When my college age son moved from campus to a house, I knew his money would go quickly eating out for every meal. I decided to make a booklet of recipes for him. I knew that I needed a good chicken recipe, since he liked chicken and it is a relatively inexpensive meat. I tried to find an easy baked chicken recipe, using a whole chicken, since I figured he could eat it for more than one meal. The best part about stuffing a chicken is putting lemon slices in the cavity. But as I thought more about it, I figured the beginner cook and a whole baked chicken recipe weren’t a good match.
He wouldn’t understand about the stuff in packets in the cavity, or tying the legs together, or how to carve it. I knew that it would need a lot of basting so as not to come out dry, and I also thought that it would be undercooked if he didn’t own a meat thermometer. So I settled instead on a really easy baked chicken recipe. Get a whole chicken cut up, or a package of legs, or wings, or breasts, bone in or not. Buy a box of crumb coating, for example, Shake and Bake. Follow the instructions. Yes, a chicken breast is the most expensive cut of chicken you can purchase at the market, but it still costs a lot less than going out for fast food.
I thought of a lot of things for my page titled chicken breast recipes. Obviously, he could use them with the Shake and Bake. But I hoped he would be a little more adventurous, so I suggested some simple stir fry recipes that would require just some cooking oil, soy sauce, green onions, and a can of water chestnuts. He likes tacos, so I included instructions for slicing still partially frozen breasts real thin and then cooking with a little oil until they were white and using them in place of ground beef with the recipe on a box of tacos.
I also told him that he could make a much better than canned chicken soup by getting a soup starter kit and then cutting up some breasts, cooking them in a pan with a little oil, and when done adding them to the soup mix, along with more noodles, or anything else he wanted. I can’t be certain he took advantage of this small book, but I tried.
