Greek Island Chicken Shish Kebabs

Spring is here!  It's quite likely my favourite season.  The days grow longer, the sun feels warm again, and there are flowers everywhere.  Fall is a close second, though, with its storms, crunchy colourful leaves, and crisp air.  Winter is pretty great too, especially for curling up in front of a fire with hot chocolate and a good book.  And I love snow!

Pretty much the only season I'm not as excited about is summer.  Maybe I'm strange, but I'm just not a fan of mosquitoes, wasps, sunburns, and feeling overheated all the time.  But I do love summer food - fresh produce, cold drinks, picnics and barbecues!  With the weather already getting warmer, I've started making some of my favourite summer meals.  Today I thought I'd share one of my favourites, Greek Island Chicken Shish Kebabs.  With its vegetables and lemony chicken, these grilled kebabs taste like summer!

Greek Island Chicken Shish Kebabs

Mix together the marinade ingredients:
1/4 c olive oil
1/4 c lemon juice
1/4 c white vinegar
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp dried oregano
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp ground black pepper

Cut chicken into 1 1/2 inch pieces.  Add chicken to the marinade, mix well, and let it sit in the fridge for at least two hours.

While the chicken is marinating, cut your vegetables into 1 inch pieces.  Some ideas for vegetables include bell peppers, onion, mushrooms, tomatoes (cherry or regular), and zucchini.

You also need to soak the wooden skewers in water for at least half an hour so they don't burn.

Colourful vegetables!

When everything is ready, thread the chicken and vegetables onto the skewers.  You can brush some of the marinade over the vegetables too, for extra flavour.

Grill the completed kebabs on the barbecue or in the oven for about 10 minutes, or until the chicken is cooked.

Serve with rice, pita bread, or Greek salad (or all of the above!).  Enjoy!

You can check out the original recipe here: Greek Island Chicken Shish Kebabs

What are some of your favourite summer meals?

Scarves and Tea

What do scarves and tea have in common?

They are both things that I have a lot of but hardly ever use.

For some reason I really like the idea of scarves.  There are so many beautiful scarves that I own or would love to own, and yet I almost never wear scarves.  The other day I was thinking about this as I was looking outside at the beautiful spring weather and realized that all winter I only wore a scarf twice.  All winter.  I know scarves aren't only worn in winter, but my scarf-wearing habits (or lack thereof) are certainly not about to change because the weather is nice.  I guess I'm just not an accessory kind of person.  But even though I know all of that, I can't bring myself to get rid of any of my scarves.  They just sit in my closet, taking up space, waiting for a time when I might get around to wearing one of them.

I have a similar problem with tea.  I love tea, I just don't drink it very much.  I will usually offer tea if someone is over, and if they want it I'll have some too, but it's rare for me to just have a cup of tea by myself.  Last time I checked I had at least 15 varieties of tea, and I'll happily get more if I ever have an excuse to. There is just something really nice about getting a new kind of tea.  (I especially like fruity teas.)  And I would also love to get into using loose leaf tea... though I'm making myself wait until I use up more of the tea I already have.  But at the rate I go through tea, who knows when that will be?

Scarves and tea.  There are probably other things like this in my life too.  And it bothers me.  I want to live simply, living with less, with the things I actually need and use.  Our lives get cluttered with stuff so quickly.  In the past I have found it very freeing to get rid of things that I didn't need or use (like the time I got rid of over half of my clothes).  Now that we are anticipating moving within the next few weeks, this is a perfect time for me to go through our apartment, getting rid of things that we don't need anymore.  I don't know if I'll have much luck with my scarves or tea (who gets rid of tea????) but hopefully there will be other things that I can pass along to make our lives cleaner and lighter.