THE MINIMALIST; A Mystery Is Solved: It's the Lemon

THE skewer is one of the most efficient tools in a cook's arsenal: once all the cutting is done, you can grill a lot of food in a short time, and take it right to the table with no further fuss.

One of my favorite foods to cook this way is chicken, but it presents a challenge: small chunks of chicken, especially breast meat, cook through before they have a chance to brown. Keep them on the fire any longer and you end up with dry, stringy meat. This summer, I decided to solve the problem.

My basic idea was to protect the chicken, to insulate it with foods that would give up moisture as they cooked. First I tried sausage, thinking that the fat would do the trick; it made a good flavor combination, but most of today's sausage is too lean to help the moisture problem.

So I turned to vegetables, specifically eggplant and zucchini, both quite watery but with enough integrity to stand up to skewering and grilling. This helped, but the chicken was still too dry. So I focused on it: I used only thighs, which are more moist and stand up better to grilling than breasts, and I cut them into larger chunks.

Better still. But the skewers needed a bit more moisture. I didn't want to use olive oil (I wanted to reduce flare-ups, not encourage them). So I tried some pieces of lemon on the skewers, and that really did the trick: The results were moist and flavorful, and the hot lemon juice squeezed over everything else at the table was lovely.

A few words about the actual skewers. Branches of rosemary are ideal: slide the food right onto them and they will flavor it brilliantly. With wood or metal, turning is easier if you use two parallel sticks for each skewer, separated by about half an inch.