Crispy Oven-baked Chicken Fingers

I feel like I've been getting behind on blogging lately, with more and more time between each post.  Granted, we were out of town this weekend and are now trying to play catch up.  I've had several people ask how I find time to write these blog posts and the truth is that a lot of other things around the house get neglected when I take time to write posts.  Mostly things like cleaning and laundry, although Joe would tell you that he's the one who really suffers, haha!  Usually he keeps himself busy with hockey things while I'm doing blog things, but now that the season is over for the Blues, he'll have to find something else to keep himself occupied.

I haven't done any fun projects around the house lately, but hopefully I'll have some time this weekend.  For now what I have for you is a chicken finger recipe that Joe and I have been making for a while.  The first time we made them was from a recipe in the Food Network Magazine and since then we've just kind of tweaked to fit whatever we happen to have in the pantry.  All you need for these chicken strips are chicken, eggs to dip the chicken in, then some sort of crushed up crunchy covering to coat the egg covered chicken :)  For the crunchy covering we've used Ritz crackers, corn flakes, regular bread crumbs, and various types of Sunchips.  I even tried pretzel bits once, but they weren't so good.  I think our favorite thing has been the Sunchips or Ritz crackers.  I've heard that crushed Cheez-its are good for this too.  Today we used some "creamy roasted garlic" Sunchips, mixed with some shredded coconut, and some plain canned breadcrumbs.  I know that the coconut sounds like a weird addition but it really was good!  It made the chicken strips taste kind of like the coconut shrimp from Outback.  Well, like I said the "recipe" is more just a guideline but here is the general idea.



Crispy Oven-baked Chicken Fingers
2 chicken breasts
1 egg - well beaten
~ 1 cup of crunchy coating
cooking spray

Cut the chicken in half lengthwise to make 2 fillets out of each piece.  Or you can cut the chicken breasts into little nugget pieces, but they cook faster as thin strips, and I'm all about fast cooking :)  If you have crackers or chips to crush, place them in a large Ziploc and use a rolling pin to crush them into nice small pieces, then add any other dry bits that you want to coat the chicken with.

Season the pieces of chicken with salt and pepper then dip each piece into the beaten egg and coat with the crunchy bits.

Arrange the chicken pieces on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper (foil will work fine too).  Bake at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes or until done.  I usually check ours with a meat thermometer, but 15 minutes was enough for the ones I made tonight since I cut them pretty thin.

Pre-baking

All done!

That's really it!  Pretty easy and delicious.  Tonight we had ours with some sketchy homemade macaroni and cheese and a spinach salad.  The mac & cheese was sketchy because I didn't have as much penne pasta as I thought so I had to break up some lasagna noodles and cook them with the penne to make enough.  Oh well, it still tasted good!