Great People Great Potatoes and Grilled Chicken Thighs

I love my wife. We are completely compatible, pretty much. She doesn’t mind me spending time on the computer checking out all my favorite college football teams and watching them on TV, including classic games from the past as well as my many video tapes of games that I watch over and over. She is also always, mostly, gracious about me and the boys taking off to go fishing whenever we get the urge, and not least of her many attributes is the fact that she prefers white meat over dark.

I am a dark meat lover, and because my wife prefers white I rest easy at night knowing that when we go down to the local grocery store for an eight piece bag of fried chicken there will be plenty of thighs and drums for me. Unless the kids are around. Those little buggers just reach right into the bag and grab whatever is handy without any regard to which is a thigh and which one is a breast. If I had my druthers they would all get wings but there are only two to an eight piece order of fried chicken and somehow that’s usually what’s left in the bag when it finally makes its way over to me.

The other day, just to try and out smart them, I brought home several packages of boneless skinless thighs that were on sale. Of course they were on sale, that’s the only way I buy meat. Chicken thighs with the bone and skin intact are usually a dollar a pound or less than the boneless thighs which makes usually makes them the better value. Just remember that bone in thighs have about 50 percent waste in the form of bone and fat. Anyhow I marinated them in a little soy sauce, olive oil and seasonings and then threw them on a medium hot grill for about five minutes on each side. They were really good and for once there was enough dark meat for me.

We also fixed up some new potatoes with milk and peas to go along with the grilled chicken thighs. Talking about good. Man we were in heaven.

When I lived in Oregon we used to hear all the time about Idaho potatoes and how good they were, like Idaho had some kind of monopoly on growing good potatoes or something. What, we don’t grow good potatoes in Oregon?

After living here for about five years now I have admit that Idaho does grow a pretty good potato. I guess you can’t always go on assumptions. Like I always assumed that Idaho potatoes weren’t any better than ours in Oregon and I assumed that all the people in Idaho were just like those people in the Napoleon Dynamite movie. Well I’m glad to say that I was wrong. The potatoes are great!

Herb Steinman our farmer buddy across the street and a local native Idahoan that doesn’t resemble Napoleon Dynamite in anyway brought us a bucket full of little new cal whites and russet potatoes. Vickie, my wonderful and longsuffering wife, boiled them up nice and tender and set them to the side. She then placed enough milk in a different sauce pan to cover the potatoes. Then she warmed up the milk until good and hot. Then she added corn starch that she premixed in cold milk to the heated milk, heating and stirring, until the milk was nice and thick. Then she added fresh peas from the garden (frozen peas work just fine) and the tender new boiled potatoes. Then she seasoned with salt and pepper to taste and that’s it.

Simple and delicious. Those Idaho new potatoes were so good that they were actually sweet and they complimented the boneless skinless grilled thighs nicely.

Normally I purchase boneless skinless breasts over boneless skinless thighs because as a rule the thighs are more expensive since they are rarely on sale. Boneless skinless breasts are on sale all the time at really good prices and are a great value. There aren’t very many cuts of meat of any kind that will get you the kind of value that boneless chicken breast do.