What's on the Grill #109

Pesto Spatchcocked Chicken!  Hey, your chicken is in my pesto!  No, your pesto is in my chicken!  Well they are two great tastes that go well together...and essentially, that is how this all came together.  We had a chicken and I had a taste for pesto and the next thing you know I am cutting up a fryer like it's an extra in Silence of the Lambs.

Irony.  What's that?  A chicken with its backbone actually removed!  Thank you...I'll be here all night.  All joking aside, that is essentially what spatchcocking is.  Remove the backbone of the chicken with some poultry shears and then apply some downward pressure to crack the sternum and you have a spatchcocked chicken.  I like to go the extra step by running two skewers through the bird.  It makes it a little bit easier to handle on the grill.

For the pesto, I used 4 cups of fresh basil leaves, 1/2 cup of olive oil, 1/3 cup of pine nuts, and 4 cloves of garlic.  I added it all to a food processor and mixed it.  I then added 1/2 cup of freshly grated parmesan cheese.

With the chicken looking less than dignified, I rubbed almost all of the pesto over both sides.  I saved about 1/2 cup to serve later with the finished chicken.

The advantage of spatchcocking is that you can cook a whole chicken (or turkey, or game hen, or your neighbor) in a much shorter amount of time.  I preheated the grill to medium high and cooked each side for approximately 15 minutes.  Once done, the chicken was served with some of the reserved pesto.  Simple and good.