about 1/4 inch thick. Add chicken to marinade; turn to coat completely, refrigerate for 1-2 hours. Remove the chicken from the marinade and cook on high heat in a skillet for 5 minutes on each side or until cooked through (resist the urge to flip the chicken for 5 minutes though so you get a good caramelized color). While cooking I sprinkled each side with a little salt and pepper.

Lemon Honey Garlic Chicken

We love overnight marinades! When you get home late from work it’s great to be able to pull marinated chicken out of the fridge and have it cooked and on the table in 20 minutes. This is the first time we’ve tried this particular marinade and I have to admit it wasn’t my favorite. After cooking it didn’t have a lot of taste so we poured some honey over the top to give it some extra flavor.

Ingredients
4 chicken breasts
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup honey
3 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
2 garlic cloves, minced

Directions
In a bowl or resealable plastic bag, combine lemon juice, honey, Worcestershire sauce, garlic and chicken. Refrigerate 2 to 24 hours. Remove the chicken from marinade and cook on high heat in a skillet, 5 minutes on each side until cooked. At this point we tasted ours and poured an additional 1/4 cup honey on the chicken and cooked for an additional 2 minutes for the honey to glaze.

I don’t want to cook tomorrow/ Overnight Chicken Marinade

Hey, it was called
“Unbelievable Chicken” on Allrecipes.com
so for lack of a better name this is what I call it, deal with it! This chicken is another one of those hard to explain flavors. I would say it resembles a General Tso’s Chicken. It is sweet with a hint of tangy ;-)

Ingredients
4 chicken breasts
1/4 cup cider vinegar
3 tablespoons mustard
3 minced cloves garlic
1 lime, juiced
1/2 lemon, juiced
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
6 tablespoons olive oil

Directions
In a large bowl, mix the cider vinegar, mustard, garlic, lime juice, lemon juice, brown sugar, salt, and pepper. Whisk in the olive oil. Just to prepare you the smell of the vinegar will really put you off, it completely fills my kitchen and disgusts me. You can’t taste it in the end product though. Cut the chicken into strips or chucks and place in the mixture. Cover, and marinate 8 hours, or overnight. I cook my chicken stovetop on high heat but I bet it’s delicious grilled!

Teriyaki Chicken

There’s something delicious about chicken and rice! Funny story... I actually tried making a ginger dipping sauce to go with this but Justin distracted me while I was cooking and I put A1 in the sauce instead of soy sauce! Yeah, so the sauce turned out to be a flop. This chicken was excellent though and lucky for us there was lots of extra teriyaki sauce in the pan that we used over our rice!

Ingredients
3 chicken breasts
3/4 cup sugar
3/4 cup soy sauce
1 tablespoon grated fresh ginger
2 cloves pressed garlic

Directions
Rinse chicken halves, and pat dry with paper towels. Cut the chicken into chunks and put in a baking dish. In a medium mixing bowl, combine sugar, soy sauce, grated ginger and garlic. Warm the mixture in the microwave (the sugar will easily mix in if it’s warm) and mix well. Pour mixture over chicken, cover, and refrigerate for at least 3 hours. Bake chicken uncovered at 375 degrees for 30 minutes. When it’s done cut into smaller pieces and serve over white rice (be sure to spoon some of the sauce over the chicken and rice).

Chicken KaChow

This recipe is a modified version on “Bou’s Chicken” found on allrecipes.com. However, since I modified it (and we don’t know a single “Bou”) I told the boys they need to think up a new name for this chicken; which is easier said than done! This chicken isn’t a BBQ, not Chinese, not even reminiscent of sloppy joe. I tried explaining the sauce to my parents and found it was easier just to make up a jar for them to take home then explain it. It is a delicious tangy sauce that the boys have named “Chicken KaChow”, lol!

Ingredients
3-4 Chicken Breast (cut into bite sized chunks)
1/4 cup prepared mustard
1/4 cup white sugar
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup distilled white vinegar
1 cup ketchup
2 tablespoons pressed fresh garlic
2 tablespoons pressed fresh ginger
1 cup water

Directions
In a medium pot with a lid, whisk together mustard, sugar, soy sauce, ginger, garlic, white vinegar, ketchup and water in the order listed. Bring the sauce to a boil.

Add the chicken pieces, and turn down the heat. Place the lid slightly ajar on the pot. Simmer for approximately 15 minutes, or till the chicken is no longer pink.