Tandoori Grilled Chicken

I have been wanting to make Tandoori Grilled Chicken for a few weeks, and around the middle of the week it was looking like Sunday was going to be the day.   Nice weather for grilling and I would have time on Saturday night or Sunday morning to start marinating the chicken.    Tandoori chicken is one of my all time favorite Indian dishes.   I tried making it in the oven a few months ago and it was OK, but not nearly as good as Tandoori chicken from a good Indian restaurant.

As things turned out, I didn't end up starting the marinade until around 1pm and the chicken was in the marinade at about 2:30pm.   I put the chicken on the grill at 6:30pm, so the chicken was able to marinade for about 4 hours.   Next time, I make this, I am going to marinade the chicken for longer.

The Tandoori Grilled Chicken recipe I used is another Cooking Light recipe I found on myrecipes.com.   The recipe called for slow cooking on the grill.   For a charcoal grill, which is what I use, the recipe said to push all the coals to the outer edges of the grill and to cook the chicken in the center of the grill.   My grill isn't very large, so I followed the recommendations and with 4 pieces of chicken on the grill (2 breasts and 2 whole legs), there were no coals directly under the chicken.   But, I think had too much heat on the chicken though, because the recipe said to cook the chicken this way for 90 minutes, but my chicken cooked in 30 minutes.  

The skin on the whole chicken legs was charred pretty good, but the skin ended up coming off and the chicken underneath the skin was perfect and had a wonderful flavor from the marinade.   The chicken breasts were boneless, skinless, but they were more towards the center of the grill so they did not get charred as much.   However, since the chicken breasts no skin, it was more difficult to remove the parts which were blackened.    I prefer whole chicken legs in general and my wife likes boneless skinless chicken breasts.    My wife said she really liked the chicken breasts.

I served the chicken with raita, plain rice, Indian spiced green beans, and some Indian bread (Naan) we picked up from a local restaurant just before dinner.

For the Indian-Spiced Green Beans, I used a Cooking Light recipe for Indian-Spiced Okra substituting green beans for the Okra.   The beans turned out great.

Overall, this was a really great dinner and a definite repeat.     Next time, I will marinade the chicken longer and maybe steam the green beans a bit before cooking them to make them more tender.