oven-fried chicken tenders

It's been... a while.  I wish I could say that I've been cooking up a storm in my new kitchen, but cereal and pasta have been my good friends lately.  I finally dragged myself out of my non-eating stupor this month and decided I'd actually make dinner... a few weeks ago (I'm sorry).  I scoured my recipes for something quick, simple, and non-offensive.  I came up with oven fried chicken tenders.

This recipe once again called for panko-style bread crumbs and I finally bit the bullet and picked some up at the store.  I am glad that I did.  They stayed crispy where normal bread crumbs would have gotten soggy and gross.  I still haven't mastered the wet-hand, dry-hand method and ended up with club fingers while attempting to bread each chicken strip.

These turned out a little bland - I bought plain style bread crumbs and didn't add a great deal of seasoning.  I think that next time, I would add some herbs and spices to jazz things up a little bit.

Oven Fried Chicken Tenders
recipe from Taste & Tell

• 1.25 pounds chicken tenders or chicken breasts, cut into strips
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1 egg
• 1 tablespoon water
• 1 cup panko bread crumbs
• 1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese
• salt and pepper
• cooking spray

Preheat the oven to 425F.  Line a baking sheet with foil, then put a baking rack on top.  Spray the baking rack with cooking spray.

In one shallow dish, place the flour.  In a second shallow dish, mix the egg and the water.  In a third shallow dish, place the panko bread crumbs, the Parmesan and salt and pepper.

Dip each chicken strip into the flour, then the egg mixture, then the bread crumb mixture.  Place on the cooling rack.  Spray lightly with cooking spray. (This is where the one dry hand and one wet hand method comes in handy...)

Bake in the preheated oven for 15 to 20 minutes or until no longer pink and the coating is golden brown.

chicken

It should be pretty apparent by now that I am a fairly lazy individual.  I'd be totally satisfied eating frozen food every day and, frankly, I'm completely surprised that I'm still attempting to make my own food.  I had sort of assumed that this project would fall by the wayside shortly after I started it.  Sure, I haven't been the best at making a new recipe every week (or even making anything at all some weeks) but just the fact that I'm still going with this and have become more adventurous with food has been a source of pride for me.

That said, there are some things I just can't get behind.  Making your own mayonnaise, homemade bread (I am sure this is delicious but it seems like a lot of work.  You know what's good?  Bread from the store bakery.  It's only like $3 and costs me 0 hours of time.), and roasting your own chickens.

I love roasted chicken.  It was one of my favorite meals when I lived at my parents' house and it seemed like we had it once a week for a while.  I spent the first three years of living on my own without any roasted chicken in my life.  I had a roasting pan, but no drive to do anything with it.  I finally gave up and got rid of the roasting pan when I moved into my current apartment and it wasn't until last year that I realized that those rotisserie chickens from the grocery store are a god-send.  They are tasty, versatile, require minimal effort, and feed me for days.  This is made even sweeter by the fact that they are only $5 on Fridays at Stop & Shop.  Even so, a rotisserie chicken costs, what, $6-7?  You know what else costs $6-7?  A raw chicken that you then have to cook yourself.  I don't really get off on crafting the perfect rub of herb and spices for my chicken and so the "all natural" flavor works just fine.  It's flexible in the sense that I can then take pieces of that chicken and make many other dishes with it.

One of my favorite roasted chicken leftovers is chicken salad sandwiches.  I tend to err on the side of easy and bland when I make food, so I'm not even going to bother with a recipe.  I bought a nice baguette from the store, placed leftover chicken on it, slathered it with mayonnaise (I don't even mix it ahead of time now because I don't like how the mayonnaise soaks into the chicken over time) and topped it with a layer of almost but not quite wilted baby spinach.  It's easy enough that I can make it in my zombied before-work daze or throw it together for dinner quickly when I get home from work.

grilled chicken

The Christmas griddle was finally removed from its resting place under my butcher block and was used over the weekend.  I was originally going to do a another slow-cooker recipe this week, but I was feeling a little sorry (and guilty) for the Christmas gift that I have neglected for the past three months.  I read with trepidation the meager instructions it came with: turn on, wait for light to turn green, place food on grill, close top, remove food, eat.  I turned it on.

One of my favorite food stand-by's is Italian-dressing marinated grilled chicken.  Since I've moved away from home, I've had to satisfy myself with marinating the chicken and then baking it in the oven, which is certainly not as good as chicken fresh from the grill.  Since I am now in possession of my very own personal grill, I thought that Italian-marinated chicken would be an excellent inaugural choice.

