Crispy Chicken Tenders

While I waited for my son to get out of preschool, I took my daughter to the library. They have an awesome children's department at this library, complete with puppet theater and educational computer games. My daughter loves the puppet theater and the assortment of board books, so many afternoons we find ourselves there in the children's department. On this particular day, I also noticed they had a display with a take-home recipe for anyone who was interested. I glanced over the recipe and thought it looked great and would be easy to make gluten-free. I tweaked it a bit and came up with Crispy Chicken Tenders.

***Crispy Chicken Tenders
1 1/2 tsp. vinegar, plus another 2 Tbsp. vinegar
1/2 cup milk
1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breast halves (I used two large halves)
2 Tbsp. prepared mustard
2 Tbsp. grape jelly
black pepper to taste
1 cup crushed Rice Chex cereal (I measured out 2 cups uncrushed, and then crushed them)

In 1/2 cup measuring cup, put 1 1/2 tsp. vinegar in and fill up with milk. Allow 10 minutes for mixture to thicken. This creates homemade buttermilk. Cut chicken breast halves into strips or nugget-size pieces. In a bowl, combine mustard, remaining 2 Tbsp. vinegar, jelly and desired amount of black pepper. Stir in homemade buttermilk. Add cut up chicken pieces, cover, and place in refrigerator 20 minutes.

Heat oven to 400 degrees. Crush cereal in bowl. Lightly grease a baking sheet. Remove cut chicken pieces from milk-mustard mixture one at a time and coat with crushed cereal. Place coated chicken pieces on prepared baking sheet. Repeat process until all chicken pieces are coated. Bake chicken 25 minutes, or until internal temperature reaches 170 degrees. Serve immediately.

You can use whatever dipping sauce you like. I made a zesty BBQ sauce to go with my chicken. My kids used ketchup.