The Everything Marinade

Grilling season is finally here.  The time of year when I retire my lasagna, meatloaf, and baked salmon and chicken recipes for the fresh, light, yummy tastes of the bbq.  It is also the time of year that I don’t mind the infamous and daily question: “What’s for dinner tonight?”  Don’t you find that meals seem to come together so much quicker in warmer weather?  I love marinating any meat, pairing it with either a roasted potato or brown rice and a simple veggie.  Dinner in 20.  

Here’s my favourite marinade – pair it with pork, chicken, or beef and marinate for at least 30 minutes.  If you want to try it with fish – just 5 – 10 minutes in the marinade does the trick.  Fish – being so much more delicate, doesn’t require much time at all.  I personally would pair this with a white fish versus a salmon.

I affectionately call it the “EVERYTHING” marinade – for obvious reasons – it works with EVERYTHING 🙂

If you do a weekly shopping trip – the only thing you might NOT have in your pantry is the bundle of fresh herbs, so add this to your list and you are good to go.  If you don’t end up using the herbs for the marinade you can use them in countless other things as they add SO MUCH almost zero calorie flavour – and no sodium, to any dish.  Of course, if you don’t have any FRESH on hand and you want make the marinade,  no worries, you can use your dried herbs.

One of my favourite cooking hacks is the Zip Loc.  Not super innovative, but the less dishes I have to do the better.  SO – take a Zip Loc bag and line the inside of a medium bowl or large measuring cup.  Now all ingredients can be mixed inside the bowl (keeping the bowl clean in the mean time!)

Everything tastes better with fresh lemon and lemon zest…

I used chicken breasts today – but like I said before, you can use pork, beef, bison – you name it…

hmmmm – I was just thinking scallops would be great too – as well as shrimp.  Less marinating required.  I marinated this chicken for about 8 hours.  I put it together after taking my daughter to school.  When we were ready for dinner, I took it out of the fridge – easy as that.

I didn’t take any photos of the bbq situation when I was making this…  my hubby did the grilling, and we were using our bbq for the first time this season – thanks to our long, cold disgusting winter.  We live in the real  world and the bbq wasn’t really something I wanted to see in pictures until I gave it a good Spring clean! 🙂

But – here is the final result – fresh, clean eating, light and yummy.

Obviously this an easy win for anyone focused on cleaner, and light eating,  BUT when you get a smile from the rugby player, you know its a keeper.