Dinner Tonight: Jerk Chicken

I have been meaning to try to make jerk chicken for a while but could mostly only find recipes that were overly complicated and involved buying exotic ingredients.  This is why I was really excited to find this post on the blog "From Blah to Ta-Daa."  I actually had all the ingredients on hand except for lime juice, and I needed to buy a lime for the rice we had earlier in the week so it worked out perfectly!
Traditionally jerk chicken is made with scotch bonnet peppers, which are some of the hottest in the world.  This recipe was noticably void of anything with that kind of heat, but I added some red pepper flakes because I thought it might need some kick.  I wasn't able to marinate it for the 24 hours it suggested, instead it got about 10.  I'm not sure if that made a difference as the chicken was still very flavorful.  Hubby was skeptical but took one bite and said "this chicken is good" so I figure it was a success! 
He was disappointed in my choice of side dish though.  He said that as long as I was making rice I should have made red beans and rice instead of just the rice pilaf I served.  Sadly, what he doesn't know (or won't until he catches up on my blog posts) is that I didn't make the rice fresh - I used leftovers that were frozen from the last time we had rice pilaf.  I think that the chicken had so much going on that all the spices in the red beans and rice mix would have been too much, but we'll tackle that next time I decide to make this.


***Tip*** The marinade included brown sugar.  My brown sugar is perpetually in a state of giant, dry clumpiness.  I remember seeing somewhere once that you could add a piece of bread and it would soften the sugar.  Last night before bed I tried this and this morning when I went to make the marinade the sugar was all soft and the clumps were gone!  It worked - how amazing!


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Estimated cost of meal:


Chicken: $1.20
Limes: $.75 (stupid freeze in Florida I think it drove up our lime prices astronomically)
Other marinade ingredients: $.50ish
Rice: Free (included in previous meal's total)
Bread: $.80

Total: $3.25

Former life total: Dinner @ KFC (still chicken): $13

Leaner Life Savings: $9.75 or 75%!!!