As the grill warmed up, my kitchen was filled with the smell of melting plastic.  The instructions told me that this was normal and that I should just let the grill do its thing and the smell would dissipate over time (lie).  I retrieved my bag of marinated thin-sliced chicken breasts from the fridge and waited for the light on the grill to turn green, indicating that it was now safe to use.  It should also be known that the grill has three heating settings: low, medium, and high.  The instructions weren't clear about what setting would be ideal for my situation, so I chose "medium."  It seemed like the safest choice - not too hot, and hopefully warm enough to kill any salmonella.

I was feeling pretty confident at this point.  Once the grill had heated up, I grabbed a chicken breast and attempted to gently place it on the hot grill plates.  Here is where my confidence wavers and the story takes a dark turn.  I wasn't expecting grease to splatter so quickly from the meat onto my bare arms, but it did.  I leapt back from the grill after throwing the lid down on the chicken.  I was unclear as to how long I was supposed to leave the chicken to cook, so I approached carefully with one oven mitt on and a meat thermometer in the other hand.  Over time, I got very good at throwing the chicken down on the grill, slamming the lid closed, and leaping away while moaning in despair.

I sustained many burns that evening.

Italian Marinated Grilled Chicken

• Half bottle of Italian dressing.
• 1 lb chicken breasts (any size)
• Sandwich fixin's (ciabatta bread, baby spinach, mayonnaise, red onion in my case)

1. Marinate the chicken at least overnight in the Italian dressing.  I usually just throw it in a Ziploc bag and throw it in the fridge.
2. Cook chicken on grill.
3. Make sandwiches

devilish

As promised, I began my new recipe making on Monday night.  You may be noticing that it is Thursday right now.  Let's move on.

I perused my recipe folder* on Sunday night and decided on something called "Deviled Chicken Breasts."  Chicken is really the only meat that I eat regularly and I have a soft spot for Dijon mustard, so it sounded right up my alley.  During my lunch break on Monday, I picked up the ingredients that were missing, which included a bottle of Chardonnay that will play a significant role later on.

I left work at 6, already dreading having to make dinner when I got home.  I am starving.  My sink is filled with dirty dishes left over from the weekend (Saturday and Sunday are generally my no-doing-dishes days).  My freezer is full of frozen chicken products that I could easily throw in the microwave and eat, tempting me.  I envision a particular disappointed looking face and persevere.  Let's do this.

For some reason, I seem to be lacking very specific adult skills.  I don't know if it is because I didn't go to high school, or if I'm just an idiot.  For instance, I have no idea how to style my hair or apply makeup successfully.  I also cannot open wine bottles.  A week ago I was at Trader Joe's (purchasing the aforementioned frozen chicken products) and impulse bought a $2.99 corkscrew (and a 29cent chocolate bar).  I felt so adult, imagining all the bottles of wine I would open and pour for all my friends at dinner parties (false).  I confidently screwed it into the cork and attempted to press down to pull the cork out.  The edge of the bottle seemed so far away from the metal part of the corkscrew and it would not latch on.  The bottle and I struggled for a good 10 minutes, during which I sent a flurry of fevered text messages and cursed Joe for his cheap goods.  I had witnessed the opening of wine bottles hundreds of times by now, why is this so difficult?  It finally popped out (through methods unclear to me), and I could get on with it.

The rest of the preparation went relatively smoothly.  The only tip I have to offer you, is to not submerge hands with cuts on them into the mixture of wine and mustard.

* Before I moved, I wanted to cut down on the amount of stuff I had to bring with me, so I went through most of my recipe books and marked all the ones that sounded appealing.  I then created a document template and just plugged recipe after recipe in. I had grand ideas to print them all out and organize them in a binder, but only got about halfway through before I lost steam/was no longer unemployed.

Deviled Chicken
Adapted from: Healthy Cooking for Two
makes: 4 chicken breasts

• 4 chicken breasts
• 1/4 cup dijon mustard
• 1/4 cup dry white wine
• 1 tbsp olive oil 
• 1/2 tsp thyme
• hot sauce to taste
• 1/4 cup minced garlic
• 1 cup bread crumbs

1.  Preheat oven to 375°F.
2. In a small bowl, whisk together the mustard, wine, oil, thyme and hot sauce.  Stir in the shallots/onions.
3. Place the bread crumbs in a shallow dish.  Roll the chicken in the mustard mixture, then in the bread crumbs to coat.
4. Arrange in a single layer in the prepared pan and bake on the top shelf of the oven for 35-45 minutes, or until the crumb coating is browned and the juices run clear.