Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Tender, Love and Care

My sister, Meredith will remind me every couple of months of all the things she wants me never to forget. She begins “Remember when we were…” and I can predict what’s coming next: the memory, and then the laughter, and as of late, a promise to make those memories again. In fact, once she turned 20 in January, we began having these sessions more frequently than ever.

About two weeks ago, she drove from Raleigh, NC to come visit me here in Fairfax. She wanted to explore the city, so we did. She wanted to meet my friends, so she did. But most of all, she wanted to cook all of our favorite meals, so of course, we did.

The last night she was here, we made her favorite meal: chicken tenders and macaroni and cheese. We hand-breaded the chicken tenders with bread crumbs to put a healthy spin on it, cooked whole grain macaroni and cheese from a box. As we worked side-by-side in the kitchen, I thought about the simplicity of the meal, the hardly-noteworthy, difficult-to-ruin components of the dinner.

As she poured dry noodles into boiling water, I asked her, “Why is this your favorite?” even though I knew the answer.

“Duh!” she said, “The food man.”

We both laughed at the mysticism of The Food Man, who was actually a representative from Five Star Distributing and drove from house to house in a mobile-freezer. He’d stop by once a month and Mom would order big boxes of food: danishes, hamburgers, chicken tenders, and then The Food Man would let us go out to the freezer truck to help find the food. We loved everything about it: how he’d show up in all white holding a note pad to write down our order, the plastic hanging strips that separated the door of the truck and the freezer, how frosty they were, how majestic of an entrance.

Meredith said, “Chicken tenders and macaroni and cheese is just a perfect combination of food. Oh, and the barbeque sauce!”

She’s talking about Dad’s own concoction: a mixture of two different barbeque sauces combined into a plastic bottle with a spout. We use it for most meat: the tanginess of it perfect for chicken, the smoky spice ideal for coating pork chops.

When I suggested rolling chicken tenders in Italian breadcrumbs and baking them, just to try it out, I was sure she’d be hesitant to modify any characteristic of her favorite meal. It was, I suspected, a tradition she felt required to pay homage to, because her love for it had evolved as she had: it started as a meal she loved because The Food Man was a nice person, and developed into a meal Mom fixed after not having seen her for a while. It became a meal she fixed because she’d missed us over time.

“Well,” Meredith said, stirring cheese into her pot of noodles, “Do you have breadcrumbs in the pantry?”

Homemade Chicken Tenders

  • boneless, skinless chicken tenders
  • italian breadcrumbs
  • 1 egg
  • 2 tbs light melted butter
  • 1/2 cup light italian dressing
Completely defrost chicken tenders. Combine melted butter, italian dressing and egg into a mixture. Whisk, whisk, whisk! The mixture should form a sort of hurricane of liquid. Like this:
Now, set up your chicken tender station. Grease a baking pan, pour breadcrumbs into a bowl, right next to the mixture you just whisked.
Fully coat the chicken tenders in the egg mixture, roll them around in the breadcrumbs until you feel satisfied, and place on your baking pan.
Bake on 425 for 12 minutes. Afterward, they will essentially look the same as they did before the 12 minutes, only cooked, which is always nice.
If you're interested in making the barbeque sauce, too, it's: Carolina Treet Original Barbeque Sauce+Kraft Original Barbeque Sauce. And you should! It's the bomb.

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