Hi! I’m Betty, welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. Tonight, we’re making an entrée called herb seasoned chicken crunch. And it’s made of chicken tenderloins and that’s where we’re going to start. Right here, I’m going to show you the bag that I got. This is actually 3 pounds worth but I’m only using 2 pounds in this recipe. This is boneless skinless chicken tenderloins and they’re in the frozen food section, at least at my grocery store.

And what I need to do is season them up a little bit. So I’m going to use some meat tenderizer. This has no MSG. It’s totally harmless, but it works for tenderizing and also it gives a nice salty flavor. Not too salty but it adds the needed salt for this. So just a little bit of that and then I’m going to use some freshly ground black pepper.

I’m going to start making a little sauce that we’ll be dipping the chicken into. And that sauce is made of cream and mushroom. I haven’t used mushroom that’s canned. This can is 23 ounces and it’s healthy, so it’s 98% fat free. I’ll try to get the half of your pan. I’m going to put that 1/3 of a cup. I didn’t say 1/3 of the can, it’s 1/3 of a cup of cream of mushroom soup, condensed into a little pulp. And then with that, I’m going to put some milk. This is skimmed milk. You can use regular if you like ¼ cup and then mix them with that. We’re going to put one tablespoon of onion. These would be chopped very find. So we have that. And those are the three items that we’re going to use for our dipping sauce. I’ll get this ready and then I’ll talk about what we’re going to put the chicken into after it takes a little bath in the dipping sauce.

I have stirred this until it’s ready for dipping so I’m going to set that aside and move on to show you what I’m going to mix up in this zip lock bag. I’ve taken probably two cup’s worth of cornbread stuffing. I usually like to get the herb seasoned because it has some flavors already in it so you might want to do that. But you could see, let me show you inside, it’s pretty crumbly but not quite crumbly enough to stick as well as I would want. So I take what I want and put it in a zip lock bag which I closed at the top and then I use a rolling pin and just crushed this. Just roll it—I really pressed down hard because you want those crumbs to be very fine. If they’re not very fine, they will not stick to your chicken. Now, I want to put some fresh herbs in here and you can use dry herbs if you don’t have fresh herbs. I’m taking a few little herbs that I have growing in my garden out there and one herb that is just lovely is sage. You will recognize that as sage. I’m putting 1 ½ tablespoons of sage. So if you use the dried, put 1 ½ teaspoons of dried sage. Then, I’m putting parsley, one tablespoon of parsley. And this is just the curly variety, you can use the Italian parsley if you have it or would rather. And again, if you’re using dried, then just use 1/3 of a tablespoon.

I’m going to put some paprika in, just a dab of that. I measured that to be 1 quarter of a teaspoon, just a tiny bit in there. And then close this bag and then shake those together. So you’ll have some nice seasoning in addition to that cornbread crunchiness that you’re going to get.

In here, I have an 8 x 12 sized baking dish. And I’ve already sprayed it with cooking oil, I used Canola oil spray, so whatever your favorite cooking spray is. Or if you want to use margarine or butter, just spread it with your hands. The process here is going to be that we’re going to take a piece of chicken, one of those tenderloins, dip it in our dipping sauce and then dip it in our crumbs and then put it in here. So I’m going to do one of those for you and then I’ll finish up the rest. When I get them finished up, they will go in the oven at 350 degrees and it will take them maybe 45 minutes or so. I’ll keep watch of the time and let you know how long it takes. So here it goes.

These are not all identically the same shape and size. And actually, since I’m getting my hands kind of messy, I would like to do this, get all that salt and black pepper dispersed and then just take any of those. This is a decent sized on. Dip it in the sauce that you have here and then that will allow all of the crumbs and its flavorings in here to stick. We’ll just shake it. It’s all messy but it’s worth it. You put that in your baking dish. I don’t have a nice lovely piece like that. If some of these cover, like I noticed some at the edge there, just bringing it on the bag and cover it up.

This is what your chicken will look like before you put it in the oven. There is one more item that you need to add and that is just a little bit of melted butter. I got just a regular salted butter and two tablespoons that I have melted on the cook top and then I’m just going to drizzle that over the top, just trying to get good coverage. There’s not a lot of it so just try to get it spread as evenly as you can. And this goes into a 350 degree oven for half an hour, maybe more. I’ll keep an eye, I’ll get it out when it starts browning up and I can tell if it is done.

Our chicken is done and it has just come out of the oven after almost 45 minutes of baking. You can see what it looks like when it’s nice and crispy like this, I haven’t cut into any of these yet but I’m taking a thick one to look at the center so we can tell what it looks like. It should be nice and white like that. If it has any pink or translucency to it, you know it’s not done, you have to get it back in the oven. But this is fine. We’re going to be serving it for our dinner in just a minute.

So this is our full cooked dinner. And remember, we have the herb seasoned crunch chicken or chicken crunch, whichever way you want to refer to it. And along with that, if you’d like to serve a little bit of mushroom gravy, we had leftover mushroom soup. If you will mix ½ cup of milk with your leftover mushroom soup, then you can drizzle a little mushroom gravy over that. Here, we have our potatoes and it’s had enough time to absorb that moisture so that’s going to taste luscious on your plate. If you like to adjust the salt, then feel free, also pepper or any other spices. And then the rest of this are the things that have mentioned or have cooked for you. I mentioned this on a quick tip, if you have squash that you want to be used quickly, leftover maybe, then just sauté it in butter with salt and pepper and a little sugar. It will look like that. It’s nice and colorful. Here are some fresh green beans from the farmer’s market that I got yesterday and then I have a big croissant or a piece of bread.

So there’s my plate and I have a nice piece of coffee cake and I’ll have regular cake but I made these yesterday in case you’re interested in looking at the sour cream coffee cake and my glass of iced tea. I don’t think I’ll go hungry tonight.