Mushroom faux-breaded chicken

So I’ve never really been a burger fan. Until recently! Now I’m excited by all the burger possibilities. I like lots of toppings on my burgers, too! But all those pesky toppings sometimes fall off, especially when you are eating it sans-pain (that’s bread-free, fools!), like I do. To continue my love affair with the NomNomPaleo.com ipad app, this was inspired by a recipe there for “Big-O Bacon Burgers”

Chop up the ingredients and put them IN the burger!

Bacon mushroom burgers – makes 6

1 lb grass fed ground beef
6 slices of bacon
1/2 lb of mushrooms (maybe more, maybe less?)

This is simple. Chop all the ingredients and mix them with the beef. Don’t do as I do in the pictures. I want you to chop the ingredients fairly small. The recipe on the iPad app pulses the bacon in the food processor. I think I will do that next time. Mix it all together and form into patties. BBQ them!

I sauteed the mushrooms and bacon before I added them to the beef. I want my bacon nice and crispy.

Toss them on the grill. Look at those flames. That’s called a fire from dripping bacon grease, yes it is!

Serve on a bed of lettuce. I added tomato, onion and dijon to mine. The rest of the family had theirs on buns. Yummo.

When I was a kid I loved chicken fingers. Like loved loved loved. They made my world go round. My family ran a restaurant. I “helped” in the kitchen a lot. I knew how to use the deep fryer. I knew where the chicken fingers were stored. I was a master chicken finger chef. Probably the reason I was an obese child…

I still love those disgustingly delicious salty, breaded flavourful pieces of heaven. Arby’s has the best ones, for the record. BUT, I don’t eat them anymore. I still love me some “breaded” chicken though. I came up with this recipe that uses ground almond, ground flax seed and magic mushroom powder.

Magic mushroom powder is a concoction from nomnompaleo.com. The full recipe is available on the iPad app, but essentially it is a mixture of salt, thyme, red pepper flakes, pepper and dried mushrooms all pulverized to a powder. The original recipe uses 1oz of mushrooms and 2/3 c kosher salt. I would cut the salt in half next time. You can play with these ingredients to get the mixture as you like it. I think the original recipe was intended for it to be more of a seasoning salt, so the way I used it in this recipe made it WAY too salty. Almost inedible salty but we ate it anyway.

Mushroom faux-breaded chicken – Serves 4

4 large boneless skinless chicken breasts
1/2 c of magic mushroom powder
1/4 c of ground flax meal (I use Bob’s Red Mill… only because it’s the only one I seem to find!)
1/4 c of ground almond
1/4 c dijon mustard
1 egg

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Put the flax meal, mushroom powder and ground almond on a plate.

Mix it all up

Mix 1/4 c dijon with an egg.

Dunk your chicken breasts and mix well

Toss in the “breading” mixture

Place on a baking tray and put in the oven for 35ish minutes. Until they are done. Use a thermometer if you want to make sure.

Yum.

I served them with fiddleheads for dinner, but you could just slice them up and eat them (maybe I did that, maybe I didn’t…) or I also put them on a salad with microgreens and some olive tapenade. They are yummy cold too!