Pignola Herb Chicken

My Thai peanut chicken recipe is so good, I've been thinking of other ways to get pulverized nut-meats onto the outside of grilled chicken. Pine nuts (pignolas) are an obvious choice. I decided one day to do a rosemary brine and basically a pine nut pesto coating for the grill. It came out super good. I have toyed now with excluding the rosemary brine and just doing a parsley/garlic/pignola pesto coating and that was almost equally as good. Next time I think I'll be trying a more intense rosemary application, like maybe blanching it and including it directly in the pesto. In any event, here's the basic formula:

Season chicken pieces in prep for grilling. This could mean an herb brine, or at minimum, salt and sit.

Put 1/2 to 1 cup pine nuts into the food processor, along with a handful of parsley or other herb and about four cloves garlic. Add salt and process, adding olive oill until the correct consistency is achieved. There should still be a few almost whole pignolas hucking around in there.

A half hour or fifteen minutes or so before grilling, toss chicken pieces with a liberal amount of pesto to coat. Let sit and then grill normally. Using a nutty oily coating makes it even more critical that one grills at the right temperature, that is, not too high. You want to avoid flare-ups and burning the nut coating. Not tasty. Do it right and you'll have speckles of black dominated mainly by golden brown nutty pasty goodness. Hit it with some lemon juice just before devouring for an extra-bright crazy experience.