My Week of Hello Fresh in Exhaustive Detail, Day 2
Dinner on Night 2 of our completely not in any way sponsored by Hello Fresh odyssey.
For our second night, we did chicken cutlets with mashed potatoes and green beans. Not a super complicated meal by any stretch of the imagination, but I picked it because I wanted to test the method they used to make this recipe. One of the reasons why I don’t make many chicken cutlets is because I hate the process of breading things. No matter how careful I am, my hands always get gross and I make a giant mess in the kitchen… no thank you! Hello Fresh promised that I wouldn’t have that problem and decided to call their bluff.
What came in the box
For quite a bit of this recipe, I was kind of running on auto-pilot. I know how to make mashed potatoes without any guidance and the green beans just needed to be seasoned and spread out on the sheet tray. The veggies were of decent, but not great, quality—a few bad spots on the potatoes to trim off, and some stems to remove from the green beans. No big deal on either count, and I didn’t feel the need to deviate from any of their instructions at all.
That’s not quite what happened with the chicken, though. Well, mostly…
Pickle chicken!
The idea of making chicken cutlets without really seasoning the chicken kind of rankled me. I also had some pickle brine in the fridge, so while I chopped the potatoes, I brined the chicken in the pickle liquid to impart some flavor.
Ready for the oven
The “breading” part was mixing up some seasoning, melted butter, and bread crumbs together and then just piling a scoop of that mixture on top of the chicken. I was pleasantly surprised at how easily this came together and how well this “lazy” breading technique actually worked.
Fresh out of the oven
The recipe included a packet of honey to drizzle over the chicken, but neither Jim nor I were interested in that and ended up just drizzling the “buffalo” seasoned sour cream sauce over the top.
When in doubt, just toss sliced green onions on everything.
This dish came out better than expected. I mean, we weren’t breaking any new ground with green beans and mashed potatoes, but I did learn a new technique for breading chicken that not only worked, but didn’t end with my fingers covered in wet flour and bread crumbs. I haven’t revisited this recipe since the week of Hello Fresh, but that’s mostly because boneless/skinless chicken has been stubbornly not on sale. If our economic dystopian nightmare ever ends and chicken no longer costs more than shrimp, I’ll definitely give this one another try.
Again, just to be clear here: this entire blog series is not at all sponsored. Hello Fresh did not pay me or approach me to make any content about their meal delivery service because they don’t even know I exist.
