I will confess to often cheating and buying honey and soy chicken sticks already made up from our local chicken shop, for convenience.
But when I marinate the chicken myself and make up the sticks, this is what I do. It is a really simple marinade of the honey soy variety. Honey soy is our kids favourite – not a surprise really as it has the sweetness of the honey!
Marinated Chicken Sticks and Salad
Ingredients:
- 8 tablespoons honey
- 8 tablespoons soy sauce
- 2 cloves garlic, crushed
- 6 tablespoons vegetable oil
- 500 grams chicken breasts
- 1/2 lettuce
- 1 red capsicum
- 3 large carrots
- 1 cucumber
- 2 tomatoes
Method:
1. Chop up chicken into smallish size pieces. You could really make them any size you liked, but I like to go smaller, so I can feel more comfortable that the chicken has cooked through properly.
2. In a bowl whisk up oil, honey, soy sauce and garlic.
3. Pour the chicken marinade into a large ziplock bag.
4. Add the cut up chicken to the ziplock bag and seal the bag tightly.
5. Place the bag of chicken on a plate (in case there is any leakage) and marinate in the refrigerator at least 2 hours (the longer the better). A friend shared this tip with me about using the ziplock bag. It helps the chicken get a much more even coverage when marinating.
6. If you are going to use wooden skewers on the BBQ, soak them in water for a couple hours of so they don’t burn.
7. Once the chicken has marinated for long enough, thread the chicken pieces onto the skewers.
8. I rest the skewers across the lasgane dish until they are all made up. Some of the excess marinade drips off then.
9. Preheat barbecue on high heat.
10. While this is happening, begin preparing the salad. The kids can help with this by:
- Tearing up lettuce in to chunks.
- Chopping carrot carrot.
- Slicing cucumber thinly.
- Cutting up capsicum into sticks.
- Cutting tomatoes into wedges.
11. Cook the chicken for about 5 – 7 minutes each side.
12. If you would like some sauce for the chicken sticks you can boil the left over marinade for a few minutes in a small pan. You should not use the left over marinade with out cooking it as it will have bacteria from the chicken in it.
13. We serve the marinade sauce to the side, so those who want it can just serve themselves.
14. Serve with salad and enjoy!
Do you make your own chicken sticks?
8 comments...read them below or add one
Yum, this is a favourite of ours too.
I am yet to find a kid who doesn’t love chicken on a stick!
We eat exactly this! That snap, with the chunky salad, could[‘ve been taken at our table! (The kids call it “chicken on a sticken”) The other even easier “marinade” is the Masterfoods Honey and Sweet Chilli sauce, some vegetable oil and some garlic…
“chicken on a sticken” – love it!
If I don’t have time to do the threading I do it with breast fillets cut into long strips and then thread them on. It’s a lot quicker. I just cut the fillets in to fairly thin even thickness so the marinade doesn’t burn before the chickens cooked. My kids love this:)
My kids love this meal too, although we add a bed of rice. It’s a great one to cook on the BBQ too. My son calls it ‘those kebabs that look like they’re burnt’. Haven’t tried it with a ziplock bag to marinade in, thanks for the tip!
I would still stick with marinading in a tupperware pot or bowl with a lid – ziplock bags in landfill are not environmentally friendly!
This is exactly what I served to my kids and their friends on the weekend. I serve the salad with each vegetable in a separate bowl so they can choose their own, but they have to have at least two different vegies. Also gave them crispy noodles but they had to eat their vegies first! There were all hungry later though so will serve with rice next time.