what's cooking wednesday - chicken and bacon shish kabobs

This past Sunday we celebrated Father's Day by barbecuing. All day. Starting with breakfast for Mike before church. Abby and I woke up early and made butterscotch pancakes that Abby had lots of fun cutting out with cookie cutters. We also made peameal bacon or Canada bacon as Abby calls it and eggs. And since it was a beautiful coolish and bug free morning we not only cooked, but also ate it outside. We don't do much eating outside so it was a nice treat. Later that day we barbecued up a feast for Papa and Grandma Linda using this great little shish kabob recipe that showed up in my inbox courtesy of allrecipe.com. I knew or rather I was hoping this would be a grand slam right out of the park.

Chicken and Bacon Shish Kabobs

1/4 cup soy sauce

1/4 cup cider vinegar

2 tbsp honey

2 tbsp canola oil

10 large mushrooms cut in half

2 green onions, minced

3 boneless skinless chicken breasts, cut into chunks

1/2 lb sliced thick cut bacon cut in half

1 (8oz) can pineapple chunks

skewers

In a large bowl mix the soy sauce, cider vinegar, honey, canola oil and green onions. Place mushrooms & chicken into the mixture, stir to coat. Cover & marinate in the fridge for 1 hour.

Preheat grill for high heat.

Wrap the chicken chunks with bacon and thread onto skewers so that the bacon is secured. Alternate mushroom chunks with pineapple chunks.

Recipe Notes: Oh I've got a lot of notes on this one. First I have to say we all really enjoyed this recipe and with a few tweaks it will be perfect. First, I marinated the chicken and mushrooms overnight in two seperate ziploc bags. That was great for the chicken, not so much for the mushrooms. They soaked up a lot of the marinade, which sounds great, but some of them were decidedly more vinegary tasting than others. I think just an hour for them would be great. And the bacon, anybody who follows the recipe to a "T" is going to be dealing with some pretty major barbecue flare ups. Bacon and high heat are not the way to go. Earlier in the day I cut the bacon in half and then boiled it for 5 minutes. Flare ups were not an issue after that, especially given I reduced the temperature to medium and kept a pretty close eye on them. This is not a throw them on the grill and then head inside for a beer kind of recipe. You should plan on staying close to the barbecue while they cook. Also spring for the real pineapple. I just happened to have a pineapple so I used it instead. I cut it into fairly sizeable chunks. I think the smaller chunks you get out of a can wouldn't have held up to the barbecuing process. I'm not going to lie to you this is somewhat of a labour intense recipe, but so worth it. Of course I made a lot of skewers, but it still only took me 20 ish minutes to assemble them all. I just set myself up a little production line and before I knew it I was done. I will certainly be making these again.

What is What's Cooking Wednesday and how can I play?

What's cooking Wednesday was born out of a desire to get out of that what's for dinner rut. Playing is easy, on Wednesday post a recipe that has been tried and tested by you and then pop over here and add your name to the Mr. Linky. When entering your name also add the name of the recipe in brackets and make sure you link to your What's Cooking Wednesday post and not just your blog's front page. And don't forget to link back here, the home of What's Cooking Wednesday.

So for example I would write Shan (Speedy Chicken Stir Fry) in the name section. For the URL section I would post this: http://shanrev.blogspot.com/2007/10/whats-cooking-wednesday-speedy-chicken.html

I'll let you in on a little secret. Much to Kaffy's chagrin, my WCW recipes are almost never made on a Wednesday. So feel free to cook and photograph whenever you have time and join us posting on Wednesday.

*All non recipe links will be deleted*