Today’s entry is brought to you by Nikon’s latest and most recent release, the 105mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S VR Micro-Nikkor with Nano Crystal technology. Man this lens is fricken amazing. You can shoot 4 stops slower, hand-held.

You shuddup. No, you shuddup. No, you shuddup. You shuddup. No. You shuddup. Purely having fun today, nothing more, nothing less. I’ve been in an odd mood with regards to food over the last week. At weird times of the day I’ve been lusting after those old traditional American casseroles. Something way too rich, creamy and/or cheesey. A dish made with frozen vegetables and a crunchy topping of some kind. A dish that Gramma would carry in with a huge smile during the holidays, warbling something about someone’s favorite casserole. That’s what I wanted, but wasn’t sure how to go about it. Then, I was also interested in cooking chicken another way, other than roasting. It wasn’t until yesterday when I was digging through Meathead’s discarded cookbooks that I sawr my prey, Tater Coated Chicken.

While Tater Coated Chicken didn’t necessarily take care of my gooey & rich pang, it most certainly handled something new to do with chicken. Well, okay it’s something really old and icky to do to chicken. But who cares, right? It’s just chicken for crissakes.
This Favorite Ways with Chicken is actually a very well put together book. They got pages of How-Tos, got charts with times and temperatures and nicely illustrated pages of carving birds several different ways. In these older books I just love to look up the chapters on Elegant Dining and foods with foreign backgrounds. On page 55 in the Elegant Main Dishes you’ll find Chicken Jubilee and Ham and Chicken Stack-ups, sigh. And in the Foreign Background on page 65 we’re confronted with, Indian Chicken or Chicken A La India and our personal favorite, Chicken A La France. Gee, I wonder how Julia Child did so well with such books on the market.
For today however, we’re back on page 39 for our Tater Coated Chicken. Please get the following ready:
Egg 1 – slightly beaten
Seasoned Salt – 1/2 teaspoonful
Chicken – 1 whole chicken cut up
Instant Mashed Potato Flakes – 1 cup
Butter – 1/4 cup
Preheat oven to 375
Looks simple, huh? It was. Add your seasoned salt to the egg wash with a few tablespoons of water. I didn’t have any seasoned salt. GASP, that’s right. Ol’ Biggles was clean out of fancy seasoned salt. I made my own by combining a teaspoon of Survival Spice and a teaspoon of salt. Yeah, yeah, I know SS already has kosher salt in it, I wanted more salt!
Lay the chicken in the egg wash, then roll it around in the potato flakes. Install said chicken pieces in to an oven ready baking dish. Make sure the chicken has enough goo on it and pat the flakes on.

Here’s what it should look like. At this point I would recommend using some spray oil, this would cause the tater pieces to brown up nice and get extra crunchy. Buuuut, I didn’t have any spray oil, so in to the oven it went.
I’ve done oven roasted “fried” chicken before and I enjoy it a little over-done. So, I believe I let this one go an extra 20 some odd minutes. This puts us out at 1 hour & 20 at 375 on the bottom rack.

HAHHAHHAHA, the chicken was really good! And it was gone. Mama came in asking for more and I had snarfed up the last wing. The crunch was severe, yet went down without too much of a fight. With some extra salt sprinkled over right out of the oven, the rich chickenny flavors were nice. Between the skin and coating, the chicken stayed moist with my extra oven time, even the breast was just fine. I noticed a few pieces in that the coating kinda tasted like potato chips. Good ol’ salty potato chips!
To sum it all up, a good time and a good meal was had by all. Yay for Better Homes & Garden in 1967.
Biggles