Nuggets.

No excuse for the lag in blogging. I have a half a summer's worth of lovely pictures of fruit tarts and salads that have not been dissected and analyzed and transformed into pop-culture-referential blog posts. Tonight we made nuggets. I'm reading a book called "Too Many Cooks: Kitchen Adventures with 1 Mom, 4 Kids and 104 Recipes." Even though this woman has clearly stolen my concept, I'm reading it and finding it less unbearably smug than I thought. The author, Emily Franklin, clearly has her shizz together. Her complement of kids outnumbers mine by 100% and she still manages to cook with flair and a sense of adventure, if her book is to be believed. Oscar spotted her "Mom Nuggets" recipe, which is provided in its early pages as an example of an uncharacteristic capitulation to kid-friendly cooking (her swell kids bravely eat curries and tofu and what-have-you for the entire rest of the book), and that was what Osk wanted us to have. He rarely weighs in with a specific meal request, so when he does, it is taken seriously. I'd like him to cultivate some joie de manger as well as relieve a little of the neverending freaking burden of figuring out what to make for dinner, a mental millstone that is ten times more onerous than the actual cooking.

So the nuggets. Photo One here is Ike's illustration of a Swissair passenger jet being loaded with a supply of "mom nuggets" for, he says, "a whole year and more." The second picture depicts the meal itself, which looks gratifyingly (to me) like we dumped a Happy Meal onto his plate. However, our nuggets are accompanied by roasted turnips from the veggie box; I should say roasted turnip singular, since we served our entire family from a single 'nip the size of a baby's head. The honey-mustard sauce we also made ourselves, although we could have probably called my sister across the street and dipped (literally) into her personal collection of scrounged McDonalds nugget sauces. The dinner was a smashing success with the under-10 set (except for the turnips, natch) and yielded enough leftover nugs for tomorrow night's dinner, when I'll be working. Here's the recipe, adapted from Emily Franklin:

2 lbs boneless chicken, white OR dark

1/2 c whole-wheat flour

4 eggs

2 1/2 c panko bread crumbs

olive oil

Cut the chicken into nugget shapes. Do not use dinosaur cookie cutters, because there is something seriously demented about a dead animal formed into the shape of another extinct animal. Dredge in flour, dip in beaten eggs, roll in panko. Set them on a plate to get them all racked up for frying. Heat the oven to 300 whilst you heat a goodly amount of olive oil in a nonstick skillet at med-high. Brown the nuggets in the oil, flipping once. As they are done, put them on a cookie sheet in the oven to keep warm. When they're all done, raise the heat to 375 and leave them in there for a few minutes, or as long as you think they need to be cooked through and/or as brown as you like. Depending on the bulkiness of your nuggets, they may be entirely cooked through straight out of the pan, but you may not want to serve them that way to your family, who will scorch their tongues on the molten-lava-hot chicken.

You can freeze the extras and reheat them on a cookie sheet. Screw you, McDonalds!!!!