Tortilla Chip Chicken

Last Monday, coming home after Heidi’s wedding weekend and prior to that, our staycation, I found that our house was void of food. I decided that I’d try to make do with what we had here for as many meals as possible, delaying a trip to the grocery store as long as possible. So I planned out our meals…and found that I had saved from the week before a bag of crushed up tortilla chips. Normally I’ll just throw away what’s in the bottom of the bag, but this time it was so many that I just threw them in a little ziploc and thought, “surely I can do something with this!”

I decided to try to bread chicken with it, and was just going to use my own recipe but gave the internet a quick scan first. And I found this Southern Living recipe! I adapted the seasonings a bit to our taste, and will make a couple of changes next time, so here is my take on the recipe:

1 pound chicken breast tenders (do make sure that they’re fairly thin; mine weren’t and I didn’t have time to cut them up, but I definitely will next time)
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon chipotle chili powder (really, any chili or pepper powder will do)
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
2 large eggs (I think I’ll just use the whites next time…reduces calories and fat, and I don’t think you’ll notice the difference)
2 garlic cloves, pressed
Vegetable cooking spray
2 cups crushed tortilla chips (they don’t need to be powdery by any means, but do make sure they’re crushed pretty well; also, it didn’t take this much for me to be able to coat three big pieces of chicken, so if you don’t have this much you’re probably fine)

1. Preheat oven to 425°. Sprinkle chicken with pepper.

2. Stir together 1/3 cup flour and next 2 ingredients.

3. Whisk eggs just until foamy, and stir in pressed garlic.

4. Place a wire rack coated with cooking spray in a 15- x 10-inch jelly-roll pan. (I didn’t use a wire rack and it turned out fine)

5. Dredge chicken tenders in flour mixture, shaking off excess; dip in egg mixture, and dredge in crushed tortilla chips. Lightly coat chicken on each side with cooking spray; arrange chicken on wire rack.

6. Bake at 425° for 18 to 20 minutes or until golden brown and done, turning once after 12 minutes.

I did this on Friday, a day that I for some reason decided would be a good time to try three new recipes…that’s a lot of potential failure for one day, but really, they all turned out good! The boys ate this fine, and Matt liked it, too, but wished that the chicken-to-breading ratio had been better, so I’ll fix that next time.

I’ll post all 3 of the recipes here.