Chicken On A Stick

Every summer there are a few events we look forward to: our anniversary (seven years in 2013!), going to an annual pool party with our buddy Cristal, and heading down to the local farmer's market on Saturday mornings.

There's lots of great things at the farmer's market, but recently we had some grilled chicken on a stick at a food vendor that was pretty disappointing. There wasn't much flavor, and the meat was dry instead of tender and juicy.

We knew immediately we would have to make our own to get rid of that disappointment and replace it with some homemade awesome! To make our grilled chicken on a stick, we started by putting together our own marinade: teriyaki sauce, soy sauce, Kraft's Asian toasted sesame "anything" sauce, and the juice of one fresh lemon.

Everything gets mixed together with a whisk. If you want to go spicy, throw in some crushed red pepper or sriracha sauce. For sweeter, you could do brown sugar. Other ingredient combinations could include ginger, olive oil, fish sauce, your favorite BBQ sauce, or just about anything you can imagine that would taste good on the grill.

Toss your chicken tenderloins into a plastic bag, pour in the marinade, and shake vigorously. Toss the bag in the fridge and turn it over every 20 minutes or so until you're ready to grill. To be fair to the farmer's market vendor, we even used the same chicken - the 5 lb. frozen bag kind instead of fresh chicken from the butcher's block.

Of course we aren't just going to be eating chicken, there's got to be a load of colorful veggies too! Here we're seasoning sliced squash, zucchini, red bell pepper, and asparagus.

After a few hours, our chicken gets stabbed by wooden skewers (be sure to soak them in cold water beforehand so they don't burn on the grill).

Here's our seasoned vegetables (coated with some olive oil) and peaches cut into quarters which will add a fun fruit element to our meal.

Now we're finally ready to get everything cooking, using a screen to make sure the vegetables don't fall through the grill onto the coals.

Here's our chicken getting a nice char on one side before we get ready to turn and coat it with more sauce.

Megan is brushing the turned chicken with more sauce - but be sure not to just use the leftover marinade, since it's been soaking in raw chicken for hours. If you want to use the marinade, you have to boil it on the stove first, which is what Megan did, also adding in some balsamic vinegar and strawberry jam for some sweet notes.

After the chicken is done we toss on the peaches (skin side up, as you don't want the skin to burn) and let them get a bit of char.

Here's our delicious finished chicken skewers!

The chicken skewers are piled on a bed of rice, and then we spoon on some of those amazing grilled fruits and vegetables.

Needless to say, ours turned out fantastic! Juicy, tender, and amazingly flavorful. We'll definitely be making these again in the future!