Mel’s Chicken

This dish turned out to be a favorite for my entire household. My wife and sister in law both love it, and I like to make it as a healthy leftover for dinners for the kids.

Ingredients
2 packs of thinly sliced chicken brests.
3/4 box of corn flakes
About a quart of buttermilk.
2-3 tbsp of brown sugar.
2 to 3 tsp kosher salt
1-2 tsp peprika
1-2 tsp pepper
A cup of dry oatmeal, steel cut or minute ready, doesn’t matter.
Some garlic salt, some fresh chives, a dash of oregano, and a dash of parsley flakes.

Prep
Preheat the oven to 400.

Combine all the dry goods into a food processor for a fairly fine mixture. To keep some texture, save a little oatmeal for last. It shouldn’t be powder, but it is going to be a breading. Taste the mixture, if it doesn’t taste quite right, add in whatever you think it needs.

Put the buttermilk in one flat dish, maybe one of those smaller glass casserole pans that’s kind of shallow. Put the dry mixture in another.

Pam/Olive oil two cookie sheets — and nonstick will work just fine.

Rinse the chicken and pat dry or at least shake all the water off.

Press the chicken into dry mixture just to get some texture on the slick chicken. Make sure there’s a light coating of the dry mixture on there, not much but at least a dusting. It helps absorb more buttermilk and that’s what makes this dish taste good. Then stick the chicken in the buttermilk, cover it, and put it back in the dry mixture to finish the breading. Place on the cookie sheet.

Cooking
Throw the two cookie sheets full of chicken-fried-steak looking chicken into the oven and cook for 8 minutes. Pull one pan out, flip, pull the other pan out, flip, and then cook for another five minutes.

Cooling
After you take it out, you have to let it set a few minutes so the breading stays on. Once it’s cooled, maybe 20 minutes or so, serve, or stick it in the fridge for the babysitters to find later.

A good trick for presentation (and flavor)
This dish does look a little dry and powdery when it comes out of the oven. If that matters to you, you cold try sprinkling a few drops of buttermilk on top of the chicken right before you put it in the oven. If you look closely at the picture, you can see some browning. That browning is exactly where the buttermilk was drizzled on. The dish will be moist no matter what, but the drizzle makes it look more appealing to kids.

You really can’t go wrong with this one.