Grilled Chicken and Whole Grain Pilaf

Dinners for summer time seem to work best when we have simple things going on. Sometimes I can just be satisfied with nothing but corn on the cob, and why not? It's amazing!

We don't really grill too much, mostly because meat is expensive, and it doesn't seem to stretch as far as other things can and do. Still, I like to grill food...but today when I grilled this Thai peanut chicken, it decided to start raining so we actually cooked on the cast iron griddle--stove top style.

We just got some meat from our friends' amazing Amish meat market, "Heflings Amish Farm Market", where you will find great high quality meats as good prices (please pay them a visit, if you live in Greater Detroit Area). I ran out of freezer baggies like a total dunce, and so the leftover chicken breast that I couldn't bag up as individual breasts, I decided to cut, marinate and grill.


I started by cutting the double breasts in half, and then slicing into them somewhere in the middle on the side, to cut them in half thickness. Hefling's always has HUGE chicken breasts, and no one person could eat all that try as they might..ok, well maybe my teenage son could. Growing boy and all...

I mixed up a marinade using the leftovers of a bottle of Peanut Sauce...I poured in water to fill the bottle, gave it a good shake, and poured it over the chicken along with some oriental five spices (a spice blend), lemon grass, onion powder, garlic powder, and some teriyaki. I let that marinade while I prepped the rice pilaf.

The rice pilaf was started by melting 2T of butter in a large shallow pot, and saulting some minced onions, garlic and carrots in it, until lightly browned. I also added some fresh ginger. I then added 1 c. of brown rice, 1/2c. of wild rice, and another 1/2c. of wheat berries. I saulted these for about 2 minutes, and then poured on 4.25 cups of water with some chicken stock mix (also available from Heflings, by the way).



I brought it to a boil, then turned it down to a simmer, and covered it tightly, allowing it to simmer until all the water was gone and the grains were nice and soft but not mush. :-)

I preheated the griddle (since it was raining on my barbeque), and began to grill up the chicken on the griddle. Having that chicken cut in half also helped them to cook more evenly on the griddle. Raw in the middle steak = good, raw in the middle chicken = bad.