Day 13 Circle A Ranch Chicken Breast Strips

I've never heard of the Circle A Ranch before. In an effort to understand these chicken strips, I Googled "Circle A Ranch" and there are actually a few of them: an Angus beef ranch in Missouri, a hemp products company in Colorado, a guest ranch in New Mexico, and a summer camp in Colorado, none of which appear to have any connection to these breaded strip shaped chicken breast patties with rib meat.   

As with most of the dollar store frozen foods, this is an individual-size portion (two "servings" of 200 calories for a total of 400 in the bag).

The instructions provide for microwave or conventional oven heating but for real restaurant flavor I deep fried mine for four minutes at 350 degrees.

 In the frozen state they look pretty good. The strips smell good. I can pick up notes of garlic and black pepper.

Again you can see the ridiculousness of dividing the bag into "servings". Who is going to eat three and a half chicken strips? Maybe a toddler or something? These are small.

I'm not sure these can really be called strips. They're more like slightly elongated nuggets. They are also all the same shape unlike, say, McNuggets which are cut into four different shapes at the factory.

After the fryer the strips come out golden brown and slightly shrunken. I think they've lost a bit of water weight in the fryer. They feel crispy and still smell good.

 Time to dig in! The breading is crispy and the inside is quite tender, with a lovely white meat chicken flavor and well-spiced breading. What these remind me of actually is Wendy's chicken nuggets. I don't think they're made by the same company (they're certainly not the same shape) but they taste quite similar.

I do wish they came with dipping sauce. These nugget-strips would pair quite nicely with sweet and sour or buffalo sauce.