Homemade Chicken Strips, And What We Did With Them

When I find a good deal on chicken breasts, I tend to stock up.  Last time I found them on sale for $1.00/lb, I bought 7lbs.  I knew I wouldn't be cooking it right away so I threw the whole bag straight into the freezer.  This past week, I thawed out that chicken and cooked it up.

The first thing I do to the chicken, before I ever cook it is marinate it overnight in Italian salad dressing.  This is a trick I learned from my dad.  Any meat he grills, he marinates in Italian dressing, and it gives it such a great flavor, so I began experimenting with it myself, with good results!

I used half of the 7lbs of chicken, and had my husband slice it up into strips.  I've made these twice now, and I've always intended to get some into the freezer, but they always disappear before they make it there.

The meat is already flavored from the dressing, so all I do is toss it in a bit of flour and bread crumbs, and then bake them.

I had a few remaining that didn't fit on the baking sheet, so I fried them up in a little olive oil, and they came out nice a crispy. =)

The night we made the chicken strips, we decided to make chicken toaster sandwiches.  I cooked up some bacon, and we added some lettuce and ranch dressing...just like Sonic. ;)

For lunch the next day, my 2 year old and I just ate them plain, with some ketchup/BBQ sauce to dip them in.  They were delicious that way, too!


The next night (after my produce buying binge), we decided to have dinner salads (changed up the menu a bit), garnished with the chicken tenders, so we sliced the rest up to throw on top of our salads.  Then we sliced and diced some of every veggie-- and several fruits-- in the fridge.

Here's my husband's salad (I promise there's some chicken under all that ranch!):

Now my girls will eat salad, they love it in fact, but they don't like it "put together", so here's what we did for them:

And here was the final result--she actually had two more half plates full, and the little one ate everything but about half of her lettuce!

Our compost pile was even very happy about salad night:

There are so many more things that can be done with chicken strips.  They are very versatile, and very easy to make in bulk!

3.5 lbs of meat (that cost roughly $3.50) lasted us through 3 meals.

I'll be sharing what I did with the rest of the chicken later this week!