Jerk Chicken, Chargrilled Corn on the Cob, Favoursome Rice!

Happy Mondays!What’s everyone up to then? Any exciting cooking this week?

Well over the weekend, I tried Levi Root’s Jerk Chicken marinade from his Spice it Up book, to make some juicy chicken pieces sing with spice! I couldn’t find the recipe online, but it’s similar to his link above, except you add a good squeeze of lime juice to the marinade.

His byline for his book ‘ Favourite dishes made fabulocious‘.. love it. Let’s face it when you think of Jerk chicken/Caribbean celeb chefs at the moment all I can think of is Mr Roots, who has carved out a nice little niche for himself in this area.

The man knows how to sing, add some rhythm to your body and well use spices and flavours to create some tasty Caribbean influenced dishes, I remember seeing him on Dragon’s Den, little did we know he would come this far?

I haven’t yet tried out his restaurant in South London ( Papine Jerk Centre) yet, but I figure I prefer to cook up his dishes at home in the kitchen (well you do have all his spices bottled up in supermarkets now), but not using those ready to hand sauces I enjoy, grinding, crushing, roasting, mixing those fresh and dried herbs and spices together to create a wonderful marinade.

This recipe is fool-proof and you can adjust the use of chillies if you don’t like it super hot! To accompany my Chicken pieces, I wanted the rest of the dish to be Caribbean influenced and had corn on the cob (boiled, chargrilled at the end and melting a little butter over them, you could add a dash of cayenne for some spice) and some jazzed up rice and peas (another Levi recipe) which I adapted and instead used brown rice and kidney beans in mine.

There’s nothing better than trying to spice up your rice, it doesn’t have to be plain (who said it did?) but in this recipe it includes, onion, celery, garlic, chilli, stock, bay leaf, spring onions which all liven it up so its pulsing flavour and spirit!

Don’t forget to add your seasoning to your marinade or chicken! Which is what I did and scrambled to add it at the last-minute! This dish was a great end of week supper treat, tastes like great home cooked, filling food, maybe next time I would make some black beans or something a bit saucy to accompany the rice and chicken.