Chicken fingers and 1/2 cup of EPIC FAIL

So this week I intended to make the non-flambe version of Bananas Foster. I didn't know Bananas Foster existed until last Tuesday, and now I really want some. I found a good recipe, but I'm not 21 yet, and neither are my roommates, so I wasn't able to procure any rum. I will have to wait one of my roommates turns 21 in the following two weeks, or until I turn 21 a little further down April. Woohoo.

Anyway, I settled on tasty chicken fingers for this week. This is another recipe I found in the back of the Bisquick box - God bless it - and was easier to make than I thought.

Ingredients
2 boneless chicken breasts cut in quarters
2/3 cup of Bisquick
1/2 teaspoon of paprika
1/2 teaspoon of salt or garlic salt
1 egg, slightly beaten
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
3 tablespoons butter, melted

Preheat the oven to 450 F. Cover a baking sheet with aluminum foil and grease it.

In a gallon storage bag, mix the Bisquick, the paprika, the Parmesan cheese and the salt. Shake it up (this is a lot of fun.)

To make the chicken fingers tastier, I marinated the chicken in my tasty and aforementioned Chardonnay Herb marinade for a few hours. I cut the chicken in quarters and dipped them in the beaten egg. Then I dropped the fingers from the first chicken breast inside the storage bag and sealed the bag.

Now it's time to play. Shake up the bag again. And more. Let the chicken roll. Move its contents around until the chicken is completely coated in the powdery mix. Do the same with the chicken strips/fingers from the other chicken breast.

Place the fingers on the sheet and drizzle with the melted butter. Of course. You didn't think this was actually healthy, did you?

Bake for about 14 minutes to make sure the chicken is not pink when you take it out of the oven. Make sure you flip the fingers at about half time so both sides cook well.

Here is me taking the sheet out of the oven as my roommate Katharine, um, eggs me on.




I also made a biscuit with Bisquick to accompany my chicken (you can see it in the video). They actually tasted good. Yum.

I should be Bisquick's spokeswoman. I wonder if they're hiring.

Oh, yes, recession. Probably not.

This week's groceries

1. 1 can of apple raspberry juice - ?
   
2. 7,000 Lean Cuisines - ?
   

Total = I can't find my receipt

P.S. I already had all the ingredients, pretty much.

Strawberry Shortcake - the dessert, not the cartoon

In my quest for easy recipes to try out I always overlook the most obvious ones. So last weekend, as I scraped the last of my roommate's Bisquick to make crepes (AKA fruit tacos), I noticed the back of the box had a couple of recipes, most of them which were not pancakes (gasp!) One of them was strawberry shortcake. See, this is what I like about Bisquick. It's so versatile. I can make biscuits, pancakes, chicken fingers, dumplings, strawberry shortcake. Maybe even my own house, if my heart felt so inclined. Bisquick is your kitchen's McGyver.

So this is my week's culinary delivery to my roommates. I haven't sent anyone to the hospital just yet.

Ingredients
2 cups of Bisquick
3 tablespoons of butter
1/2 cups of sugar
1/2 cup of milk
4 cups of strawberries
1 tube of Cool Whip or real whipped cream, as your heart desires

Preheat the oven to 425 F. In a pan, melt the butter mercilessly, which is not difficult I guess. Combine the Bisquick, milk, 3 tablespoons of sugar and the butter in a bowl and mix until you have dough of some sorts. I'm not quite sure what the consistency was supposed to be, but whatever I did turned out fine. If you follow the instructions, you can only pray yours will turn out fine too. But my success bodes well for the rest of humankind.

Anyway, I digress. Spoon the dough onto a buttered baking pan to make six biscuits. Make sure there is enough room in between them for the biscuits to expand. It's like your teenage kids, you have to give them some space.

While the biscuits bake, slice a boatload of strawberries, put them in a bowl and mix them with an unhealthy amount of sugar.

After12 minutes in the oven, your bread should be golden brown. Take it out of the oven (thank you, Captain Obvious). Slice the biscuits in half and fill them with strawberries. Place the biscuit halves back together and top with whipped cream. You can also get some strawberry syrup and squeeze some of that on the strawberry shortcake. I just thought of that. I wish I had.

You know how I take pictures every week? These were gone before I had a chance. That's how good it was.

This week's groceries

1. Bisquick - $2.64
2. 1 lb. strawberries - $2.49
3. Market Pantry milk - $1. 69
4. Market Pantry berry juice - $0.77
5. Market Pantry soups (x3) - $4.11
6. Del Monte fruit cocktail (x2) - $2.64
7. Cadbury eggs - $2.79

Total = $17.13

Strawberry Banana Tacos

My roommate Katharine and I went to Blue Mesa today for Sunday brunch. It is a luxury I am able to afford once a semester, but after having scrambled eggs with potatoes, cheese enchiladas, corn cakes, Spanish rice, beans, agua fresca, rice pudding and flan, the price of the buffet seemed very well worth it.

Keeping with today's Mexican theme, I decided to make fruit tacos! Which is the cheap college version of sweet crepes, the ones you fantasize about having in some cute coffee shop in some cute French village while cramming for your test in the library.

Ingredients
1 cup of Bisquick
1 egg
Milk
Nutella
Bananas
Strawberries
Cool Whip

The reason I didn't write measurements for most ingredients is that I used what was leftover of my roommate's Bisquick, which was less than a cup, and enough milk to make the mix look like pancake batter.

So I mixed the Bisquick, the egg and the milk until I made pancake batter. I poured a spoonful of batter on a small nonstick pan (which I greased) and tilted the pan with a circular motion so the batter would cover the entire surface. I tried to flip the crepe to early though, and that resulted in epic fail, as evidenced by the pancake wreck in the picture.

Katharine came to the rescue and told me to way for bubbles in the batter before flipping the crepe. That actually worked. Make sure you don't pour too much batter on the pan so the crepe is thin and not, well, a pancake.

Because the crepes were small, they wouldn't wrap around their contents, but they make perfect tacos! I spread some Nutella on each and slice some strawberries and bananas to fill the crepes with. Add some Cool Whip if it strikes your fancy.

These are great for breakfast or dinner. Or any time, really. Who needs an excuse to eat this?

This week's groceries

None. I'm broke and relied completely on my roommates' charity.