If you are a sensible human with sensible human tastes in food, you already recognize Chick-fil-A as the king of the chicken sandwich, serving chicken that is much like unto God in deliciousness and tastiness.  (What’s that you say?  God isn’t delicious?  To which I respond:  have you ever eaten God?  I thought not.  And then I respond again: Catholics, shuddup.)(*)

Unfortunately, if you are a good sensible human with sensible human tastes in food, you recognize that Chick-fil-A serves their delicious chicken with a side order of bigotry and discrimination, and you don’t ‘specially want to give bigotry any of your money.  Even if the chicken is delicious, chicken fried in the hate-oil of intolerance ain’t edible.  Or some such overwrought figure of speech, I dunno.

This puts us decent folk in a bit of a quandary.  Chick-fil-A is delicious.  But we can’t have the delicious, no, we must deny the delicious, like Christ thrice denied Satan, or something like that.

But I love you.  I love you so very much.  

And so:  I give you knockoff Chick-fil-A, courtesy of sliceofsouthernpie, who may well be horrified to see me linking to her recipe in these particular terms but I hope not because she seems like a nice lady.   I am slightly modifying her recipe, which technically is for nuggets, so I’ll reprint the version we used here:

• Chicken tenderloins (Boneless.  Aren’t they always?)
• 1 cup of milk
• 1 egg
• 1/4 cup pickle juice (we used the juice from zesty dill spears and it worked fine)
• A cup or so of flour
• 1/3 cup powdered sugar
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon paprika
• Fryin’ oil (we used vegetable; CFA’s website confirms that they use peanut oil; I doubt it matters much but let me know if I’m wrong)

First, marinate your chicken: use the egg, the milk, and the pickle juice, whisk the hell out of it and put your chicken pieces into it (you don’t need to beat the hell out of them first or anything) and leave them in the fridge, airtight, for a few hours.  Bek put ours in at lunchtime.  Once you’re ready to start cooking, mix together all of the dry ingredients in a  bowl.  She suggests dredging through once; I think I’m going to authorize the dredge, dip back in marinade, then dredge again method, as our chicken came out slightly under breaded.  Then fry ’em up.

Serve on a white bread bun, preferably heavily buttered and then slightly toasted in the oven (note that we didn’t do this), with exactly two pickle slices, preferably pickle slices dripping with pickle juice and pressed into the top bun.  And one more thing: mine didn’t quiiiite taste right until I sprinkled a couple turns of sea salt directly onto the meat.  Once I did that, other than the slight under breading, they were perfect.  And marriage-equality-friendly, too!  Wheeee!

(*) Yes, that’s a transubstantiation joke. I know, they’re not terribly common.