How to Cook : Aunt Sandy's Oven Crispy Chicken

I mentioned earlier that we had another batch of chickens butchered last week. Usually I just get them all as whole birds. But our processor does do cut-ups, so I decided to try that out this time and got about two thirds of them cut up.

I was thinking for supper tonight I’d just do the usual – the “Sunday Chicken and Rice” recipe from my church cookbook. I love church cookbooks. They’re a collection of everyone’s best recipes (so you know they’re good) but they’re also a little bit of a memory book. Many of the ladies whose recipes appear in this cookbook from 1981 have passed on. Some of them were my Sunday School teachers. I still remember which pew some of them sat in every Sunday. And I remember some of these recipes appearing at monthly church potluck dinners.

As I was flipping through the cookbook looking for that usual recipe, another caught my eye. It’s from my Aunt Sandy, who passed away from cancer in (I think) the spring of 2000. I think about her all the time – usually when I’m oiling down my stainless steel sink with vegetable oil, because I remember her saying she did that every night before bed. Or when I’m telling Rafe to stop running in the house, because I remember her telling how she used to say that to her oldest, my cousin Chris, all the time.

I hadn’t ever noticed this recipe before, but she was a great cook so I knew I had to try it. And wow. It was good. It was so good that it reminded Rafe we hadn’t said the “food prayer” before supper, and he made us all stop right there so he could say it.

We’re usually dark meat people, because none of us like dry white chicken breast. But tonight we literally bargained with each other for a hunk of breast meat. It was so tender and juicy. Just wow. That’s the best I can come up with. Just wow.

Not only was it good, but it’s super easy to whip up. It uses ingredients that I always have on hand, and took no time to prepare. I baked some Bush Delicata Squash – one of the few things to make it out of our garden alive this year – in the oven right alongside the chicken. Some Cottage Cheese Dill bread from the farmers market rounded out our plates.

Sorry, food photography is so not my forte!

So, without further adieu, the recipe!

Aunt Sandy’s Oven Crispy Chicken

Combine onion, potato flakes, chili powder and parmesan cheese in a shallow bowl. Combine egg and milk in another shallow bowl. Salt and pepper chicken, then dip in egg/milk mixture. Then roll in potato mixture. Place skin side down in baking pan and bake 30 minutes; turn chicken pieces over and bake another 30 minutes.