Frugal Food Friday: Home made chicken goujons with sweet salad
The weekend is here! Let’s celebrate with a simple and frugal recipe. I think I mentioned way back in July when I started the blog that I love food! More specifically, I love good, healthy, and home cooked frugal food. Anyway, here is an easy meal to kick things off with, and there’s plenty more where this came from in the TFS recipe box.
Chicken goujons with sweet salad
Prep time: 10 mins + 5 mins, Cooking time: 25 mins
Goujon ingredients:
Chicken – roughly 100 grams / person should be enough
Breadcrumbs
1 Egg
Method:
This is so easy I could get my 6 year old nephew to do it. First of all, get some old bread or rolls that have gone a bit crusty (not mouldy though!) and chuck it in the food blender: white tiger bread rolls work really well I find. Whizz it up until you get the desired consistency of what you might call a “crumb”. If you make a big batch of it up it freezes really quite well, so you can store it for months and use in future recipes. Then pour a decent amount of the crumbs onto a plate, and grind a bit of salt and pepper on top to taste. Crack the egg into a bowl, whisk it up (a fork will do). If you bought whole chicken breasts then cut it up into goujon or nugget type shapes, whatever your preference may be. Sometimes there may be an offer on “pre-cut up” chicken so watch out for those deals as always! Either way, chuck your cubed/stripped chicken into the bowl of eggs and make sure they get a good slop of it all over. One by one, transfer them onto the plate of crumbs, making sure they are nice and evenly coated, then place them into an oven dish or tin. You might need a tiny brush of oil on your oven based cooking container! Put them in the oven at 200°C / 400° F and they’ll be ready in 25-30 minutes. (Please cut through with a knife before eating to check they are done: no pinkness and piping hot)
Sweet salad:
While the goujons are in the oven you have plenty of time to chop up some nice fruit and salad. This is just a suggestion of course so make whatever salad you like! Tonight I went for:
Crisp iceberg lettuce, apple, red grapes, carrots, cucumber. I like mine drizzled with a bit of salad cream, try it, it really works!
Here is the finished article, I clearly need to work on my food photography but I can testify that it honestly was very tasty:
Frugal Food Friday!
Yea yea yea… how much does it cost though?!
Seeing as this is a blog about frugality, saving and early retirement… the all important thing naturally is cost! Here is a rough run down:
Chicken: £1.50, 1 Egg: 20p, Breadcrumbs: neglible, salad stuff: £1. As you can see we had some oven chips (naughty!) which I guess were about 30p.
The above was for two people so that is a grand total of £1.50 per person.
Compare this to the abomination that is the McDonalds chicken nugget meal for over £4 per portion, which for all we know is still being made from this stuff. By the time you’ve hopped in the car, queued up at the drive in and come back, let’s face it you could have easily made your own; I know which one I’d rather do.
So there you have it! You can eat nice food, on the cheap, that is really quick and easy to make. I’d also imagine even the fussiest of children would eat this meal – well, the nuggets and chips part anyway! And slightly healthier than your average processed and frozen cr*p as well.
Viva la frugal food revolution!
TFS.x
Yummy! This looks delicious and my daughter would love it too! I like the idea of mixing fruit into the salad. I usually stick with tomatoes and cucumber… rather boring! This would jazz up our salads a little! 🙂
It’s funny, I didn’t even read it anywhere, I’ve just found myself randomly trying things out recently that I never thought would go together before and you’d be surprised at how many things actually do. Sweet and savoury, etc etc.
A bit of experimentation in the kitchen is always good fun 🙂