Baked "Fried Chicken"

Yes, you can make fried chicken by using your oven! There is no extra fat or grease involved, and it's just as good as the greasy kind, but healthier!

You can coat your chicken with any type of recipe you like. I do a typical coating of flour mixed with some paprika and season salt, then the chicken is dipped in milk, lastly coated in a store bought extra crispy seasoned chicken fry mix. Layer your cookie sheet with foil with a rack on top so the extra oil/grease that falls naturally falls away from the chicken will be collected in the foil, and will help keep the chicken from sitting in its own fat. I baked it at 375 degrees for about 45 minutes to an hour depending on how large the pieces were. Most online recipes say to coat the outside of the skin with some butter or fat in the last coating process, but a healthier tip is about halfway through the baking process, "baste" the outside of the chicken with it's own grease so the outside can continue to "fry."

This oven fried chicken was served with white rice and a spinach salad. A little guilty, but mostly healthy!

I have a secret: I like my fried chicken with ketchup! Classy, right?

Soup and Salad To Go

On days when I leave work really late, I like to stop by Market Street and help myself to their amazing salad bar and soups. My favorite soup from them is the loaded baked potato soup. It's soooo good!

Market Street's salad bar has a great selection of whatever you can think of to put on a salad with a variety of different types of lettuce, cold pasta salads, unique items like tabbouleh and hummus, and mixed fruit! One of my favorites is the mixed tortellini and chicken pasta salad (shown below).

Mixed fruit, tortellini and chicken pasta salad, and spring mix salad.

And if you're wondering why there's only one pickled okra all by it's lonesome, it's because I was curious about what it tasted like. I've never had okra in pickled form. The verdict: yum!

Simplicity

I recently bought some chicken thighs at the grocery store that were on sale, $0.77 per pound! So the next two posts will consist of two different chicken dishes. I wanted something simple and easy to make, but still tasted like it took a lot of effort to prepare.

All I did was take some chicken thighs and generously sprinkle lemon pepper seasoning and extra black pepper all over the chicken. I opted to not add any extra oil to them because chicken thighs are the more fatty part of the chicken, and the skin was also still on it. I baked the chicken skin side up for about 30-40 mins at 375 degrees until the skin was a nice crispy golden brown. Since the extra fat should melt right off of the chicken as it's baking, I put the chicken on some foil with the edges turned up so that the foil catches any of the extra liquid. All of this is put on a cookie sheet so everything was easier to transfer in and out of the oven.

Since the chicken is a dark meat, I decided to serve it alongside some romaine lettuce with sun dried tomato vinaigrette to balance the fattiness of the dark meat and the lightness of the salad.

This meal tastes great the next day as well. I took some leftovers for lunch at work and it was really satisfying. I do recommend though that any time you pack a salad, to pack the salad separately from the dressing so it does not become soggy.