Margarita Chicken Sammiches

A limerick for Mike and Jaime
Our time was quite cockamamie
When Mike got hurt
He did not work
Thus, Big Bite with Guy Fieri

That was rather lame, but I do like limericks.  And if you do too, you should check out the The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form.  I much prefer their definition of chicken to my putrid attempt at artfully adulating the inspiration for this recipe.  There goes the alliteration again...

A chicken is someone who's not
Very brave, and who worries a lot,
Or a fowl like a duck,
That we slaughter and pluck.
We may cluck as it's chucked in a pot.

Back in the day, when my wife and I lived next door to our friends Mike and Jaime, we got in the habit of watching a lot of Food Network and subsequently, we tried making some recipes from said tv station.  Mike decided we should try this recipe from Guy, and though I am not usually a fan of his, this recipe serves as the basis for a wonderfully tasty sammich.

This time around, I didn't have jalapenos to use in the recipe, but after just returning from Wisconsin, my mother gave me some tabasco peppers from her garden.  I figured this was worth a shot.  In the past I have also done fresh jalapeno and pickled jalapeno, both tasted great.

The recipe calls for marinating red bell peppers, then dredging them in flour and frying them.  From my recollection, this turned into quite a debacle of smoke.  I'm sure if I was more proficient at frying this wouldn't happen, but it seemed like a lot of effort to add something that would be masked by the flavor of the chicken, red onions and spicy mayonnaise.

Speaking of the spicy mayonnaise, the recipe called for putting plain mayonnaise on the roll, but we had a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce screaming to be used, so I looked around for some recipes and came up with the following:

1 cup of mayonnaise
2 tbs of lime juice
3 peppers finely chopped
2 tbs of adobo sauce
salt and fresh pepper to taste

Later on when I ran out of chicken, I made a salad of spinach, red onion, tomatoes and the spicy mayo as a dressing.  It was rather delicious, however don't plan on kissing anyone for the rest of the night...

I also traded out cabbage for what I had in my fridge - spinach.  Something green and crunchy did the trick.  I also finished it with a couple tomatoes.

So here goes my recipe:

3 boneless skinless chicken breasts, butterflied and cut into pieces the size of a deck of cards.  I think I got about 9-10 pieces of chicken out of that

Marinate the pieces in the following for 4-8 hours:
2 tbs of chopped peppers (in my case tobasco)
1/4 cup of chopped fresh cilantro
4 tbs of tequila (rot gut works just fine)
1 tbs of minced garlic
1 tsp of cumin
1 tsp of oregano
juice of two limes

When it times come to cook, I would imagine you could do them in the broiler or a pan, though I prefer charcoal grill.  I cook my chicken indirect, because otherwise I end up burning the hell out of them and end up with dry chicken.

Cook the chicken until done -- should be firm to the touch.  It took about 10 minutes a side indirect.

Build up your sammich with some spicy mayo on the bun, a piece of chicken, a slice of jack cheese, spinach, red onion and tomato.

As you can see I served it with tortillas and some guacamole.

Work has been done.  Oh, fond memories of Meridian.