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Okay, I hearby promise that the rest of this entry will be devoid of rhyming.

Instead, I will tell you all about these awesome chicken nachos my boyfriend and I made.

We experimented with the chicken marinade/rubs, so there are actually three different flavors of chicken in there. Yum…

These were all the ingredients we used. As you can see, we just went nuts. It was fun.

Dish one was an ordinary dry rub. I forgot what was in it. I apologize. I wasn’t paying too much attention. I was much too excited about dish two, which is where we tried to recreate the chicken they use at Chipotle restaurant.

I’m from the Albany, New York area, and I live there now, but for some years in between I lived in Denver, Colorado. Chipotle stores are every three feet in Denver, so it was inevitable that I’d go in someday. Once I did, I was hooked.

It’s ridiculous. They have a ton of options, but I order the same, plain thing every time: chicken tacos with cheese. That’s it. No salsa. No guacamole. No nothing. Just the yummy, yummy chicken offset with some cheese. I’d get it a few times a week. Kinda sad really. But I have no shame, so I don’t care.

I went for years without it, once I moved away. It made me sad, but that’s life. I always kept an eye out though, to see if they would ever expand this way. And a few months ago, they finally did.

I’ve settled back into the old routine. We’ve reached the point where the folks behind the counter knew what I wanted without me telling them, just like their counterparts all over Denver, lol.

So, yeah. If I could create that flavoring on my own, I’d be so happy. It turns out I have some work to do though. That smokey flavor is hard to get! Seriously, if anyone reading this works there, or knows someone who works there, hook me up. We used hot sauce, dried chipotle and some balsamic vinegar. And cilantro and garlic. I think that’s it. I should have written it down, lol.

The third dish was my boyfriend’s special, make-it-up-as-he-goes-along concoction. I liked it the best out of the three, due to the lovely sweet and spicy mix he had going on. He used brown sugar and cocoa for the sweetness, cumin, oregano, and cilantro for the inbetween, and sriracha for the heat - that’s a Thai hot sauce for those of you (like me) not in the know. Plus some salt and pepper just for fun. The end result was really tasty all by itself, but the subtlety was overwhelmed by the rest of the nacho stuff, like the cheese and sour cream.

That was my common complaint actually. The nacho stuff tended to drown out a lot of the seasoning. I’m not sure if that means more seasoning or less other crap though, lol. Next time, we have plans to marinate them longer than two hours, baste while grilling, and to actually tenderize them and flatten them out to increase the surface area of the chicken. That all should help.

My boyfriend liked the dry rub the best, actually. I appreciated the crispy crust it made, I didn’t like that the chicken was dry compared to the marinades.

It was really weird to me how different each piece of chicken looked after marinating for a while. I should have been surprised by the different staining, but I was.