Hardee's Hand-breaded Chicken Tenders or How I stopped worrying about bringing my lunch to work and started eating awesomeness

So a couple of days ago I found myself in a predicament that thrusts itself upon me from time to time.  I had brought my lunch, Thai peanut noodles(perhaps to be covered in a future blog), but I wasn't terribly interested in eating them when lunch time rolled around.  In the past in an effort to save money I have swallowed my pride in these matters and choked down whatever mediocre food item I had packed in my lunchbox plastic Wal-Mart bag of awesomeness.  However, on this particular day due to working some substantial overtime I had a little change in my pocket and I decided to go out for lunch.  Man am I glad I did.

I was in the mood for some tasty fried chicken.  KFC was out due to my personal vendetta against them(definitely to be covered on another day) and trying to access the McDonald's on  the other side of 82nd St at lunch time is more effort than I wanted to put in.  That left Hardee's and their new hand-breaded chicken tenders.  Much has been written about these on various other food blogs around the interwebs with mixed reviews, but my opinion being that Hardee's generally puts out a fairly high quality product I decided to try them out for myself.

The first thing I noticed was the cost.  The combo with 5 tenders, fries and a drink was around 7 bucks.  Even before tasting the food I thought this was more than reasonable and comparable to almost any other fast food restaurant's chicken tenders.  However, the thing that I simply could not believe was the quality of the product.  I decided to start this blog after having ate the meal so I apologize for not having a picture, but the tenders were quite sizable, juicy, and fresh in both taste and the amount of time they spent out of the fryer before being served.  The color was a nice golden brown and the breading was light and crispy being more similar to KFC's Original Recipe than the frozen strips that you would get at someplace like DQ or Arby's.  This allowed for the juiciness of the chicken to come through more.  I chose to dip these in their honey mustard sauce, but even if they had forgot to put the sauce in the bag it still would have been a tasty meal.  The bottom line...Hardee's promises in their commercials that their chicken tenders will taste better than their fast food competitors' because Hardee's are fresh and not frozen.  I wholeheartedly agree.

Taste:  If I'm comparing with other fast food joints these are a 9 or 10 on scale of 10.  If I compare them to most fast causual places they probably still rate an 8  or 9 only losing points because of the smaller portion size.
Value:  10/10.  I was fuller, more satisfied and no lighter in the wallet if I had bought a comparable product.
Randomness:  7/10 It wasn't exactly fried chicken bought out of some guys trunk in a gas station parking lot, but come on it's Hardee's.  Most people probably don't even know they still exist as a chain.