Dinner for an overambitious day: Chicken with Sumac

I can tell that autumn is approaching because we've started cooking ambitious meals again. During the summer dinner tends to be pretty minimalist and involve the grill, and most of my creativity goes into creating new drinks to sip while I sit on the deck watching my husband cook (don't give me that look - the shoe fits on the other foot plenty of times, I assure you!).

I'm cooking a pretty significant dinner later this fall so I've been spending a lot of time with my cookbooks, including a bargain-bin gem called The Food and Cooking of the Middle East that I picked up on a whim at Barnes & Noble earlier this year. This particular cookbook has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the upcoming dinner, but I love it because it's full of recipes for food that I've never heard of. I really like Middle Eastern food but many of the cookbooks I come across - like many restaurant menus - seem to cover a fairly limited range of recipes. When I picked this up in the store, I'd never heard of the first 3 recipes I saw. Sold! And it has not disappointed; this may be the first cookbook I make cover-to-cover.

The mad genius I married also loves Middle Eastern food and has really missed the bread. He's been working on a recipe that makes a really fine approximation of a thick, chewy pita so it only makes sense go cook dinners that go with it (and give him an excuse to keep making it - this is not going to be for special occasions only). The first time he made pita we wildly underestimated the amount of time/energy/mess this would require; we looked at the flour coating every single surface in our kitchen and decided that the dinner part of dinner needed to be a lot less ambitious. Chicken to the rescue! This recipe calls for wrapping the bread around the chicken and eating it like a sandwich, but the GF pita isn't quite as pliable as the wheat kind so we just piled everything on it and ate it like a pizza.

We went from Hungry Panic Mode to sitting at the table in just about 25 minutes - highly recommended for those times when your ambition has exceeded your limits and everybody just wants to eat.

Chicken with Sumac 

 2 tbsp olive oil
2 onions, sliced
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 lb boneless skinless chicken, cut into thin strips
2-3 tsp sumac (bought at our local Middle Eastern grocery' I don't think you're likely to find this in the spice aisle of Kroger. But I could be wrong.)
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground allspice
1 lemon, juiced
salt and pepper
1 small bunch parsley, chopped
pita
plain Greek yogurt for serving (optional but tasty)

Heat the olive oil in a large skillet and add the onions. When they start to soften, add the garlic and continue cooking until the onions are very soft and golden brown, about 10 minutes. Add the chicken and sumac to the pan and cook, stirring constantly, about 2-3 minutes. Season with salt and pepper and add the cinnamon, allspice, and lemon juice; cook another 5-10 minutes until the chicken is completely cooked (this goes faster if you've cut the chicken into thinner strips).

Serve the chicken on or next to your pita bread; you may want to warm the bread in the oven while the chicken is cooking. Garnish with the parsley and a dollop of yogurt.