Potato Chip Crusted Chicken and Bacon Bread Salad

There are a million and one ways to dress up chicken - stuffing, frying, injecting, marinating, pan cooking, etc. You can take a look at some of our other delicious chicken experiments, like the coffee rubbed whole chicken, spicy buffalo chicken calzones, chicken bacon alfredo puffs, or our buffalo fried chicken.

One style we enjoy is to coat chicken breasts or tenderloins in something crunchy and then pop it in the oven, which gives a great juicy inside and a nice firm crunch on the outside. Recently we had some potato chips that weren't very exciting, so we decided to use them as a crunch coating for some tenderloins. Here we've got a handful of chips in a plastic bag to make it easier to crush them up.

To prevent any mess, Megan rolls a rolling pin over the plastic bag, crunching up all the chips quickly and easily.

Here we've got some tenderloins which will get coated in the chips before baking.

Instead of a milk and egg wash, as we might do for frying or baking a coated meal, this time we decided to brush the chicken with a layer of mayo to get the potato chips to stick.

The tenderloins are set in a bowl of chips and then flipped over. The crunchy coating should stick nicely to the meat.

Here's our finished coated chicken, just about ready to go in the oven.

While the chicken is baking, we'll put together a salad, which will be a little more involved than our usual veggie-topped side salad. This one uses a custom dressing and a few non-traditional ingredients. To start off with, we microwave some turkey bacon until it's crispy.

Next up we dice a whole roma tomato. If you're feeding several people, you may want to go with two or three instead.

The sauce is a combination of balsamic vinegar, minced garlic, basil, and salt and pepper.

All the sauce ingredients are mixed with the tomatoes, which are then worked together with a potato masher.

After the flavors have had a minute to soak into the tomatoes, cut up and throw in the bacon.

For a little more color we also ended up dicing some green onion as well.

Finally goes in the ingredient that sounds odd but actually works fantastic - torn up pieces of a fluffy bread. French bread would work great, but we used a cheddar topped bakery bread.

Mix it all together and let it sit for a few minutes so the bread soaks up the dressing.

Then tear up some romaine, or whichever lettuce you prefer, and toss it in.

A few quick mixes and you've got an absolutely delicious salad!

Here's my plate with two juicy and crunchy chicken tenderloins and a helping of salad.

The salad actually could have been a meal on its own because of how filling it is, and next time we'll likely go that route.