Chip Chick

Evidently I was a fairly picky eater as a child.  My grandmother still reminds me of what a picky eater I was (I am now thirty-seven), and how I created such a burden on her and my mother.  Now that I am a mother myself I apologize whole-heartedly to whoever I inconvenienced with my pickiness.  I anticipate the roar of applause as I now declare, “My middle daughter is VERY picky.”  What goes around comes around I guess.

Some moms I know will create vastly different meals for each person in their family….like my kitchen is a restaurant?  Whatever.  I say those kinds of moms need to drink more wine while they are cooking.  We have two rules in my kitchen.  #1 : If mommy doesn’t like it, it will most likely never be made. #2 : Three out of five Pentons must  like it, or it will not be made again.  My husband really doesn’t like the first rule.  It means that he never gets goulash or onion rings.  (Give me a break, I don’t like the way onions crunch in my mouth and my goulash is NEVER as good as my mother-in-law’s, so why try?).   The second rule is great though.  Who wants to make something for dinner that makes 2 out of 3 of your kids cry?  

With an ULTRA picky eater in the house it is rare to find a recipe that the whole family likes.  If I followed my daughter's lead, we would alternate spaghetti and cheese pizza every night until she went to college.  Thankfully Chip Chick has secured a spot in her cute but persnickety mouth!

In one of my all-time favorite cookbooks, “One Bite Won’t Kill You”, by Ann Hodgman, she describes Chip Chick like this….. “It’s not hard for homemade chicken fingers to be better than McNuggets, which taste like dog meat.  But this recipe is much, much better….and much, much easier than driving a cranky bunch of children to McDonald’s.”  Ahhhhh….she is so wise.

 

Ingedients:

·        1 ½ pounds of boneless chicken breasts or chicken tenderloins

·        1 large egg

·        ¼ cup milk

·        ¼ teaspoon pepper

·        2 6 ounce bags any-flavor potato chips.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees and cover a cooking sheet with cooking spray.  Cut the chicken into tenders if you have the breasts or you can even do nuggets.  Beat together egg, milk, and pepper in a medium bowl.  Crush the chips.  It seems like a lot but you will need a nice deep layer of them so just do it already!  I like to make an assembly line like this….

Now flop and press the chicken in the chips until they are well coated and put them on a cookie sheet.  I did Ruffle’s Cheddar and Sour Cream and two Pringle’s Jalapeño (for my spicy husband) on this tray.

Bake for 10 minutes.  Turn them and bake for about 10 more minutes.  They should be starting to brown.  Serve with dipping sauces…ranch, sweet-n-sour, bbq…..or your picky eater can just have ketchup.  Yuck.  Get fancy and make a Ceasar salad for the more mature paletes in your family.