Lemony Cricket...or Jiminy Snicket?

After an excessively long break thanks to finals, spring break and me being awfully busy the following week and excessively lazy last week, Fruncoki returns to its regularly scheduled programming of maybe once a week!  This week I present lemon chicken I came up with more or less on my own after taking little bits of inspiration from some places, but that was mostly just figuring out how to bread stuff.

Now feast your eyes upon this excellence of lemon chicken on a mound of rice, sided with an excellent berry smoothie (because it was a good day).

Lemony Chicken

• Chicken breast (or thigh or whatever, as long as it's boneless/you can debone it (which is evidently a pain in the ass, I wasn't very good at it), skin optional) - price varies on how you buy it, probably about $3 for what you'd use assuming you buy it skinless and boneless, otherwise closer to $2
• 2-3 eggs - like $0.20 lol eggs
• Bread crumbs (panko is the Japanese word for it, if you buy from Asian markets.  Not sure if it has a Chinese equivalent) - I honestly forget.  I think a bag the size I have in the picture below is like $2-3 at most, so let's say $2.50, and I use about a fourth when I make this, so about $0.60
• Salt/pepper - if you don't have this please go buy some and have a wonderful six months with your purchase :)
• Onion - I think they're like $0.80 here
• Garlic - 2 bulbs/$1 here, so about $0.10 since you get at least 5 cloves per bulb
• Lemon juice - like ~$2 I think, but it lasts basically forever, so let's say you need $0.10 for this
• Rice - a $20 bag lasts like two months, so I dunno, probably a $0.25 contribution to this cost
• Optional, real lemons - no idea I don't pay attention to the price I kinda just stuff them into my basket and throw cash at the lemon stand

Total price estimate: $4.05/about 3 meals => $1.35/meal

Bonus smoothie recipe later, for anyone curious.  As far as the lemon chicken goes, to minimize downtime make sure your chicken's ready to be breaded before you start anything.  You can also set up the BREADING STATION, since that might take a couple minutes (which is a lot of time when you're frying stuff) if you haven't done it before.  What you'll want to do for that is crack your eggs into a bowl and beat them a bit (dead chicks can't say no, hey-oh), then put in a little salt/pepper and some lemon juice and beat it a little more.  Put some of your bread crumbs into a bowl, and you should be good to go.  Your chicken should be in small cubish shapes.

Chicken on left, bread crumbs in middle, beaten eggs on right,
final destination plate in blue.

With that ready, take your garlic and dice it pretty good, then sprinkle a pinch of salt on the garlic.  Heat your pan on medium-high, toss on some butter, and let it move around, then put the garlic on.  Chop your onion (I only used about half an onion, but you can do whatever) into whatever kind of size you prefer.  I like mine diced, if you can't decide yourself.  Add that to the pan and just kinda let those do stuff while you bread your chicken.

BAM

To do this, it's pretty simple.  Take your chicken chunks, roll them on a paper towel a bit to absorb the moisture, dip them in egg, pull it out and let the egg drip off a bit, then dunk it in the bread crumbs and bam, you have a breaded chicken chunk.  Rinse and repeat for entire batch of chicken.  When you're done you can add it to the pan.  The only tricky part about it after this is making sure it's cooked all the way, which I tested experimentally (because I'm fat and because I don't have an actual meat thermometer), and I'm not sure there's a better way if you own a thermometer.  Whatever.  Anyway, you basically just let this heat until it's cooked, and then it's pretty much done!  Toss that shit on some fooking rice, and scarf that because you can't appreciate good food when you're in college.  Just kidding, enjoy it, because you deserve it, you FUCKer.   (It sounds funnier to me than fruncokier, so I think I'm switching)

In case anyone was wondering about the smoothie, I have something similar to this, but not exactly, because I don't remember paying more than $40 for it...at any rate, I just tossed some raspberries, some strawberries, some ice, a bit of vanilla extract and some lime juice into my Mr. Coffee, put in some French vanilla coffee in the top and let it go.  What came out was fruity godhood, which could have been cosmic fruity existence with a wee bit of milk.  But it was still excellent.

If you have suggestions, complaints or comments for me, drop me an email or leave a comment!  Also, happy Zombie Jesus Day, everyone!