Stephanie's Dry Rub Chicken



 

My oldest sister's husband, Andrew, makes the best jerk pork and grilled chicken and he mostly uses dry rubs that he puts together himself. And on all the food network shows the best grilled items are from a dry rub that's been marinating for hours! So I started looking up various dry rub mixtures and was constantly short an ingredient or two. So Simone, my sista, encouraged me to make my own and be sure to taste it before I apply it to my chicken. lol.

So that's what I did! Brown Sugar was my main ingredient since I love my chicken to have a sweet taste to it and then get cut off my a pinch of salt or some other flavor. Ironically I used no salt because the other ingredients had enough sodium in them.

After the preparing the rub I tasted it, smelt it and was satisfied. I cleaned the chicken with lime and little cooking wine. Then I seasoned up the meat.

I cooked the chicken WHOLE in the Nuwave oven and then I cut them AFTER they were done to seal in the natural juices. I brought some to my sister and her husband to taste and His opinion was like money to me since I see him like a meat master on the grill.

He sliced a piece, ate it....and said TASTY!!

I was stoked lol. Seems odd but you just don't understand this guy does some gourmet stuff on the grill!

CRAB CAKES

So I'm behind a few recipes so I'm getting caught up. Surprise surprise I'm late with my blog posts :P Thats the one consistent thing with me and this blog hehe :)



Anywho! Perry and I tasted these KUNG-PAO Crab Cakes at a green Publix in Boca and they were delicious! So I got the receipe and made them once I got all the ingrediants.
The receipe looks easy enough, and the last thing I got was the crab. On the recipe list it says to buy "Crab stuffing" from the seafood department in publix. I went there and found no "crab stuffing just crab. I even asked the Aprons Publix sample chef and instead of helping me he tried to tell me that the receipe is old and they haven't served that in years and he's been doing this chef thing for 15 years now -__- I was highly fustrated. How are you going to tell me what I ate a week ago?!
In my fustration he finally came and tried to assist me.

What the recipe failed to tell me was that the "crab stuffing" was a combination of the crab and crushed crispy onions. So I got flaky crab which was Buy 1 Get 1 at the moment and went along my way.
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In the kitchen hell went down lol. I had Perry in my living room and this quick dinner went sour for a moment but my sister( on the phone) and my dad came to my aide. I mixed the crab stuffing together but it was not sticking together it just looked like a pasta dish!

We tried an egg to be a stronger sticking agent and it was no use!

Then Simone suggested I use all the moist ingredients. They were meant for the sauce and were not listed under the crab portion of the recipe but I added them anyway, that's what you see in the small bowl above. And that helped, things for sticky especially with the sweet chilli sauce. But it was not enough to ball up on its own! I even added panko brad crumbs to give it weight but still nothing.

Then DADDY came to the rescue and he said get the flour! The flour sucked up the excess moisture and allowed me to shape my crab! Simple but genius! These are the things you learn by experience not the books.

Now the my little crab cakes were finally taking shape They were ready to FRY!

My dad took the first bite and it was yummy! All that hard work paid off.

As they fried, I worked on my scallion noodles which had the multigrain pasta noodles, lots of scallion, carrots, and low fat low sodium garlic herb spreadable cheese. These noodles were delicious and were used later in the week with my DRY RUB CHICKEN ;)

With the noodles complete, I made more sauce to top the crab cakes and OMG that was very spicy! So spicy I couldn't

FINALLY DINNER TIME!