Baked Chicken Legs for School Lunches

Last week our young man came home from school, and told me that the canteen had delicious chicken legs on the menu. Apparently his friend had ordered them, and shared one (thanks, Master K!). Would he like some in his lunch? Oh, yes, he most certainly would!

So I checked out the school canteen menu, and discovered that they offer 3 BBQ chicken drummettes for $3. Pretty reasonable price, considering they are prepared fresh at the canteen. And canteens offer a great service, so I am certainly not going to tell you not to use them! But if I can make something at home, and I have the time and the ingredients, then I’ll give it a go.

Drummettes are smaller than a drumstick, but I couldn’t find them anywhere when I did the grocery shopping this week. So drumsticks it was – 2kg for $7. That was 17 drumsticks.

I had a quick look for BBQ sauce recipes, but decided to go with the one I’ve used before. It’s from taste.com.au, and usually goes with beef ribs. We love it!

For 1kg of meat, the ingredients are:

1/2 cup tomato sauce (ketchup)

1/4 cup honey

2T soy sauce

2T malt vinegar (use whatever vinegar you have, I used apple cider vinegar)

1T brown sugar

1t powdered mustard

Combine all ingredients in a bowl, add meat and turn to coat. Leave to marinade for 1 hour, (but if you need to cook them earlier then that’s ok!).

As you can see, I have two bowls of chicken legs here. The one on the right is lemon and honey, just for a something different. I didn’t follow a recipe, just a large spoonful of honey, a big squeeze of lemon juice, and a large clove of roughly chopped garlic.

I didn’t leave them to marinate for very long, I didn’t want the lemon juice ‘cooking’ the chicken. Probably only 10 minutes or so, while I heated the oven (170deg C) and prepared the roasting trays (lined them with baking paper).

I baked the chicken for close to 30 minutes, turning them twice and spooning over more marinade each time.

Whilst these will be delicious cold in the school lunchbox, the canteen serves them hot.

A couple of years ago we invested in a wide-mouthed Thermos so he could have a hot lunch on those cold school days. This works very well for us. I know some people have other branded ones which they are very happy with, but when I went looking I saw that Thermos brand says that food will stay warm longer than other brands. So that’s what we went with.

He will get 2 drumsticks in his lunch serving. I put a rough estimate of 60c per drumstick for me to make them at home, so $1.20 per lunch. For those families that choose to order from the canteen, I don’t think a dollar or two is much to worry about for the sake of convenience (our canteen is open 2 days a week). But, as I mentioned above, I have the time to make these at home, so I will 🙂

You may have noticed that in my 2kg of purchased chicken I got an odd number of drumsticks. That spare one has been taste tested, and declared delicious!

Our son is happy, and so am I!

By the way, the sauce leftover after cooking I reserved. Last night we had the leftover BBQ sauce over shredded chicken breast. I plan to use the honey and lemon sauce in some fried rice 🙂

If you save any uncooked marinade, be careful to make sure it is fully cooked before re-using. You don’t want to be taking any risks with raw meat juices.

*UPDATE 15/3/2017 – These were sent to school today for the first time, one of each flavour. They were still hot at lunch time, and were delicious (so I’m told!), and he can’t pick a favourite 😉

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