PB Chicken Marinade

The rest of this week looks like it is going to be great weather for BBQing, so today I am posting my peanut butter chicken marinade recipe. It would be a bit blasphemous to call this a Thai peanut sauce, although that is what the recipe did evolve from. It's one of those things where there are a number of people in my life that are intimidated by "foreign" food, but if I westernize things enough and then just rename them something safe like peanut butter chicken, then they are a go.

I make this recipe different ways depending on the season. In winter, it becomes a frying pan meal, where I increase the amount of sauce and onions, and then serve it over rice. I can't even begin to describe how filling and satisfying it is in the winter to eat a meal that is so filled with carbs (rice) and protein (chicken AND peanut butter). Once I started making it this way I noticed that when the weather got very cold, my body actually craved it as a bulk up strategy.

Anyway, back to the summer preparation, using it as a marinade for chicken kabobs. I'm sure many of you will echo the sentiment that BBQ chicken runs a high risk of either being under cooked (pink and scary!) or so dried out that it becomes unappealing. I find these kabobs to be the solution to both issues. It is hard to undercook the chicken when it is cubed and kabobbed because unlike breasts, they are a uniform thickness, and have a nice hot metal skewer running through the middle. Drying them out also becomes less of an issue because the peanut butter marinate is nice and oily, and prevents the chicken from drying out.

PB Chicken Marinade (for two breasts worth, but can be adjusted up or down depending on how much flavouring you like - I also will cook some extra for dipping if people are into it):
1/4 onion, diced fine
1/2 cup crunchy peanut butter
2 tbsp ketchup
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp milk (can use coconut milk)
1/2 tsp hot sauce (adjust to taste)

Cut your chicken into nice even sized cubes. Combine marinade ingredients in a tupperware container, and throw the chicken cubes in. Use your hands to rub the marinade all over the chicken (it still has close to peanut butter consistency, so really, it is just smeared on). Sit it in the fridge for a few hours or however long you have. Skewer the chicken cubes and smear any extra marinate all over the kabobs (or increase the liquid components and cook it on a side burner as a dipping sauce, but make sure it gets good and hot for a while since it has been in contact with raw chicken).

Cook the skewers on the BBQ at about 400 degrees for about 5 minutes a side. To be safe, cut into one of the cubes to verify that it is not longer pink in the middle. You will know a side is cooked when it gets easy to pull it off of the grill because cooked meat covered in peanut oils will come off easily, whereas raw meat will still stick.