Chick-fil-A Chicken Nuggets

I was complaining to a friend the other day about all of my cooking failures. She told me that I should have a little grace and not be so hard on myself because I actually had a pretty tough audience. It’s true. She’s right. My kids are such picky eaters. They always have been. If I had a kid like my brother, he would have eaten everything I cooked and I would not be writing this blog. I would be falsely led to believe that I’m an excellent cook. I guess it’s all relative.

In addition to being picky eaters in the first place, something happened last year to add to the perfect storm that exasperated my cooking failures. My youngest son was diagnosed with celiac disease. It’s not the end of the world, you might be thinking. Yeah right! Maybe for someone who eats meat and potatoes and vegetables but my kid’s favorite foods were Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets and Panera  mac & cheese. Everything this kid liked had gluten in it. He was devastated. I was devastated. I spent a small fortune buying anything gluten-free from every store in Wilmington in the hopes that we would find something he liked. Nothing.

I stayed up late at night researching recipes and finally, I found it. I found a gluten-free copycat Chick-fil-A chicken nugget recipe this was perfect! I read it 10 times. It didn’t even look that hard. The recipe promised that it would taste just like Chick-fil-A nuggets. The woman who wrote it said her kids actually like these better than Chick-fil-A nuggets. This was going to be great! I couldn’t sleep that whole night because I was so excited about making this recipe and presenting it to my son and having him gobble up every single last nugget and proclaim, “Who needs Chick-fil-A when I’ve got a mom who cooks like you?” He’d have a big adoring smile on his face and I would walk out of the room literally patting my own back and high fiving my brother. I’m sure you can imagine where this is going.

I waited for my brother to come home from work because he’s my cooking partner. Except that one time with the grill when I almost burned the house down. That time I was going to cook by myself and have it ready to surprise him when he came home from work with a delicious grilled chicken dinner. Instead he came home to black chicken on the grill, smoke still in the air, me in tears and the siding melting off the house. Well, I learned my lesson. My brother now helps with every single cooking failure so I could have someone else to share the blame. Not really. It’s so I could have someone to dial 911 when I set the house on fire.

We both read the recipe through multiple times. We had all the ingredients on the counter, and we got to work with big, excited smiles on our faces. We probably even danced around a little as we mixed the little gluten-free bread crumbs with the gluten-free flour and prepared the little bowl for the eggs. We did all the dipping stuff and rolling stuff and shaking stuff. Then chicken nuggets looked perfect! Before they were cooked. Perfectly adorable raw Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets made by my brother and I. It was going smoothly so far.

Neither one of us had ever made anything before where you actually have to fry something. I am talking about dunk it all the way in oil as opposed to just fry it up in the frying pan in a little bit of oil. But that seems simple enough, right? IT WASN’T!

The oil has to be a certain temperature? There’s a certain device to measure the temperature of the oil? I can’t use my trusted plain old meat thermometer for that? “We can just wing it,” I said confidently to my brother. “Let’s just watch the oil until it looks hot enough.” My brother nods in agreement because I’m sure hot oil looks different than warm oil? So we watch the oil until it looks hot enough, and then we start dunking some chicken nuggets in. Just a few at a time like the recipe says. Oil is splattering all over us and we are jumping back covering our bodies with our hands but then putting on brave faces and moving back in to check on those nuggets. We set the timer for the exact time the recipe said to and we pull those nuggets out carefully with our cute little metal slotted spoon perfect for frying. BLACK!  Not just a little burned but black.

“Hmmm… the oil is probably too hot. Let’s turn it down just a little bit and then just try again,” I said, undeterred.  But this time the nuggets burned even faster, so I thought maybe the oil was too hot and we just needed to dump the oil and try again. My brother takes the big pot of oil out the back door and dumps it into some brush area we have behind our house. He comes back in, and we try again.

Can we use canola oil? Can we mix it with olive oil? Why not? Isn’t oil just oil? I didn’t really buy extra vegetable oil, but I had some old containers of oil I was just pulling out of the cabinet.  My brother and I poured new oil in, watched it until it looked hot enough and once again dropped  a few chicken nuggets in. The first batch looked a little funny. My brother said they tasted bad. The second batch was too burned, the third batch didn’t seem to be done quite enough, the oil looked really dirty, my brother ran outside to dump the oil so we could start again. I pulled out every bottle of oil and just sort of poured stuff in to experiment and see what would happen. Batch after batch came out worse than the time before.  We adjusted the time, we adjusted the oil, but nothing worked.

In the end, five pots of oil had been dumped in the brush, (my brother got his exercise that day) multiple bottles of random oils, eight chicken breasts, my kitchen ended up smelling like a McDonald’s, my brother and I covered in grease splatter and burns, we were left with ONE, yes, ONE, edible homemade gluten-free chicken nugget. (edible is relative in this sentence)

I put it on a plate and present it to my son. “Here it is! Here is a gluten-free Chick-fil-A nugget. It will taste just like Chick-fil-A! You will be in heaven.”

“I hope you weren’t very hungry, though,” and I smile and shrug.

He tasted it and was polite, but he didn’t like it.  And it absolutely did NOT taste like a Chick Fil A chicken nugget. (not that I tasted it because I am vegetarian) The recipe lied. Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Don’t believe recipes. Definitely not prep times.

We ended up just ordering a gluten-free Domino’s Pizza for him, but I’m not giving up on that Chick-fil-A chicken nugget recipe. I think we’ll try it again another day. Once we recover. And once I do a little research on what exactly went wrong.

And I know, I know, I know, that you should not dump oil out in their environment like that. It can cause all sorts of damage to the environment, and trust me, I love the environment. I recycle and pick up trash and dream of having an electric car. I still feel bad about all the oil I dumped. Sometimes it even keeps me up in the middle of the night to this day.

I was panicking and I just had to get rid of that oil because of course, the oil was the problem, and the next batch was going to work out perfectly. Besides, I couldn’t use my normal black bean can for all that oil. I need a really large, sealable, non-breakable container big enough to store all that oil safely. I’m actually hopping on Amazon right now to find one for my next chicken nugget attempt. Let me know if you have this problem also and I will send you the link to the one I find.