Tonight we (finally!) made the Baja-Style Rosemary Chicken Skewers with the Avocado and Grapefruit Salad. We both got home on the late side, but really wanted to try this dish, so we did something we rarely do: we made dinner together, side-by-side, in our tiny, “one-butt” New York City kitchen. Since we teamed up on the cooking we’ll also team up on the writing. See if you can guess who wrote what!

Making the marinade was very simple: all the ingredients went into a bowl and got mixed together. The only change I  made, which turned out to be a really good one, was to substitute chipotle pepper flakes for red pepper flakes. Prepping the chicken was easy too. Once I cut the thighs into smaller pieces, I just added them to the marinade, mixed to coat, and let them sit for 20 to 30 minutes. Threading the chicken pieces onto the rosemary skewers was a little tricky and one of the thinner skewers actually broke, but all in all, it was not that hard.

I made the full amount of salad dressing so we would have it around if we wanted to make the avocado/grapefruit salad again or if we just wanted to have a different salad later in the week. For the salad itself, we didn’t exactly halve the recipe they way we normally do. We did use one grapefruit instead of two, but only used one avocado instead of the two we would have used if we were halving everything. (The recipe calls for four avocados.)

We deviated from the recipe a bit when it came time to cook the chicken.  We don’t have a grill, but we do have a cast-iron grill pan, which works just as well. The only problem is the apartment gets a little smoky when we use it, so cooking the chicken on it for 20 minutes wasn’t going to work. Instead, we cooked the chicken in the oven at 350 degrees for about 15 minutes and then finished it on the grill  pan (which we pre-heated for about 10 minutes on medium-high heat) for about three minutes a side. The only problem was that the longer rosemary sprigs, which hung over the edge of the grill pan and were exposed to the flame from the burner, kinda sorta caught on fire. Fortunately, we never leave the grill unattended when we use it and had a spray bottle of water close at hand!

The change to the cooking technique worked out very well – the chicken came out very moist with a really nice char. The dressing was perfect with the avocado and grapefruit and I especially liked the instruction at the end that called for sprinkling the salad with salt and pepper, which gave everything a little more flavor.