Tag Archives: parmesan

Sarah’s New Secret Recipe Chicken Parmesan

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I don’t think I’ve ever even been tempted to order chicken parmesan at a restaurant. There are tons of dishes I like better at any Italian restaurant, including eggplant parm, and so I have always ordered those without having been tempted by the chicken parm.

My mother, on the other hand, is nuts for chicken parm. Perhaps it started as an affinity for veal parm… but as veal grew to have a dubious reputation she switched over to chicken. Maybe I’ve just never been enough of a meat enthusiast to see the appeal of a breaded cutlet on spaghetti, but chicken parm has always been Saundra’s thing, not mine… until recently when Saundra made a statement so bold and so shocking that I just had to respond…

She says that the best Chicken Parm she’s ever had is from the Olive Garden.

Dorito CrumbsSurely the mass produced, MSG-filled, big chain restaurant chicken parm couldn’t possibly be better than fresh, hand-made dishes from local Italian restaurants? Minutellos? Alexanders? Pleasure Bar? Nope, said Saundra, the Olive Garden chicken parm is better than all of those. I refused to stand for such a notion, and so I set out to make a chicken parm that Saundra would find better than the Olive Garden. I researched recipes, I consulted Italian home chefs, I assembled my ingredients and I was ready to go. I cooked up a batch of chicken parm, served it up to Saundra and….

It was good, she said, but Olive Garden was still better.

What!? How was it possible that my from-scratch, fresh-ingredients, straight-from-the-oven chicken parm could still be eclipsed by Olive Garden?

“I don’t know what the difference is,” said Saundra. “There’s something about it… you just can’t stop eating it. It’s addictive… like Doritos!”

And that was when I got the idea to make chicken parm with Doritos in the breading! Saundra declares this recipe to be a contender against Olive Garden; I suspect she may never concede Olive Garden completely, but in the meantime:

SARAH’S DORITO CHICKEN PARMESAN

Chicken ParmesanBreading

equal parts
- plain bread crumbs
- grated parmesan cheese
- Dorito crumbs

eggs
milk
flour
salt

The Rest of it

1 to 2 lbs. chicken breast, cut and pounded thin
vegetable oil
pasta and red sauce
additional cheese, shredded parm or provolone (optional)

If you have particularly large chicken breasts you may have to cut them cross-wise through the middle (like slicing a bagel) as well as cutting them in half. You want to pound the breast thin, and pounding the entire thickness of the breast is not only a lot of work, but it’s going to leave the breast meat too pulverized to work with. Chicken breast falls apart more easily when pounded than does pork or beef, so I thin it out first with a cut and then with a light pounding.

Lightly salt the pounded breasts and set aside.

Prepare the breading first by crumbing the Doritos. Place them in a large freezer bag and use a rolling pin to crush them into as fine a crumb as you can. Transfer them to a new bag (the one you used for crumbing will inevitably incur damage and holes in the process) and add an equal amount of plain breadcrumbs and grated parmesan cheese. I used a cup each of Dorito crumbs, bread crumbs and parmesan the last time I made it.

Beat a couple eggs with a splash of milk and pour it into a wide bowl or plate.

Put some flour in another freezer bag. I like to use gram flour (i.e. garbanzo bean flour) in order to keep the glycemic index low for Saundra, but any flour should work okay. Add a little salt and/or pepper to the flour if you like.

Toss a few cutlets at a time with the flour. When they are thoroughly coated, dip them in the eggs and then in the crumbs. You may find it easier to do the crumb layer on a plate, rather than in the bag.

Repeat with each cutlet. Stack them with parchment or wax paper in between to avoid sticking. Refrigerate while getting the other items assembled. If you are making red sauce from scratch, you might want to start it now; if using a jar, just put it over a low fire to warm.

Heat about an inch or so or oil in a wide skillet. Have a few baking sheets and an old kitchen towel standing by. Fry the breaded chicken cutlets in the hot oil. There should be enough oil to cover the cutlets when a few are in the pan. Turn the cutlets to make sure they are getting done evenly on both sides. When cutlets are golden brown, place them first on the old kitchen towel (just to absorb some of the excess oil) and then on the baking sheet. Once you get enough cutlets to fill the baking sheet, you can put some additional cheese on top before putting them in the oven to keep warm. Keep them at 200 or 250 degrees, again, just to keep them warm while finishing the meal.

When all cutlets are fried and in the oven, finish dinner preparations, i.e. the pasta and red sauce and/or other side dishes. Check on the cutlets often and turn down the temperature if you have to leave them in awhile, as you don’t want them to get dried out.

Serve with pasta and plenty of sauce on the side.

Pesto Parmesan Eggs

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As my deviled egg experimentation continues, I decided to try a souped-up and much changed version of a recipe for pesto deviled eggs I found in a cookbook. The recipe I found was not agreeable in a number of ways. First of all, it called for a sizable dose of sun-dried tomatoes. Now, I love sun-dried tomatoes, but with a tablespoon and a half, that makes it Sun-dried Tomato Eggs, not Pesto Eggs. Now, sun-dried tomato eggs sounds like a very good idea, one that I will most certainly try making one day, but if I’m going to make pesto eggs, I’m going to let the pesto be the main attraction.

Pesto Parmesan EggThe other thing I didn’t like about the recipe I had on hand is that it was too simple. Not enough ingredients. Clearly this recipe was much too reliant on the sun-dried tomatoes, so I would have to make some major additions and substitutions. The result was as follows:

SARAH’S PESTO PARMESAN EGGS

6 hard-boiled eggs, peeled
1/4 cup sour cream
1/8 to 1/4 cup grated or shredded Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons prepared pesto
1/4 teaspoon minced garlic or garlic powder
1 tablespoon crumbled bacon or real bacon bits
1 tablespoon pine nuts or slivered blanched almonds
8 to 10 leaves fresh basil
1 teaspoon white wine or lemon juice.
black pepper and/or red pepper to taste

Cut eggs in half length-wise and scoop out the yolks. In a small bowl or container, combine yolks, sour cream, cheese, pesto, garlic, bacon bits, nuts, basil, wine and pepper with electric beaters. Once the yolk mixture is combined, spoon the mixture into the yolk halves and chill for at least two hours before serving.

I was actually quite pleasantly surprised with how these eggs turned out. Usually I give a recipe a couple tries before I’m happy enough with it to post online, but these came out swimmingly the first time. Next time I make them I’ll try doing just a couple things differently. First, I didn’t chop the fresh basil before I added it. I was feeling lazy and decided just to pick some from my window plant, wash it and toss it in. Some of it got torn up in the beaters, but a lot of the leaves were left whole. Next time I’ll chop the basil a bit before I toss it in. Next, I want to try using lemon juice instead of wine. This recipe has a distinct lack of acidic ingredients, which help keep the eggs looking and tasting fresh. Most deviled egg recipes include mayo and/or prepared mustard, both of which have vinegar already in them. The original recipe didn’t even have the white wine; I added that because I thought it could use some form of acidic preservative and I was afraid the lemon juice might clash with the dairy elements. The eggs still tasted fine a day later, but they started to get a little discolored around the edges. Next time I’ll try lemon juice to see if it will keep them fresher looking longer. White wine vinegar might be feasible as well, but I didn’t have any on hand. The bacon could, of course, be omitted for vegetarians.