Sunday, September 1, 2013

Month 8 day 1: Quick chicken parmesan

Month 8! I can't believe it's already September. G will be coming back tomorrow, so I am really excited. I will have to start cooking more! And get to stop doing the dishes!

This month there are 5 issues-- and that will continue for the rest of the year. They are:

  • Cooking Light, September 2009
  • Cooking Light, September 2010
  • Cooking Light, September 2011
  • Food & Wine, September 2010
  • Every Day with Rachael Ray, September 2011

I think I must have bought the September 2009 issue at the grocery store when I first came to MIT. It's the only magazine I have from 2009. When I was looking through it, everything looked so familiar. I think I had paged through a few times and marked some recipes to try-- but mostly didn't, until now! September 2009 was a long time ago. And September 2010 was around when I first started dating G. Good memories!

Today I made:
Oven-Fried Chicken Parmesan, Cooking Light September 2009
with green beans and vinaigrette, Cooking Light September 2009

I didn't really have any food around, and was mostly snacking on leftover cheese, crackers, and truffles from last night's party. There was an extra serving of pork tortas in lab, but it's getting kind of old, and I stayed home all day. To be honest, I really liked the subletter who was staying with me for the past two months (best subletter ever), but since she left I am relishing walking between our two rooms and rearranging things back to the way they were. I'm just so happy to be at home that I don't want to go outside or do anything else!
But eventually I was getting hungry and felt like eating more chips and hummus was not the answer. So I looked through to see which recipes could be made from the pantry/freezer.

I had a couple little chicken tenderloins in the freezer, panko on the shelf, a jar of pasta sauce (unusual for me to have, but people are moving out and giving away things), and just so happened to have extra fresh mozzarella in the fridge (and Parmigiano-Reggiano as usual). I heated up some frozen green beans (not so great) as a vehicle for the vinaigrette instead of romaine as suggested, and we are out of polenta (and pasta! Our pantry is a bit worthless right now), but I felt like I'd had enough crackers today anyway.

I recently bought panko for a recipe instead of the normal bread crumbs, and there is a pretty big difference. Panko is very cripsy, and makes things seem like they've been deep fried even if they haven't been. It was great here too. This was very quick, but I recall making chicken parm as normally taking a really long time. Is that just because normally I'm making the tomato sauce from scratch? Or pounding the chicken? Or maybe at the age when I first tried to make it I was just not very good at cooking and multitasking in the kitchen.

This was a fine recipe, although it ended up being quite salty. I might have over salted, but I think it might have been from the Parmigiano-Reggiano. In any case, I was using just little tenderloins, so there might not have been as much chicken to stand up to the cheese as there should have been. I think I'll save this recipe, just because it shows how easy chicken parmesan can be.

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