Crunchy Baked Chicken and Oven Fries

Crunchy Baked Chicken and Oven Fries

I got this recipe from the Kroger coupons that they send in the mail.  Usually I don't think their recipes sound very good but this one intrigued me because it used FRENCH FRIED ONIONS in the breading.  Yum, yum.  I thought it would go really well with a recipe I just found for oven-fried potatoes.  So this is a dual-recipe post.

Oven Fries

from Brooklyn Supper

2-3 Idaho potatoes (Brooklyn Supper recommends 4-5 yukon gold potatoes but I couldn't find any)

2-3 tbsp olive oil

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 425.  Cut potatoes into wedges, which took me a few tries to figure out how to get wedges!

I guess this is where the Yukon golds would come in handy--they are smaller, and probably wouldn't need to be cut in half.

After you get your potatoes cut, start on:

Crunchy Baked Chicken

2 eggs

1 cup milk

1 6oz. can French-fried onions, crushed

1 cup Parmesan cheese, grated

1 cup plain bread crumbs

1 tsp paprika

1 tsp salt

½ tsp pepper

6 chicken breast halves (or drumsticks, leg quarters, etc.)

Combine egg and milk in shallow dish and whisk until blended.  

Combine the onions, cheese, bread crumbs, paprika, salt and pepper in a shallow dish and mix well.   

If you aren't crazy about onion flavor, leave out the french-fried onions.  But if you really like onion flavor you would love this.  The onions made this super flavorful and were making me salivate at this point.

Take a break and go take pictures of this.

As you can see, I made an enormous amount of chicken.  If you were going to just do 4 chicken breasts you could certainly cut all of the amounts in half and use the smaller can of french fried onions.

Dip the chicken in the egg mixture and then roll in the bread crumb mixture to coat.

 Place chicken in a large glass baking dish.  Bake at 350 for 30-40 minutes, depending on how thick your breasts are, until cooked through.

After you pop the chicken in the oven, you can return to your fries.

Apparently what makes fries soggy is the starch.  But you can rinse the starch off by putting them in a bowl, filling it with water, letting them soak a few minutes and drain.  Do this twice, then again but this time put ice in the bowl too.

Lay out on a paper towel and pat dry.

Pour 2-3 tbsp olive oil on a cookie sheet and add fries.  DON'T sprinkle with salt and pepper yet.

This is where I started to lose control and didn't get in-process pictures of my fries.  Pop in the oven for 30 minutes, turning every 10 minutes.  Sprinkle with salt and pepper.  They were nice and crispy and a perfect compliment to the chicken.

Thanks for the recipe, Kroger Associate David!

Notes:  On the chicken, I actually think that this turned out much better with the chicken breast halves than with the drumsticks.  And that is saying something because I generally am not a big fan of chicken breast meat.  I also think it might be interesting to substitute the milk for buttermilk--yum--and pan-fry the chicken in butter.  I know, bad.  It's a lot healthier to bake but no matter what you do, if you are baking chicken with breadcrumbs the bottom half gets soggy.  You could pan-fry it in a non-stick skillet with butter-flavored Pam.  But I have done that before with my chicken parmesan and it requires A LOT of Pam.  And I have to wonder if a pat of butter isn't healthier than all that Pam.