One of my favourites. And the kids eat it too since it’s basically giant chicken nuggets!

Ingredients

• One chicken breast per person
• plain flour (I like to season mine with a little salt and pepper)
• 1 egg, beaten
• breadcrumbs (I use Paxo Natural, but you could posh it up a bit with artisinal breadcrumbs)
• a frying oil (eg sunflower)
• salt and pepper
• parmesan
• lemons to serve

Method

1. Preheat an over to 75’c to keep things warm. Put in a baking tray lined with kitchen towel or greaseproof paper.

2. Pop a damp sheet of kitchen towel on your worktop, then a chopping board on top of that. Get a large piece of clingfilm (double the size of the chopping board, rest it over the board, then place a chicken breast on the clingfilm and finally lay the rest of the clingfilm over the chicken. Using a meat mallet, a rolling pin, or even another chopping board, bash your chicken breast to an even 1cm or so thick. Repeat for all chicken breasts (if you have decent quality clingfilm the same piece should hold up for multiple chicken breasts).

3. Heat the oil in a large frying pan.

4. Lay out three shallow bowls, each big enough to take a flattened breast. Put the flour in one, the egg in another, and mix the breadcrumbs and parmesan with a little salt and pepper in the third.

5. One by one, dredge the breasts in the flour and shake excess off, then dip in the egg and drip the excess off, then finally into the breadcrumb / parmesan mix and again shake off any excess.

6. Fry each coated chicken breast for 3 to four minutes on each side (check the internal temperature with an instant-read thermometer: chicken should reach a minimum of 70’C / 158’F according to the World Health Organisation - most recommend higher but the WHO is good enough for me). Transfer the cooked chicken breasts to the oven to keep warm while you do the others.

7. Serve with lemon wedges, a really simple tomato spaghetti, and a green salad.