Chicken Tenders

I get an email about once a week from Kraft where they give a few recipes and advertise one of their products. In this week's email the main recipe was chicken tenders with Shake and Bake. The recipe was simple and the chicken tenders looked mighty tasty. I already had the chicken but no Shake and Bake mix; so in my avoidance of going to the grocery store twice in one week and my desire to make things homemade whenever I can, I made my own Shake and Bake coating mix.

I looked up the ingredients of Shake and Bake on the Kraft website and saw that is was basically just flour and spices. I took it a step further and used dried bread and seasons that I made into a semi-powder in the food processor. I have a little 1 cup processor that worked great for this. To get the dried bread I put a few slices of bread into the toaster oven for about 45 minutes at 200 degrees. The spices I used were pepper, garlic salt, onion powder, and paprika.

And just like Shake and Bake all that I needed to do was put the chicken strips in a bag with the coating mix and shake. I baked the tenders for about 30 minutes in the toaster oven set at 350 degrees. The chicken tenders came out perfectly. The seasonings blended together really well and the coating stuck to the chicken (past attempts to bread chicken had resulted in a pile of breading and a bare chicken piece).

Although there is no picture, I also made some Mrs. T's mini-perogies to go with my meal. Instead of pan frying them after boiling, I too put them in the toaster oven. I gave them a quick spray with non-stick cooking spray and then seasoned them with a little salt and pepper. The baked perogies had the crispness of pan frying but without the extra butter and oil.

Both of these are recipes I will use again. The homemade coating mix was so easy to do and much cheaper than any store bought mix. Plus this way I was able to adjust the spices to my liking. I am already thinking about altering the spices to include more italian seasonings and using it for a chicken parmesan meal. I'll be sure to post the results.