Mon, Jan 18 – Tonight was my turn to make dinner again. Last week I made lasagna, so this week I decided to make chicken parmesan. I checked a recipe earlier today and stopped by Standa on the way home from class to pick up chicken breast, flour (for breading), and a few other needed ingredients. I loosely followed this recipe from chickenparmesan.net, but simply used a jar of tomato sauce instead of the combination with tomato puree called for in the recipe, and added chunks of cherry tomatoes. (Eating in Italy is actually teaching me to like some vegetables – but still not lettuce!)
Frying the chicken was somewhat trial and error. At first there was not much of a fried breading so I attempted to add more flour and thicken the crisp while already in the skillet. This eventually just lead to an unappealing sediment of flour glob in the pan. The second batch (I could only fit three of six pieces on the skillet at once) I tried to batter a bit thicker to start but the build up of old flour in the pan was not ideal. All turned out well and the chicken tasted good and had some crisp, but was not thickly breaded as intended.
I then poured the sauce over the chicken in a baking dish, generously topped with fresh mozzarella and grated parmesan and baked for about an hour – nice because it gave me plenty of time to clean up all the dishes and utensils I had dirtied during preparation. The finished dish was another culinary success and tasted great. The small group meal sharing has worked out really well so far – I get a great meal almost every evening, don’t have to cook often, and save money too.
The dish tonight was split among six people, but I still have one piece of chicken leftover for my lunch tomorrow. The photo above is it right out of the oven. The side of pasta was compliments of Jackson. Now I have about a week to figure out my next meal to cook. Any suggestions?