rub-a-dub-dub

About a year ago, my husband was introduced to the notion of a rub - for meat typically going to be grilled. It's come up a few times, but a couple of weeks ago, he was ready to give it a go. There are recipes out there, but he wanted to make one up. Works for me. Love a good recipe but sometimes ya just wanna try your hand at it and see what happens. Now me - I'm all about just throw stuff in there and make it work. We'll worry about replication later. He, ever the chemist *smile* wanted to go ahead and use actual measurements and get it on paper. Cool. I served as the scribe. 

He went thru the spices and we talked about what we want, don't want, might want... blah blah blah until we settled on our rub would consist of. Next - quantity... Umm... not sure how much we had, call it a pound or so of boneless, skinless chicken breast cutlets I think. So to make sure there was enough, we settled on 1/2tbsp of each. Figured we could taste and tweak as necessary. Went ok, one thing accidentally got a whole tbsp, a couple things we doubled on purpose. Mixed it on up and applied it. Messy process - good thing I was just the scribe hee hee.

Part of his inspiration came from something I'd made with pork a while back. It was actually with one of the McCormick's recipe inspriations things. It was Apple Sage Pork Chops or something like that. It involved apple and  he dug that, so he wanted to incorporate that into what we did. Sooooo, when it came time to let the meat sit for a few hrs before cooking it, we put thinly sliced apple in along with. It gave me an opportunity to test out the apple slicing skills I'd hones up on watching Master Chef. 

A few hours later we took it out and threw it on our foil lined cast iron grill. Foil? Cuz that joker can be tough to clean. The chicken still had pretty grill marks...tho it's a li'l tough to see that on the picture, but whatever. So, how'd it turn out? Spiiiiicy!! What isn't necessarily baaad. It made for a really great sandwich if your tolerance is a li'l lower for the heat. I thought it'd be tasty with some pasta & alfredo, so I'll be trying that experiment at some point. Two of the boys liked it a lot which is cool. Hubs was a li'l disappointed at first b/c it didn't ome out like he'd wanted it, but once the 10 & 11  year old were fans he felt better. Then when he made a sandwich of it later, he was hooked. In retrospect, brown plate not the best for photo opp but we almost neglected to take one at all, so it is what it is.

Next time? Tweak the recipe so it has a li'l less fire. Or keep the fire and make alfredo. Probably would also help if it the meat was thicker... All in all, pretty decent first go at it. Can't wait to try again. I haven't done ribs in a while... Hmmm... Take 2 perhaps... We shall see...