Date nights that involve fun restaurants and a variety of cocktails and wine are the best. However some nights you want to spend time with your favorite person but you are grumpy and don’t want to deal with people, or its raining and nasty out and you just want to stay home. Last Wednesday was one of those nights, the week had been particularly sucky and the hubs was about to leave to kick off a road trip out west, and the sky had opened up.
To counteract everything else that was going on we wanted something comforting but light, since summer in DC is a hot, sticky mess. Grilled chicken, still on the bone, with a delicious sauce was just what was called for. For the sauce I created a hybrid between pesto and chimichurri which was made up of; 1 bunch of basil, 1 bunch of cilantro, 3 cloves of garlic, 1 roasted jalapeno (deseeded), and 1 cup of good olive oil. Toss all of that in the blender until you have a thin sauce.
The chicken was basted in the sauce and then grilled until done, and the rest of the sauce was used to dip the chicken into (and as a sauce for pasta a few nights later).
As a starter to eat while the chicken was grilling we had some lovely burrata. If you haven’t had burrata yet then stop whatever you are doing and get some (Trader Joe’s has a lovely one). Burrata is a soft and rich mozzarella filled with an equally amazing custard. Depending on what kind of burrata you get the custard can be thin like the most delicious cheesey sauce you’ve even had, or it can be thicker like a cheese within a cheese. Either way its amazing.
We topped the meal off with a delicious bottle of my new favorite summer wine, yes I am talking about Beaujolis again, but its delicious.
This meal is great as it keeps the mess to a minimum which lets you spend more time with your favorite person (and also with my favorite four legged friend)
