Chicken Shish… not just for drunks on their way home…

Now, I forgot to photograph this, so I apologise… but I picked up the following five items that were reduced:

Chicken pieces (free range of course – I DO live in Crouch End)

A bag of spinach

A nearly too-ripe avocado

Cayenne peppe (how can spices be reduced to clear I don’t know)

A lemon

Sour cream

Not wanting a curry and instead feeling like I wanted something hearty, healthy and tasty, I decided to go for the Turkish plate mix of a overly green salad, chicken shish and rice.

The salad, I added some tomatoes, bell peppers, spinach, spring onion and avocado to a bowl before dousing it in lemon, a tablespoon of oil and pepper. There’s something quite satisfying about almost kneading the dressing into the salad with your hands, get the food all over your fingers, that tactile relationship that I had with food before knives and forks were imposed on me.

For the chicken, I asked on twitter and facebook for advice on how to shish it up, but got the usual pithy responses about barbecuing it to within an inch of its former self, adding rat etc, and instead, had to try and remember those years I lived on Green Lanes, when a nice hearty chicken shish from a non-kebab shop was par for the course.

Into a bowl, I added:

3 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/4 teaspoon cumin
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne

Added the chicken pieces in and uses my tactile food-loving (clean) hands to cover everything in marinade. Leaving this for an hour and realising I couldn’t be bothered to fire up a barbecue, got the grill going. Deep pan covered with tin foil, the pieces all laid out individually (not on top of each other) and the grill fire up, they were under for 20 minutes in total, turned frequently.

Served up with a handful of rice, a lot of salad and a dab of raita (sour cream, lemon, chilli powder and cucumber), the chicken shish was tasty, hearty and surprisingly healthy, despite its reputation preceding it.