Cottage cheese chicken tenders

One of our staple dinners is breaded chicken tenders with broccoli and pasta.  It's quick, everyone in the family likes it, and it's easy to make enough to pack in lunches the next day.  It's also reasonably healthy, except that my go-to method for preparing breaded chicken tenders involves mayo and sour cream (the fat helps keep the chicken moist and tender even when I'm 5 min late taking it out of the oven - a very nice feature when one is also dealing with a demanding 4 year old and an infant, for sure).  

Andy's question about making sauces with yogurt as a base got me thinking about other potential substitutes, and cottage cheese came to mind.  Lowfat cottage cheese has good flavor and a ridiculous amount of protein for not very many calories.  And, when it's pureed, it has a consistency similar to yogurt.  

Last night I made breaded chicken tenders using pureed cottage cheese and yogurt instead of mayo and sour cream on the chicken.  I used my handy-dandy immersion blender to do the pureeing.  Without all the fat provided by the mayo the chicken is more susceptible to overcooking.  Also, as always when you use something to coat chicken, you end up having some leftover that has to be thrown out, and since cottage cheese and yogurt are more expensive than mayo, this substitution ends up costing more.  However, the flavor was really nice - Aleks commented several times that the chicken had more flavor than normal.  Overall, a success, and I'll probably adopt this as my go-to method from now on.  

~ 6 oz cottage cheese

~ an equal volume yogurt

1 1/2 T mustard

1-2 cloves garlic, put through a garlic press

Panko bread crumbs

~1/2 t salt + black pepper to taste

1.5 lbs chicken tenders

Puree the cottage cheese with the yogurt, then stir in the mustard and garlic.  In a separate bowl stir together the bread crumbs, salt, and pepper (and anything else fun you feel like using - grated parmesan, chopped sage or thyme, etc).  Pat chicken dry, then coat with yogurt mixture, then dredge in bread crumbs.  Lay on a baking sheet and spray with spray oil (PAM, or I used olive oil spray).  Bake at 450 for 15-20 min. 

I had been hoping for a bit of a cheesy flavor, and didn't get that.  I think maybe next time I'll try it just with the cottage cheese and leave the yogurt out. 

-Maggie