The Grilled Life …. Chicken in an Asian inspired chilli marinate

Over the past few days I have realised that one of the best cooking equipments to have at home for a lazy person or for a busy person or for someone intimidated by cooking or for the health conscious or for someone who likes variety in food is the OTG or oven toaster grill.

I have had loads of fun with our new OTG. So far I have just grilled in it. And toasted. I am yet to break my mental block and bake though many of you have been kind enough to send me some easy recipes for breads and cakes. But there’s no stopping me when it comes to grilling.

Take this dish for example. I had a bad bad cold the other day. The sort where your shoulders and chest ache when you sneeze. We went to Dr Miranda who sent me home with some lovely praline chocolates that her son had made. Meeting Dr M usually makes me feel better.

Came home. Realised that I needed something nice to eat. I took out some chicken drumsticks from the fridge. Thawed them in the micro and made this Asian styled grill.

The recipe doesn’t matter. The ingredients don’t matter. Nor do the proportions or the measurements. The idea of writing this post is just to show how quick and easy it was. I’ll try to put down what I did and you will do the recipe injustice if you don’t take your own creative leaps.

Recipe:

Marinate:

• Pound 4 cloves of garlic and 2, 3 chopped red bird’s eye chillies in a mortar and pestle or in a blender. This gives a nice warm kick to the dish.
• Add 1 teaspoon each of teriyaki (Japanese sweet soy) sauce, Sriracha (Thai red chilli) sauce, Thai fish sauce (for salt) & honey (to temper the salt) to the chilli & garlic mix and gently mix it

Prep:

• Slash the chicken with a knife. That way the marinate will go deep into the meat and the flavours will spread evenly
• Gently spread the marinate with a spoon over the chicken. I use my hands but keep your fingers away from your eyes if you do so
• Oil the surface of your baking tray. Put an aluminium foil on it. Place the marinated chicken on this. Place some chopped onion bulbs between the drumsticks.
• Let it marinate for at least half an hour. I got just ten minutes that day

Grill:

• Preheat the oven for ten minutes at 200 d Celsius
• Put the tray of marinated chicken into the oven
• Keep it in the oven for 30 minutes at 200 d Celsius
• After 30 minutes the oven will turn off.
• Keep the tray in the oven for another 5 minutes. Garnish with some chopped pepper/ capsicum, spring onion
• Take out the tray and hold it with some sort of cloth pads as the tray will be very hot
• That’s it. Cooked quite evenly and the meat was fairly juicy

I had it with a Mama’s Tom Yum noodles. The only noodles premix that I really like. Bangkok, KL, Singapore, Calcutta, Melbourne, Sydney … I would stock these wherever I went. Thankfully found them at the Palladium at Lower Parel recently.

Now off to put in some treadmill time before a dinner of butter pepper garlic squids tossed in port with some goat cheese and wurst that @Rao_v sent from Amsterdam on the side and Candies bread rolls. Sounds good? Perhaps some single malt with it and Chef Lenny’s home made liquor to end it.