Potato Chip Chicken Strips

The rehearsal dinner prep consumed this week. Forty people. The biggest event Sarah's Table has ever catered. The menu: Earline's fried chicken (five chickens, ten pounds of flour, three gallons of oil, two days of brining), coleslaw for forty, baked beans (Mama's recipe, scaled up, four times the normal batch), cornbread (OBVIOUSLY — eight pans, Earline's recipe, no sugar, I will put this on my tombstone), and for dessert: Chloe's pecan pie. Four of them. FOUR pecan pies. Chloe made them all. Saturday afternoon, assembly line, four pie crusts, four fillings, four oven cycles. My ten-year-old produced four pecan pies for a paying client's wedding rehearsal dinner. The line has gone commercial.

Sunday: the event. I arrived at the venue (a barn outside Nashville — the wedding-barn-industrial-complex of middle Tennessee) at 2 PM. Set up by 4. Guests at 6. The food was hot, the presentation was right (I bought serving platters — actual serving platters, not the Walmart disposable ones I've been using, because a wedding rehearsal requires PRESENTATION and presentation requires PLATTERS and platters cost $45 at HomeGoods and I bought them because the business deserves to look like a business). The bride's mother tasted the cornbread and said: "This tastes like my grandmother's." The grandmother line. The line that means: this food is not new. This food is ancient. This food comes from a place that I recognize because my grandmother lived there too. The highest compliment. The same compliment from the Instagram comment months ago. "My grandmother's food." That's the brand. That's the whole brand.

The bride came to me after dinner. She said: "Thank you. This was exactly what we wanted. This was home." This was HOME. A barn in Tennessee, forty people, Earline's fried chicken, Chloe's pecan pie, and a bride who said it felt like home. That's the review. That's the Yelp five-star. That's the reason I stood on a step stool at eleven years old and made Hamburger Helper: so that someday, thirty years later, a bride at a barn would eat my food and feel HOME.

Revenue from the rehearsal dinner alone: $1,200. Minus ingredients ($380), kitchen rent (already paid monthly), and the platters ($45). Net: approximately $775 from one event. The math is no longer walking. The math is running. The math has entered a sprint. The math is saying: this is real. This is a real business. This makes real money. The math is the most convincing argument that Sarah's Table is not a hobby, not a dream, not a side hustle. It's a business. With platters.

I have been thinking about chicken all week — specifically about what makes one piece of chicken taste like a restaurant and another taste like someone’s grandmother’s kitchen, and why only one of those things makes a bride tear up at a barn in Tennessee. The answer, I am increasingly convinced, is the coating: it has to be crunchy, it has to be golden, and it has to carry some kind of memory in it. Earline’s recipe uses seasoned flour and three gallons of oil. But on a regular Tuesday, when the event is over and the platters are washed and Chloe is back in school and I need to feed my own family something that still tastes like this week felt — Potato Chip Chicken Strips are exactly that. Crunchy, salty, unmistakably comforting, and the kind of thing a ten-year-old can help with.

Prep Time: 15 minutes | Cook Time: 25 minutes | Total Time: 40 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

1 1/2 lbs chicken tenders (or chicken breasts sliced into 1-inch strips)
2 cups plain or lightly salted potato chips, finely crushed
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
2 large eggs, beaten
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp onion powder
1/4 tsp smoked paprika
1/4 tsp black pepper
Cooking spray

Instructions

Preheat and prep. Heat oven to 400°F. Line a large rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper and coat generously with cooking spray.
Set up your breading station. Place flour in a shallow dish. Beat eggs in a second shallow dish. Add crushed potato chips to a third dish and stir in garlic powder, onion powder, smoked paprika, and black pepper.
Bread the chicken. Working one strip at a time, dredge in flour and shake off the excess, dip fully in beaten egg, then press firmly into the seasoned potato chip crumbs on all sides. The crumbs should stick in a solid, even layer.
Arrange and spray. Place breaded strips in a single layer on the prepared baking sheet, leaving a little space between each. Spray the tops lightly with cooking spray — this is what gets them genuinely golden instead of pale and sad.
Bake. Bake for 12 minutes, then flip each strip carefully using tongs. Return to oven for another 10—13 minutes, until the coating is deep golden and the internal temperature reads 165°F on an instant-read thermometer.
Rest and serve. Let strips rest on the pan for 3 minutes before serving. Serve with honey mustard, ranch, or — if you are me — just eat one straight off the pan standing at the counter because you earned it.

Nutrition (per serving)

Potato Chip Chicken Strips — The Crispy Coating That Brought a Barn Full of Strangers Home