Last night on the way home from work I popped into Sainsburys to buy some groceries.  Having walked down the aisle I noticed that the BBQ charcoal was on offer and thought it’d be a good idea to throw some chicken on the grill today.  I love to make up my own tandoori chicken style marinade and grabbed the very basic ingredients (minus butter as I wanted it to be low fat) along with some peppers and veg to grill.

Normally my tandoori marinade consists of:

• 1 pot of low fat greek (or normal) yoghurt
• 2-3 tablespoons of garlic and ginger paste
• 1 tablespoon of fresh ground chillis
• 1/4 cup of melted butter (or ghee)
• 2-3 tablespoons of tandoori powder
• 1 tablespoon of garam masala
• 1 tablespoon of olive oil
• A little pepper
• The juice from 3-4 lemons
• A splash of tap water to the mix to make things a little more watery than creamy to soak the chicken thoroughly.

So as you can see below, this is the kind of mixture I go for.  There is a definate ‘gloop’ factor to the mix and if you finger off the sauce you’ll see that the chicken is well soaked.  Dip it back in after though because you want a bit of sauce when grilling.  I tend to use much bigger fillets of chicken normally, and cut gill slits into it before marinading so that it really soaks in.

The weather today was really, really grim.  A far cry from yesterday apparently when it was beautiful and I was in the office.  Still, I won’t be beaten by the British weather.  I sat by my window and after the first downpour I noticed the clouds were moving fast so I ran down, threw on the bag of self-lighting charcoal (you need to use a match so that’s a lie!) and off we go!

So here we are, the coals are hot and the food is cooking.  This is my slightly pensive face as I can see the skies are beginning to change again with rain clouds (very heavy) starting to build up.  April has always been called ‘April showers’ in the UK, and last year it was our warmest month (practically summer) so it was perhaps an irony that the British weather decided to go back to normal today when I wanted my food.

This is the very teasing and tempting view I had when cooking.  It taunted me the whole time and I decided to share it with you all.  See how the big piece on the left calls to you and says “EAT ME!!!!”?  I only got a small bag of charcoal so it took slightly longer than normal too.  All the while the precipitation gradually increased almost in time with the chicken.  In the distance, I could hear thunder.  Yay!

The chicken had literally about 2 mins left to cook and the rain started coming down, very gently at first but enough to make me get out the brolly.  The cooking finished and I ran into the house rather smug that I had beaten the British weather system once more.  As you can see I decided to wear my lucky clover t-shirt that I picked up in America during St Patricks day.  Worth every penny, to be sure to be sure!

Et voila!!!  Chicken a la Antikrish (slightly more cooked than I would have liked but had to run and get a brolly!) with chargrilled veg and low fat tortillas from Sainsburys.  Alex will be the first to tell you that you can make it a lot more authentic and from scratch, but if you wake up at 9am, think “hmmm I want some funky chicken” then all you do is throw that lot in a bowl and let the chicken marinade in it for a minimum of two hours.  And whilst I’d definately say the authentic tastes way better (Al’x mushroom curry is to die for) this still isn’t too bad.

Pukka!

GALLERY – Click below for larger images