Thunderstorm Grilled Chicken

Take a look! Grilled Chicken Cutlets with Lemon, Black Pepper and Arugula-Tomato Salad from Bobby Flay's Grilling for Life, page 120. This is an easy mid-week meal, so give this a try sometime on a Wednesday or Thursday. When I got home from work, I first pounded the chicken. I put regular boneless chicken breasts between two sheets of wax paper and hit it a hundred times with a mallet. This is a good stress relieving exercise after just getting home from work! The pounding flattened out the chicken into thin cutlets which were great later for quick grilling. Following Bobby's instructions, I marinated the cutlets with chopped shallots, lemon juice, olive oil, lots of ground pepper and I threw in some red wine vinegar. I put the cutlets in the mixture, then turned them over to insure they were coated and put them in the fridge. Then I watched the first part of the first NCAA game. After about an hour in the marinade, I took the chicken to the grill and put them over flames. I turned the cutlets after only a couple of minutes. I wanted that high heat to sear the meat and get those great grill marks, but then I moved the chicken to a cooler part of the grill to allow some indirect heat to cook the chicken through. This technique produces a crispy outside, but keeps the inside tender and juicy. It is easy to over grill a thin piece of chicken. If you over grill you end up with a dry piece of leather. Preparing the salad took just a few minutes as the chicken finished off. The salad is just lettuce, sliced tomato and shaved parmesan cheese with olive oil and red wine vinegar over the top. The whole meal - from pounding to plate took less time than it took Butler to upset Syracuse. My broken bracket suffers more busting. 


If you have not done so already, check out the lower right side of this page. There you will find all the great Bobby Flay grill books, used here on Bobby Flay Everyday! Pick up a couple of these books and follow along. I will always give you the book and page reference for every grill feast. And if you purchase through this blog site, you get a discount from Amazon. 


Weather Report. Springtime in Tennessee - which means noisy weather!

Cold air and warm air do not play well together. The warm air had settled in over the past several days, so when some colder air came sweeping through at grill time, a battle ensued. The warm air is lighter (think of a hot air balloon rising when heat is added into the bottom of the balloon), so when the thicker, colder air approaches, the warm air rises and gets out of the way, which allows the cold air to just slide in underneath. But the rising warm air forms vertical clouds as it is pushed upward and this produces thunderstorms. The line of thunderstorms, as you can see in the photo, is just the rising air on the leading edge of the oncoming cold air. This time of year, its not summer (warm air), but winter (cold air) is not quite over, so the warm and cold shift back and forth jockeying for position like armies across a battle line. This is why the spring across America is thunderstorm and tornado season. The United States is not so far north that it is always cold and not so far south that it is always warm - we are in the middle - between two armies. The thunderstorm and tornados are just collateral damage in the war between warm and cold air. This makes it difficult, but not impossible to grill.

                       

The storm hit just about the time I was firing up the grill. Big drops (like the ones splashing here) means there is more violent turbulence up in the thunderstorm, because the drops get thrown together before they get flushed out the bottom of the cloud. The storm begins with that rising warm air - but what goes up, must come down. Like a fountain, the air and water drops eventually stop going up and start coming back down. When they do, they come down hard and fast. That is also why it gets suddenly cooler under a thunderstorm. The air and the drops that are striking the ground have come from 25 or 30 thousand feet up - and it is always below freezing up that high. 


The good news is that lines of thunderstorms pass on leaving behind, cool, clean, fresh air - great grilling weather. Of course, I think every weather is great grilling weather!
Paul