Monday, April 8, 2013

BBQ Chicken & Pineapple Quesadillas

It's grillin' time! So ready for it. I love our grill. I love my daddy for gifting us with it for our wedding. Such a perfect gift from him, too. :)

Super happy for weather that brings our grill back out. I feel like it's so much easier to eat healthier with a grill by your side... or maybe it's just the wonderful weather that makes me feel like eating healthy, fresh foods rather than heavy dishes...? Eh. I'm just glad winter is OV-ER. Bleck. Give me the sun, please and thank you.

Grillin' weather. Grillin' chicken. Grillin' with Sweet Baby Ray's. Grillin' pineapple. Sigh.

First of all - If you don't use Sweet Baby Ray's, you should. Or let me know what you use that is better because I'm not sure what can top it. Well, maybe. My dad's barbecue chicken with his homemade beer barbecue sauce is pretty freakin' good. But I can't make that. So I'll say this I guess - Sweet Baby Ray's is the best for plain ol' out of the bottle barbecue sauce. Yes.

Anywho. Tonight we had some delish barbecue chicken & pineapple quesadillas. I love these things. This is maybe our third or fourth time having them... I'm not huge on repeating dinner yet because I love trying new recipes. Only the faves get repeated. I'll wait until kid time to play the repeat often game.

These things are so easy, too. First, I pounded my chicken and seasoned it with salt, pepper, garlic powder and cumin - just a light sprinkle of each. You don't have to do the pounding thing - my hubs is just all about the pounding of the chicken. always. I guess it makes for even cooking though. I let mine sit in the fridge for about 2-3 hours but that's not really necessary either. Again, seasoning. Hubs is big on the seasoning and the "marinating." So I let it sit. I'm sure it did something. :)

Right before putting it on the grill I added some barbecue sauce to each side. Chopped the pineapple up into sticks/wedges.  I cut the pineapple ends off. Then cut the pineapple in half. Then I cut each half into 8 pieces, wedges. (Layed... Laid... ?? Why do both of those look weird...?) I put the wedges down on their sides then cut the skin off and the rind off. Does that make sense? I'll have to cut up another pineapple and take some pictures. It's a pretty great cutting technique that I learned from some blog or cooking book or cooking show or something at some point.

You can cut it however you want. It'll still be delicious before AND after you grill it.

After the grilling just chop it all up. Oh, hey, I actually took a picture of that part.


Then we use our griddle to make the quesadilla. Place large flour tortilla on the griddle then sprinkle some shredded cheddar cheese on it - maybe 1/8-1/4 cup. Then place your chopped chicken and pineapple on the tortilla. Do a little extra squirt of barbecue sauce to your liking. Maybe add some chopped cilantro or fresh jalapeƱos (seeds removed unless you wanna burn). Sprinkle another 1/8-1/4 cup of cheese then top it with the another tortilla. We didn't do cilantro or jale's this time and it was still excellent.

Let it cook there until it starts to get golden and then very very very carefully flip it over to cook the other side a bit. I put my griddle on 300 degrees and let it cook on each side for about 4 minutes. While you wait you can snack on the grilled pineapple and maybe throw a piece or two of chicken bits to your dog. That's what we did anyway.

For us - one large quesadilla was plenty along with our salad. We made two though - with 2 1/2 chicken breasts and a little over half of the pineapple. + the extra bits of pineapple and chicken breast that we ate or treated Billy to.

And that was dinner tonight. I'll add some pictures when we make this again... which will hopefully be soon because this is just blah without many pictures. Fail, Kem. It's hard to take pictures and cook at the same time... how do all those professional food bloggers do it? I shall learn.

Here's the "recipe" which is more like a how-to.

What's going to be YOUR first "spring is here, it's time to grill" meal? 

xo - Kem