menu planning recap: night two KABOBERY!

last night was a mother-smashing success, as i knew it would be. on the docket were chicken bacon kabobs and jasmine rice. the kabobs have a pineapple bbq glaze whose easy-to-delicious quotient is so small its an imaginary number (8i+449 to be exact...yes, it's negative easy).

would you too like to go down in a glaze of glory? read on.

we were first introduced to this meal while visiting ryan and raechel last may. it was so good that when we got home from the trip, i made it again 2 days later. and then promptly forgot about it until last week, while menu planning and saying to myself, "what the crap can i do with all my frozen breasts?" my first response to that question was obviously, "make out with jesse dukes in an igloo." and then i remembered the existence of these gems and i literally started giggling at my desk in glee because of all the delicious in our near future.

if you read raechel's blog too, you will see she just posted the recipe. i am 43% sure this was brought on by me writing her asking a question about it last week, and her realizing it didnt exist online yet so she said she would swiftly remedy that. and then i tweeted my meal plan picture and ryan saw it and demanded it for their famliy this week as well. i think that's how the story went. just telling you that so you know i dont actually copy her meal-for-meal like a nut, but instead we both remembered these together and revived them from the annals.

but all of the credit goes to raechel for this beast. i have seen the magazine version of this recipe and it's just okay. raechel made it 213% more delicious and classy (she has this effect on most things she encounters...including me) and took the 3 microwave steps out of it (i dont even get why you would do that to meat).

after a total of 10 minutes of prep and then playing outside while the grill grilled and the rice steamed, and then this is what we were dealing with:

these havent even been fully digested by my stomach and i am already dreaming of when i can eat them again. that. good.

here is how we made ours (just a few variations from rae's) which served 2.5 humans, with a few leftover bobs to snack on cold later (serious).

chicken bacon kabobs with pineapple BBQ glaze of glory.

-2-3 medium size chicken breasts, cut in half vertically, and then horizontally a few times to make cubes

-8 slices of bacon, cut in half

-jar of pineapple preserves

-bottle of hickory bbq sauce

-metal skewers or presoaked bamboo ones

-kabob supporting actors (sweet onion, bell pepper, pineapple, mushrooms)

1. wrap each chicken cube in a bacon half and then spear it (its okay if the bacon doesnt make a full circle). intersperse each kabob with your supporting cast (we didnt add anything else to the meat-in-meat combo last night...whoops).

2. transfer those puppies to a hot grill.

3. dump half the jar of preserves and half the bbq in to a small saucepan and heat on med-low until its simmering a tad. our about a third of this into a little bowl and brush it on the skewers as they gril.

4. when the bacon is nicely done and has a little carbon scoring (aka char), pull them off. you cant really overcook chicken to "too dry" when it is wrapped in delicious bacon and coated with this sauce, so dont be afraid to leave them on until the bacon is good and done.

5. serve with/over rice (our choice for rice ALWAYS is jasmine with butter and salt and pepper) and the remaining glaze as dipping sauce. there is no such thing as "too much" of this sauce:

his nostril looks weird because i retouched it because he had a bat in the cave, and this is a food post, after all. just looking out for you.

the kid ate SO MANY OF THESE. i have never seen him carnivorate anything like he did these. we are such a great, traditional family, that we feed little zombie man ourselves while he watches TV standing up. not really, usually he feeds himself as he sprints around between bites and jumps off of things...you know, like they did in the olden days. but last night, dinner was way close to bedtime so we gave in to avoid a meltdown ruining our dinners. #tradeoff.

if you dont make these or at least want to make these or at least want to be fed these by jesse while you watch dora...then we cant be friends. let's just break it off before the heartache starts.