Chicken Dippers & Curry Dip

There’s nothing wrong with a tasty treat of chicken nuggets, or chicken dippers and dips.  But I do begrudge the idea of spending about £2.70 on about six chicken nuggets from a national chain of fast food providers.  Even though the golden arches are just 200 yards away from my route, I’ll still take the time to make my own chicken dippers at home.

Of course, this is food cheats, so when I say make my own, I don’t actually mean that EVERY time.  Once a year I’ll buy a bag of chicken dippers for the freezer – the current bag contains 42 large nuggets, bought from Sainsburys – I picked up dippers instead of nuggets this time, based purely on price (I’m so price conscious as every little helps!).

At full cost these work out at £0.07 each, but if you wait until they’re on special offer then you can get them cheaper.  Comparing £0.42 for the supermarket -v- £2.70 for the fast food shop just doesn’t make sense to me!  It’s also quicker for me to slide these into the oven, than it is to get my jacket on, lock up the house, walk up the road, queue, wait, order, pay, leave and get home again!

For dips I’ll use standard chutneys and sauces available at the supermarket.  Today I used Heinz Curry Sauce – a squeezable bottle similar to tomato ketchup, but it’s curry sauce. The whole bottle cost me £1 and I use it for a variety of uses, such as dipping tortilla chips into!

Sometimes I’ll just mix some mayonnaise with curry powder to make my own curry dips.

What I find handy to use as a dipping pot is one of my bright silicone cupcake cases as dipping pots.

The toaster oven’s great for cooking small quantities.  It’d be madness to heat up a whole oven just to cook six chicken nuggets!  The toaster oven’s much more fuel efficient.  Cooked from frozen, the bag said that the nuggets need to be cooked for 12-15 minutes in a pre-heated oven at 200°C.

Instead, I adjusted these cooking instructions to cook the chicken nuggets in the mini oven and used:

• Oven temperature set to 190°C
• Used the baking tray, placed on the lowest shelf setting
• Set the heating elements for both (top and bottom) to be on

Method: 

1. I just wanted to cook six nuggets, so I lined the baking tray with foil and placed the frozen nuggets on there, spaced out a little bit.
2. I set the timer for 5 minutes and turned the oven on.
3. After 5 minutes I turned off the top element, so only the bottom heater element was on.
4. I set the timer for another 5 minutes and turned the oven on.
5. After 5 minutes I then turned the nuggets over and put the oven on for a final 5 minutes with just the bottom heating element on.

And that was it – 15 minutes, with no pre-heating, and the nuggets were the colour I wanted them to be, they were sizzling and fully cooked.

I served these with some curry dip this time, alternatives would’ve been tomato ketchup, sweetcorn relish, chilli relish or lemon sauce!

I find a small cereal bowl’s the perfect size to hold my chicken dippers and dipping sauce pot!

Total cost: £0.50