My niece and nephew have been in town for a month and their mother, my sister, came to join them for the past week. As always, the time sped by way too quickly – especially now that we both have kids to race around after there is hardly any time to actually talk between cleaning mud off of dirty boys (they found and emptied my mud buckets…) and protecting kids from barking dogs (not my kid, if he weren’t used to it by now…) and … and …. Ah well.
So yesterday my sister and her kids came over for lunch…what was I going to make? You see, to be blunt, they like sweet and salty processed foods – like much of the rest of North America – and Jack and I don’t eat that way. Hot dogs and cakes would be super easy to make unwrap and warm up but that just doesn’t float my boat so I decided bbq chicken was the way to go.
I marinated the pieces of chicken in a mixture of….
…approximately 1/3 cup olive oil
…somewhere around 1/4 cup maple syrup, though I’m thinking it may have been a bit less
…a tablespoon or 2 of apple cider vinegar
…probably about the same amount of coconut aminos
…the rest of my paprika, was probably close to a tablespoon
…about a tablespoon of Korean ground chilli – adds color and flavor but not too spicy for the little mouths
…turmeric, maybe about a teaspoon
…garlic powder, I was generous
…oregano, maybe 2 teaspoons
…a few shots, maybe closer to 6, of Franks Red Hot Sauce.
I think that was it. I made sure the chicken pieces were soaked and coated and then let it sit, covered in the fridge, for 4 hours.
The plan was to barbecue them but something happened and my darn barbecue just wouldn’t start (no clicky, clicky noise at all when we pushed the starter) so we oven roasted them for about 45 minutes.
Mmmmm. Mmmmm. I made tons, thinking we’d have loads of leftovers, and we have 3 small pieces left. The olive oil crisped up the skin, the spices gave it some gorgeous colour, and the maple syrup made it nice and sweet for my sister’s family’s tastes and made me feel better about having sweet food for mine.
The snacks we had were chips – made in olive oil with a bit of sea salt, and crudités with a quickly improvised dip made of …
…the rest of a container of greek yogourt (goat)
…the squirts from 1/2 a lemon
…oregano, teaspoonish
…ground pepper
…salt
For dessert there were mango ice thingies on a stick, made only of mango.
So we had a yummy picnic treat with food I felt good about serving.
