How to Make Persian-Style Chicken Kebobs

Hi, I'm Louisa Shafia one of Rachel Ray's Buddies on eHow.com. Today, I'm going to be making chicken kebobs. So for these kebobs, I have chosen some farm fresh chicken. This is pasture-raised chicken. It's really good and fresh and full of nutrients, and I'm going to make it with a Persian spice. Now my dad is from Iran, so I'm very familiar with Persian flavors, and it's also the birthplace of kebobs, so I think I have kebobs in my blood. So, this marinade is very, very Persian. It starts out with some yogurt, which is just a little bit sour. It gets some lime juice which is very, very sour, and this is, woo, I just sprayed myself with lime. This is a very important part of Persian cuisine. There are a lot of sour flavors, and lime is a wonderful way to get a sour flavor into your food. Other ways to get sour flavors are lemon juice. You could use pomegranate syrup. You could use cranberries. There are lots of ways to get really, really tasty, sour flavors into your food. So, even though this marinade is going to be really sour, at the end, after the chicken marinates in here, it's just going to have a very mild, sour taste, but it's going to taste rich, and the sourness will really balance with the fattiness of the chicken to give it a very rich flavor. Okay, so I've got plenty of lime juice in here, that's the juice of about two limes. Now I have some garlic cloves that I just crushed. I'm going to throw those in whole. You don't need to cut those up because this is all going to get blended. I'm going to put some olive oil in here, a good amount. I'm going to put some turmeric. Now, I'm just going to put a little dash of this because it's very strong and bitter, but it's going to give this marinade a very nice yellow color, so just a dash of that, a little bit of cumin, this is some ground cumin, maybe about twice as much turmeric as you're going to put in, a little bit of salt and some pepper. So, already this is starting to smell really good. Okay, I'm going to blend this up until it's smooth. Okay, my marinade looks nice and smooth, so I'm going to take my chicken pieces, put them in this large bowl. You can either cut these yourself or you can get your butcher to cut them up for you. I'm going to pour my marinade over the chicken. I've got plenty of this nice marinade. You can see it's very smooth after it was in the blender. Okay, so I'm just going to toss my chicken pieces in here. Make sure they're really well coated with this marinade, and then what you want to do is let these chicken pieces marinate for at least two hours to soak up the flavor or overnight. And you're going to want to let them marinate in the fridge. Okay, so just to show you what we're doing here, I'm going to skewer these right away with this lovely long metal skewers, and what you want to do when you make kabobs is you want to space the meat or chicken, or whatever you're using, you want to space it out a little bit on the skewer so you have maybe about one-fourth inch between pieces. I'm laying my skewers down on this lightly-oiled baking sheet, and if you want to do this without skewers in the broiler, that would be just fine, you would just put them on a roasting pan, an oiled roasting pan. If you want to skip the whole skewer aspect of this, you could also do this on a grill. It's really wonderful to make kabobs on a grill. That's sort of the original real way to do them, but you can do them in a broiler any time of year. Now that I have my chicken pieces on my skewers, I'm going to broil these kebobs in a hot oven for about 10 minutes. I want them to be nice and brown and charred, and I'll turn them over once while they cook. These kabobs just came out of the oven, and they are nice and charred and golden brown. So, these are ready to eat. You want to eat these as soon as they come out of the oven. So, I'm going to pick up my hot skewers with a towel, and I'm going to lay them on this bed of rice that I made earlier. I'm just going to pull off my chicken pieces with a fork, you don't want to touch the skewer because it's quite hot, and so I'm serving these kebobs with some lime wedges. I'm going to put a big dollop of yogurt on the side. This is very traditional with a kebob. You definitely want to have some yogurt on there. It gives a nice, tangy flavor, a nice counterpoint to the richness of the chicken. I'm going to put a few beautiful cilantro leaves on here. This is for color, and it's always nice to have a fresh herb on your plate, a little bit of pepper, a little bit of salt. Lastly, this is one of my favorite ingredients. This is dried ground sumac. This is a berry. It's ground and dried and has a very tart, salty flavor. It's used a lot in Middle Eastern cuisine to give things a sour flavor. So, I'm just going to finish off these kebobs with some of this sumac. Now, I like to be generous with it. One, because it tastes great, and two, because it looks beautiful. This is really a perfect garnish, and it really adds to the flavors. These are real Persian chicken kebobs. I can't wait to dig into these. Thanks for joining me. I'm Louisa Shafia for eHow.com.