Aloha Chicken

So, true to my word, I have used my cookbooks. And I’m here to post about it, just like I said I would. 🙂 I received Deceptively Delicious for Christmas and, although I don’t have to “hide” anything in my daughter’s dinner, it is still a fun cookbook to have. If you haven’t heard of this cookbook, it is supposed to help you hide veggies and fruits in your food so that your kids (and spouse, even) will eat it. You do this by using purees.

I decided to try the Aloha Chicken. The purees hidden in this dish were sweet potato and pineapple. I normally abhor pineapple so this was a test to see if I could eat something I hated, too. In theory, you should do the purees ahead of time and either freeze or refrigerate but I just did it as I was preparing the meal. This was pretty simple to do since I have a food processor and had purchased the already cut up pineapple in the produce section at the store. It ended up being a great thing for me since then I could give the leftover whole pieces of pineapple and steamed pieces of sweet potato to my daughter who throughly enjoyed it that way. (Interestingly enough, she wouldn’t touch the sweet potato when I mashed it up on her tray but loved taking bites out of the steamed pieces.)

So, on to the rest of the food prep. The rest was super easy. Just cut chicken into finger pieces, dip in flour, then a mix of the 2 purees, coconut and egg white and lastly breadcrumbs. (The recipe actually called for flax seed to be added to the breadcrumbs but I was out and to make it healthier you could use whole wheat bread flour. It also called for soy sauce which I did not add as I did not have any and wanted to be able to give it to my daughter anyway so I didn’t want the extra sodium.) I didn’t have the wooden skewers the recipe called for so I just put the chicken straight in the frying pan with the olive oil.

This was really delicious! The taste reminded me of coconut shrimp actually which I really like. And I did “deceive” myself and was able to eat the chicken without gagging on pineapple. 😉 I actually don’t like coconut either (don’t like the texture) but you just get the taste without the texture in this chicken meal. Basically this is fancy chicken fingers which is a very kid-friendly meal if you DO need to hide ingredients.

I’m looking forward to trying other recipes from this cookbook! I think next time I will make the purees ahead of time, though, and I can freeze what I don’t need that way for another meal.

Have any of you tried out a new cookbook recently? I’d love to hear about it!