Grilled Lime Chicken

Tuesday's meal was a success! This is a delicious easy summer meal, it's light and tasty with the added bonus of not heating up your kitchen by cooking outside. Unfortunately for those of us in the lovely Seattle area the weather wasn't so summery yesterday, after a string of 3 glorious 65 degree days the weather gods felt they had given us enough hope to stick it out until July and reverted back to typical April weather. Grey and drizzling. By the way, where is this year going?!

Lucky for us we have a covered deck! Complete brilliance by the previous owners.

In the spirit of trying to be smarter about our meals throughout the week when I was planning dinners I tried to find recipes with the same ingredients, and this week it was cilantro in particular. We love love love the stuff but never end up using it all before it turns. My friend Jillian has had luck freezing it but I haven't tried it yet, but either way I'm sick of wasting food.

Grilled Lime Chicken
 Adapted from Beer Lime Grilled Chicken

Ingredients: 

• 1 lime, juiced ~2 tablespoons of lime juice
• 1 (12 fluid ounce) can light colored beer (I used PBR, for some odd reason it's what we had on hand)
• 1 teaspoon honey
• 6 garlic cloves minced
• 5 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro (approximately, this is if you really like cilantro, if you're only slightly a fan use less)
• salt and pepper
• 4 chicken breasts

Directions:

1.  In a bowl, mix the lime juice, beer, honey (I didn't have honey on hand so I substituted sugar), garlic, cilantro, salt and pepper until honey dissolves. Pour over chicken, cover and marinate for no less than 30 min.
   
2.  Preheat outdoor grill for  medium heat, lightly oil grate (Michael just uses Pam and it works well).
3. Remove chicken from marinade and place on grill. Make sure to get plenty of cilantro leaves on the chicken! 
4. Grill until tender and juices run clear, about 7 minutes per side. 

I pounded my chicken breasts down a bit, they were pretty thick. I only marinaded it for 30 min but I would definitely recommend a longer marinade, the chicken was good but not as flavorful as I would have liked and didn't make it to the center of the chicken. Next time I might play around with adding some teriyaki sauce to the marinade, we used it as a side dipping sauce and it tasted wonderful with the lime and cilantro flavors.

Overall a decent dish but not fabulous yet, I'll try it again making those changes and see how it goes. If you try it and make any of your own tweaks I'd love to hear about them!

What is your favorite grilled dish? Favorite marinade?