Few things in summer feel as good as getting out, taking advantage of a sunny day, and firing up the grill to enjoy an amazing meal you may not be able to make all year round. You’ve gotta take advantage of the weather while you can, and few things say grilling quite like getting the chance to grill up some skewers of perfectly marinated meats and your favorite veggies. But just like summer isn’t complete without a great grilling recipe, no skewer is complete without something equally delicious to serve it with, so this recipe also includes an amazingly seasoned rice to go with them and provides a new dinner favorite recipe next time you’re in need.
We’ll start with the best part of this recipe, the skewers themselves, and whether you call them skewers, kebabs, kabobs or anything in between, I just call these “delicious”. These are nice and simple, an assortment of Halal chicken thighs, yellow onion, with orange and yellow bell pepper chunks. These have the perfect mix of juicy meaty goodness with flavorful veggies that grill up to be tender with just a little bit of satisfying crunch. When you’re chopping your yellow onions, set half of one aside for later when you use it to make the rice.
This recipe uses a traditional Middle Eastern yogurt-based marinade with a few other herbs and spices mixed in to give the chicken a delicious tangy flavor. It also uses both lemon juice and lemon zest, and the citrus flavor they bring really comes through in the final product in a good way. It adds a freshness to the skewers that compliments each individual flavor and makes these the perfect dinner recipe that refreshes during the warmer weather. The chicken will only need to marinate in this for a few hours, any more than that and the yogurt and citrus can over-tenderize the meat and leave it too soft, so this is a great marinade to start in the morning and it’ll be perfect to make for dinner the same day.
But we aren’t content with just providing tasty skewers, I told you earlier this is also a recipe for tasty rice to go with these tasty skewers, and now here we are to round out this very tasty recipe! It’s a mix of basmati rice with a few seasonings like cloves, pepper, and cinnamon sticks. But other than the rice, the other key ingredient is the fried yellow onion that starts this recipe. When you make yours, do yourself a favor and start making it in a large pot because as you add ingredients, particularly the rice and Halal chicken broth, you’ll need the extra space. Save yourself the trouble of starting in a pan and needing to transfer to a larger pot halfway through, that’s a piece of free advice from someone who started this recipe in a pan that was too shallow. Oops!
But I digress, after letting everything boil together and the rice has absorbed the broth and been infused with the other great flavors and the turmeric turns it a beautiful golden color just begging to be eaten, now you’re all set to enjoy this with your skewers!
This recipe provides the complete package for a great dinner, both in terms of mix of flavors all coming together and for providing plenty of skewers to be served with flavorful rice and leave you enough coming back for seconds. That’s it for this recipe, or recipes in this case, that are both simple and come together to make an exceptional Halal dinner for you and anybody else you might be serving. We hope to see you next week with another Halal recipe, but until then you’ll have to enjoy this one.
