Summer Chicken Marinade

Since this is my very first post to the blog, I need to get some things off of my chest.

The main reason that I haven't posted anything to the blog until now is because the only recipes I make have come from other siblings who have access to this blog. I feel like it would be a mixture of plagiarism and stealing someone's thunder to post his or her recipe. People then told me to change up a recipe and then post that. I refer to this process as "customization."

Now I would like to explain why I'm still on the fence about customizing recipes. There are four main reasons:

1) We live in a specialized society. Instead of trying to master every skill, we choose one to specialize in and master. I don't want an architect teaching children and I don't want a teacher designing buildings. With that being said, I'm not a chef, a cook, or a culinary artist. People do those things professionally so that I can focus on educating high school students.

2) When I spend the time to make a meal, I will not have the patience or time to start over if the original customized meal falls through. It's just too risky!

3) Comfort zone, people! Recipes that were created and perfected by culinary artists are my comfort zone. They include measurements, temperatures, and times to make them idiot proof for people like me :)

4) When you add things willy nilly, it makes it hard to recreate in the future. What if it turns out to be a gem but you can't recreate it?!?

With all of this being said, I also happen to have a sparse kitchen. (Whether or not I can use sparse in that manner, you know what I mean.) My kitchen isn't one that you can walk into and whip up your favorite recipe since I probably won't have the ingredients that you need. I don't have the spices or items that most people feel are essential to cooking. This is why I had to make a custom marinade for Danny's chicken breasts. I know..it shocked me, too!

I put in olive oil to keep the chicken from drying up. I tossed in lemon juice to add some summer zing; the lemon is what turned this experiment into a "Summer Chicken Marinade," as promised in the title of the post. I figured garlic and fresh ground pepper would give it a nice flavor. I let them hang out in there for 24 hours and flipped them over a few times throughout the marinating process.

I made some bow tie pasta and tossed it with olive oil and Danny grilled up the chicken. It was delicious! I know I didn't invent something brand new here (like the original peanut butter and jelly sandwich guy), but it was a big step for me. Thanks for reading! Don't worry; my future posts won't be this lengthy :)