Thank you DuClaw Brewing for sponsoring this post and sending me the DuClaw Everything is Taken. All opinions and the kabob recipe are my own.

Welcome to the March edition of “Cooking with Beer”! Each month DuClaw Brewing sends me a beer and a friend and I create a recipe. It’s a fun time to think outside the box and try a new beer and new food. This month’s beer is “Everything is Taken”, a light refreshing lager with the bonus of a lot of hoppiness. I’m not gonna lie – this is not a beer I would drink. I like my beers dark and sweet. But it was good for what it was and on a hot day, it would be a nice cold beer to have at a cookout. As Beer Geek would say, it’s a good lawn mowing beer: light, refreshing, and best served ice cold. This was perhaps the hardest beer I’ve had to create a recipe for and I was flying solo this month, thanks to incompatible schedules with my co-conspirator.

Since this beer screamed summer and cookouts, I decided I’d create a recipe for grilling. And I must say, I was quite successful. I chose to marinate some chicken breasts and vegetables for kabobs on the grill. The chicken turned out moist and flavorful and the veggies were tasty as well. In fact, the mushrooms were so good, none of them even made it to the dinner table. I think the marinade would also work well as a salad dressing or in a cold grain salad of some sort. You just don’t want to cook the marinade separately at all as the hop profile quickly turns bitter.