Good grilling day

I should preface this entry by saying that I started in on tonight's meal yesterday. The goal was Giada's Grilled Chicken with Basil Dressing. This is the third time I've made the dish and now consider myself to have mastered it. Not that it's uber-hard or anything like that, mind you.

Anyway, I decided to make the basil dressing in advance, which was basil, lemon zest, lemon juice, garlic, EVOO, salt, and pepper. I threw it all in the blender and flipped the switch on. Big mistake. Apparently the blender is broken, and the contents proceeded to leak out from the bottom and spread all over the counter. I was quite upset and insisted that Jim throw the entire machine in the garbage, while I salvaged the remains by transferring them into the mini-bowl of my food processor. I tinkered around with the ingredients, adding a little more of everything, but the result wasn't the usual pesto-consistency. The bowl was still a little too big for the pesto and so it ended up being slightly chunky. But at least the taste was still good.

Today was the marinating part, which I actually did at work. I packed up all of the ingredients (salt, pepper, fennel seeds, lemon, EVOO, and of course, the chicken breasts) and took them with me. During lunch I dumped the ingredients into a ziploc bag, added the chicken, and massaged the marinade into them. I turned them a couple of times over the course of the afternoon, but that was basically it.

When I got home, I had Jim fire up the grill and take over. In addition to the chicken, we tried grilling some frozen corn and the leftover ciabatta bread. Jim decided to add some butter to the ciabatta in addition to the EVOO, salt, and pepper that I had previously topped the bread with. And of course the corn was rubbed with butter, salt, and pepper.

I think the meal turned out quite well, actually. As Jim put it, it was a good grilling day (not to be mistaken with a good day to grill). Everything turned out perfectly--the chicken was cooked all the way through but still moist, the bread didn't burn, and even the frozen corn tasted as good as it could.

I'm pretty excited about all of the grilling we're going to do this summer.