Crispy Chicken Tenders

I'm always one for fried food, but sometimes you just need a simple alternative especially when you don't have a deep fryer at home. This recipe is from a book called "Cook Yourself Thin," which offers tasty substitutions for your favorite meals. While I'm not necessarily interested in the cook yourself "thin" part, I am interested in the cook yourself "healthy" part.

Also, I had a half-empty box of organic cornflakes that were soon-to-be stale if not used in a heavy-handed fashion.

So I decided to give this recipe a try.

The key part of this recipe was the buttermilk marinade, which make the chicken tender and very flavorful.

For the chicken marinade:
2 cloves garlic, smashed
1/4 teaspoon dried thyme
1 bay leaf
2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/2 cup nonfat buttermilk

1. Combine all these ingredients in a large bowl. Place 1 pound of chicken tenders in the marinade and cover and refrigerate for 1 hour.



2. Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees. Cover a baking sheet with foil and spray with cooking oil. Set aside until chicken is ready.

3. Mash up 1.5 cups of cornflakes into medium crumbs for breading.



4. Drain the chicken from marinade. Pick up chicken tenders one by one and turn it in the cornflakes. Since I like extra crispy breading, I tended to smash as much cornflake breading as I could on to each chicken tender. Arrange on baking sheet.



5. Bake in 400 degree oven for approximately 15 minutes until the cornflakes are nicely toasted and chicken is cooked through.



* My only complaint about this recipe was that while top side of the chicken tender was nice and crispy the underside tended to be soggy after a while. To prevent this, one idea is to bake the chicken tenders on a rack. Another idea is to flip the tenders half way to make sure both sides are crispy.

If you try these ideas, please let me know how it turns out!

Chicken Marsala

After a year of staring at the same bottle of Marsala wine in our wine rack, I decided it was time to try the classic Chicken Marsala.



I followed a pretty simplistic recipe:

1/4 cup all-purpose flour for coating
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
4 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves - pounded 1/4 inch thick
4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup sliced mushrooms
1/2 cup Marsala wine
1/4 cup cooking sherry

1. Pound the chicken breasts into 1/4 inch thick pieces. I didn't have a meat tenderizer or mallet so instead I used a rolling pin, which also did the trick.



2. In a shallow dish or bowl, mix together the flour, salt, pepper and oregano. Coat chicken pieces in flour mixture.

3. In a large skillet, melt butter in oil over medium heat. Place chicken in the pan, and lightly brown. Turn over chicken pieces, and add mushrooms. Pour in wine and sherry. Cover skillet; simmer chicken 10 minutes, turning once, until no longer pink and juices run clear.







4. Once the chicken was cooked, I realized that with this recipe all of the sauce was gone except for leftover thickened sauce sticking to the sides of the pan! Having watched one too many Food Network shows, I quickly removed the mushrooms and chicken. Then poured some chicken stock into the pan and promptly started scraping the thickened sauce off the pan.

5. I let the chicken stock and sauce reduce and added some flour to thicken the sauce a little bit.

And.... tada!

Chicken Marsala on a bed of Linguine topped with grated parmesan cheese.

Food for thought.

No new cooking adventures this week...

Instead, KK and I have been digging through cookbooks for new recipes for this week!



Question: Why is it so normal to eat one of these....?



But then feels so odd to eat one of these....?



Off to more cooking this week!!!