Homemade Chicken Nuggets

Every kid loves chicken nuggets right? Especially the Mcdonald’s ones…mmmm. At our place the hubs is a huge fan of them but the Little Monkey isn’t. That said.. chicken is her favourite or so she says. In one of my random kitchen experiments I figured out a way to make a semi healthy version of chicken nuggets that she’ll actually eat! I even tested it out on my wine club and they loved the pairing with a waffle and chilli sauce.

So as I sit exhausted after an all day conference (Women in Business Network), I am going to share a very easy chicken recipe that can  score you smiles from toddler right through to the snobby wine guzzling adult!

Cut chicken into chunks and marinate in your favourite sauce. It can be anything from salad dressing to wing sauce! For us I chose the Nando’s wing sauce since I was craving some of their famous chicken.

I tried this two ways. An impulse session saw me marinating in the sauce pan directly (so technically… I didn’t really marinate. I just cooked it) and then the next time I marinated it overnight. There was a difference. It wasn’t very pronounced but the overnight version had more flavour.

I like cooking the chicken first because I’m overly cautious about avoiding raw chicken and because there’s more flavour this way. Cool cooked chicken.

Take a bowl with enough flour to dust all your chicken pieces. Add salt, garlic powder and paprika (if you want more heat) and mix it all up. Fill another bowl with some milk . You have two bowls and guess what you need to do? You got it! Dip in milk and then the flour.

Let the chicken sit for about 15 minutes so that the flour gets a bit of a pasty feel. It’s totally cool if you forget about it and come back an hour later. Good thing it was all fully cooked!

Next up you dip the chicken in milk again and then either in bread crumbs or panko. I personally like the panko so that’s what we use. Final step involves frying the chicken. I don’t like deep frying so I just put a centimeter of oil in a shallow pan and ‘fry’ the pieces.

The Little Monkey likes eating it solo but the waffles with sweet chili sauce was a popular choice at wine club. I experimented with this last month and we’ve had three times already. Clearly a keeper and fairly easy to make.

Do you have a good fried chicken recipe or trick to get that crust oh so crispy? Please do share!