Oven Fried Chicken

Recently I’ve been trying to reduce our weekly grocery bill while finding ways to continue making tasty and healthy meals. My goal is to get our bill down to $60/week, but let me tell you folks it’s not so easy in NYC. Especially since I love, love, love shopping at the fancy grocery store. For some ridiculous reason it’s just relaxing to me… there are free samples of fancy cheese and the milk comes in pretty glass bottles. Speaking of which, big PSA for any readers in the NY metro area; I just found out that you can get $1.50 back for returning your Ronnybrook glass bottles to the grocery store. So there you have it, I’ve officially found an excuse to keep on buying fancy milk and sampling expensive cheese. What?! I get money back, it’s cost cutting!

Photo via: Ronnybrook Dairy

But back to the issue at hand, last week I swapped my usual boneless skinless chicken breasts for more budget friendly skin-on chicken legs. Originally I was going to make regular baked chicken, but I was feeling kind of meh about that as a dinner option so I decided to go for some oven fried chicken instead.

I’m not sure that this really classifies as “healthy” per se, but considering that it isn’t fried in three inches of oil, I’m okay with dubbing it a healthy alternative. However, I will caution you that if you are craving traditional fried chicken with a thick crust, this probably won’t do it for you but it is delicious and makes the house smell A-MA-ZING! Also it goes great with a little bourbon spiked iced tea…..go on with your bad self, I won’t tell J

Oven Fried Chicken

2 cups buttermilk
2 tsp  hot sauce
3 tbsp shortening
1 1/2 pounds chicken drumsticks
2/3 cup Bisquick
1 1/2 tsp poultry seasoning
1 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
cooking spray

1. Place chicken, buttermilk and hot sauce in a large bowl and marinate in the fridge for at least 2 hours.

2. Put the shortening in a glass baking dish, place the dish in the oven and preheat to 425 degrees.

3. Mix together the Bisquick, poultry seasoning, cayenne pepper, salt & pepper. Dredge the chicken in the Bisquick mixture.

4. Place the chicken skin side down in the melted shortening coated baking dish, spritz with cooking spray and bake for 30 minutes. Flip chicken, spritz with cooking spray and bake for another 30 minutes or until chicken juices run clear. Be sure to let the chicken rest for at least ten minutes so that the skin adheres to the meat.

*note: I didn't have any actual buttermilk at the time so I did the milk & lemon juice trick (1 tbsp lemon juice per cup of milk will give you buttermilk)

**second note: I live in Brooklyn and therefore everything takes forever to cook in my oven. If you have an oven that hasn't been around since the mid 70s, be sure to watch your chicken carefully.

***third note: lots of notes on this one, but a note about Bisquick. I happen to really like the slightly sweet, waffley taste that the Bisquick gives the chicken, but if this isn't your thing and you're more of a purest, feel free to substitute regular old flour.

Hey look! An actual picture of the finished product:

Just um, don’t mind the terrible lighting in our kitchen…..or the huge mayo finger smear in the tomato bowl.