I Immediately Regret This Decision! Chicken Tenders (with Parmesan Cheese)

I have some chicken tenders from a while ago. I looked up some recipes online and most of them looked pedestrian so I was like, alright Giada, I’ll trust you on this one.

Ingredients: chicken tenders, bread crumbs, parmesan cheese, milk, and stuff. The recipe called for some buttermilk, to which I responded “wtf is a buttermilk?” My first instinct was to mix some butter with milk, but according to wikipedia it actually has less fat content than milk, and also is kind of sour. Well, I just happen to have some skim milk that’s starting to go sour…

Soak chicken in milk. Mix bread crumbs with parmesan cheese.

I distinctly remember my thought process went like this: “oh, I have some herbs. I’ll just add some herbs. What doesn’t taste better with more herbs?” As soon as I put it into the mix, though, I immediately regretted my decision. For one, there was too much of it. I was worried the breading mixture wasn’t going to adhere properly to the chicken. I was also worried the herbs were just going to be burnt to a crisp.

I am so incredibly bad at drizzling oil.

Into the oven!

I didn’t want to waste the extra breading mix I had, so I just put it into the oven and hoped that something delicious would come out… and it did!

The dipping sauce is basically balsamic vinegar.

Moneyshot. It’s not as golden as I thought it would be. I’m not sure if that’s because of my terrible oil drizzling, or if I just didn’t leave it in there long enough.

Steamed Chicken with Ginger & Scallion Sauce

I’ve tried to replicate this dish from JJR restaurant several times, and have been met with nothing but abject failure. I don’t know how the restaurant does it, but it’s not at all like when I make it. Le sigh. In any case.

Ingredients: chicken, ginger, onion.

I don’t have a steamer so this is my set up, lol.

Meanwhile, ginger & onion, with some salt.

This is the cool part. Heat up some oil until it’s hot enough to fry (I used some peanut oil), and pour it over the dry ingredients. Tzzzzzzzzzzz

November to December is Chicken (Breast) Month

Finally and for a limited time only, the chicken breasts at Ralph’s is $2 per pound again. Oh, how I have waited for this glorious day!

About $30's worth of chicken breasts... plus Justin's TV dinners

As a certain idiot I know is fond of saying, “Oh! You are definitely the Chicken Monster!”

Since I have all of this lovely breast at my disposal now, I am declaring the time from now until I go on Winter Break National Chicken (Breast) Month. I’ve had this idea to do themed months for a while now. Basically, I’ll pick one ingredient, or form of food (such as sammeches), as the theme, and for one month I will play out all its variations. During this month I will make, amongst other things, Chicken Marsala, Chicken Kiev, Chicken Parmasan, Chicken Cutlet Curry… You get the idea.

I play with the ingredients I have, so today, I made this… I guess if it had a name it would be something like Tea Fried Chicken… with Mushroom. This is something I noticed on my trip to the motherland, that they would use tea in their dishes as herbs, like we would use basil. I tried looking up the recipe online, but couldn’t find it. All the tea chicken recipes I found would use tea, the beverage, for the sauce. The dish I had in mind is very dry, and uses the tea leaves as herb.

So, I winged it (I have got to remember this one for National Wing Month). It was kind of scary going solo, but it worked out okay, I think.

Ingredients: chicken, oil for frying, (green) tea leaves, and mushroom

These are apparently mushrooms that grow on tea trees? I am not sure.

Rinse & soak in warm water. I think I should have cut the mushrooms in half; they’re kind of long.

Cut the chicken into bite size cubes, dry, and rub with some salt. Fry.

When chicken is done, add–dried chili, tea leaves, and I used a bit of garlic. I have long learned that if you put the spices in first, they will get burnt because it takes so much longer to cook the meat. So what I do is fry the meat spiceless until it’s basically done, then push the meat to the side of the wok so that the bottom can heat up to sufficient frying temperature, then add the spices. Or you can take the meat out if you’re making a sauce.

Add mushroom and sauces (I used a dash of soy sauce–chicken broth might also be good, or the water from soaking the mushroom); salt again.

Moneyshot