Homemade Chicken Nuggets

I'm taking a short break from Takeout With the Tos for a while because our summer schedule is different so I'm not entirely sure how the cooking is going to fit in. I'm working on thinking through how that's going to work. Next school year I will also have more time during the week so I may not need to cook on Sunday afternoons anymore! That's still TBD though. The series will come back after a few months but it may look a little different.

A couple weeks ago, I made chicken nuggets by scratch. Have you ever wanted to make them from scratch? Chances are, your answer is "no." For the longest time, it wasn't on my radar either. But then, I was scrolling social media and came across a post on how to make homemade chicken nuggets.

I made them. 

I saved it just out of curiosity thinking I may or may not make it. A few weeks after I saved this recipe, my kids were hungry when I was teaching so I made their requested food really quickly. My son requested chicken nuggets and my daughter requested something similar to a burrito. Long story short, I put everything on one plate, handed it to my daughter, and my son never got his chicken nuggets. 😭 I was very upset for him because those were the last chicken nuggets in our freezer. As a result, I decided to make homemade chicken nuggets and try this recipe.

If you want the TLDR version: I'm never making homemade chicken nuggets again. 😂 And I'm someone who goes through the trouble of cooking because I enjoy it. But chicken nuggets....never gonna happen. And here's why:

I followed the recipe shown above loosely. There was another recipe I looked up and kind of combined the two together into my own version of chicken nuggets. Here's the part that ruined the recipe for me: the ground chicken. I didn't have pre-ground chicken but I had plenty of chicken in my freezer. I used my food processor to blend it down. Don't get me wrong, I love chicken nuggets because of that ground up texture vs the fibrous meat strands of meat pieces. But physically making it yourself and dealing with it/cleaning it up? That is a whole other monster.

Mixture consistency. Love the food processor for stuff like this. Hate the cleaning. 

Then there was the frying process. Again, I'm not against frying food. I love frying food, and especially having our wok to fry in. But boy does it make a huge mess. 

My big mess.

I tried a few after I made them, and I definitely skimped on the salt/seasoning. Oops. It wasn't intentional. But with some barbecue sauce or ranch, these would be some yummy chicken nuggets. 

I'm never making these again because Costco sells freezer chicken nuggets from $3/lb all the way up to the fancier $6+/lb all natural chicken pieces. I'm for all of them. I'm going to compare my nuggets to the $6/lb ones because I used chicken tenderloins and there are no preservatives in my nuggets. These definitely already cost me $3+/lb to make at home due to the cost of the ingredients, the time it took to put everything together, and the hassle of cleaning up after myself. I'm glad I did it once....but never again.

For all its glory, here they are again. My homemade nuggets.