Cooking Light Day 3

Who would have thought when I set out this week planning my meals and going to the grocery store that I would have such a busy week.?.  I never could have predicted that I would have so much come up after school that I barely had time to eat dinner, let alone cook it.  Alas, this is the life of a parent.  You have to be able to roll with it or you won't be a very happy person.  Not every minute can be scripted and planned out.

On Tuesday I made 2 dinners trying to prepare for the rest of the week.  In theory this was a good idea but at the time I felt like I was in the kitchen for 3 hours.  That might be because I was...  Lesson learned.

I did make some thing sort of new and following my theme for the week I made another recipe from this month's issue of Cooking Light.  This was pretty easy and I think you could substitute shrimp for chicken and regular flour for the rice flour.  I made 2 batches of this.  1 with unsweetened coconut and one with the regular sweetened variety.  The sweetened flakes became kind of gummy when cooked in the pan.  They were still very tasty just not very pretty :)  I served this with a tangy sweet red chili sauce and a scoop of sticky, sweet brown rice.

Coconut Chicken Fingers

4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts.sliced into "fingers"
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp red pepper
1 C rice flour (or all purpose flour)
1C buttermilk
1 lg. egg
1 1/2 C unsweetened flaked coconut
3 TB canola oil

Sprinkle cut chicken with salt/pepper.
 Place flour in a shallow dish. Combine the buttermilk and egg in another shallow dish and put rice flour in a 3rd dish.  Sort of like an assembly line.
Dredge chicken in the flour, dip in egg/buttermilk then coat lightly in the coconut.
You will see I didn't follow my own steps!  I forgot about the red pepper until after I had coated the chicken.  Oh well...it was still good :)Repeat until they are all done.
Heat a skillet with the canola oil.  Add chicken to pan and cook for  6 minutes or until no longer pink and outside is slightly brown.

I had this done in under 30 minutes.  This is really very good.  Neither of my kids are particularly fond of coconut but they didn't even seem to notice it at first.  Once they did and realized they liked it...they knew they had been tricked.  Didn't stop them from cleaning their plates!