Home Made Chicken Nuggets

For quite some time now I've wanted to figure out a way to make my own chicken nuggets, because the boys love them so much, and generally speaking they are not very good for you. Ironically, we did manage to find some vegetarian "chicken" nuggets that do well on the nutrition front, but are pretty expensive. And the boys just won't believe us that they do not have chicken in them :-) Finally I started playing around with things and came up with a really great recipe. Especially because it goes together so easily.

• 175g cooked chicken
• 85g whole wheat bread (1.5 slices)
• 1 egg
• 1 tablespoon chicken fat or oil
• some chicken broth or other liquid
• 1 tsp salt
• herbs and spices to your taste

Take your chicken and put it into a mini-chopper and mince it as per the video. Dump that into a large bowl, and then do the same with the bread and dump it into the same bowl. Now put your egg, salt, herbs and spices in, and give them a good mix. If your kids are like mine, you may want to give all the herbs and spices a good grind in a pestle and mortar first to turn it into powder, so that the kids will not find bits-and-pieces of things in the nuggets.

Now mix the egg mixture into the bowl with the bread and chicken, and add just enough other liquid to get the right consistency to form your nuggets. This will probably be 2 to 5 tablespoons of liquid depending on how moist your bread and your chicken were.

In these videos I then hand-formed them into nuggets and put them onto a baking sheet with silpat (parchement) on it, and baked them at 325F for 13 minutes on each side for a total of 26 minutes.

Another option you have is to press the mixture into silicon ice cube trays that are shaped like various things the kids might like - fish, star fish, or whatever. Then freeze them and after they are frozen you can pop them out of there and either put them directly into the oven, or put them into a ziplock bag to freeze them for later. We have not baked them yet out of the freezer, but I'd guess you'd add 2 minutes of baking time on each side.

Enjoy! They are absolutely fabulous, and extremely healthy because you know exactly what is in them!