Get Your Popcorn Ready

Friday night marked a first for us on Boy's Cooking Night as we prepared a dinner for... GUESTS. It was only my parents, but still, it's a milestone. Anyhow, we opted to go with our go-to salad, the spinach-strawberry-almond with a maple-mustard dressing, and popcorn chicken with a variety of dipping sauces.

We'd been trying to get the boys to attempt the popcorn chicken for a while, but my oldest kept shooting it down. Finally this week he relented, and our first foray into poultry-cooking was on. Now normally my assistants are pretty overbearing and intrusively energetic, but on Friday it was a struggle to get people involved. It ended up kicking off with just me and the four-month old, but hey, he was ready to go.

Anyhow, I started by throwing together the salad and the dressing. Once again we opted to hold the garlic in our dressing mix. If I'm being honest, I haven't really missed it. So we got that out of the way pretty quick, and then it was time for the chicken, and my assistants slowly started trickling in. 

The dish was actually pretty easy to put together. We only had one wild card, and that was doubling the recipe to account for our extra people. Fortunately there weren't any odd fractions, so that made our lives pretty easy. HOWEVER, I didn't read the instructions and the olive oil that was supposed to go in the pan AFTER we mixed everything... went into our chicken mixture instead... Whoops.

Anyhow, after coating the chicken, we dunked it in our ziplock bag full of breadcrumbs, and the boys went to town shake & bake style. We had one near catastrophe when the first bag ripped, but we caught it early before dumping the entire dinner on the floor. Crisis averted.

Once our chicken was all mixed up, we set about making our dipping sauces. Being that none of us are into real spicy foods, we went with a honey mustard sauce and a curry mayonnaise. We even got Grandpa involved!

Finally, it was time to cook the chicken. It was here that I realized our mistake with the olive oil. Fortunately it didn't hurt us. We got off to a bit of a slow start, but eventually it all came together.

As far as how it tasted, I really thought it was one of our best dishes so far. The chicken turned out great and we had fans of both dipping sauces. Of everything we've cooked so far, I think this is the dish we're most likely to do again.