Sarah’s New Secret Recipe Chicken Parmesan

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.

Pasta with Spinach & Dried-Tomato; a treatise on cooking by method over recipe

I spent the summer of 2001 studying Medieval Slavic manuscripts through an intensive summer institute at the Hilander Research Libary at Ohio State University that included coursework on paleography and recensions of Church Slavonic… but unforunately (fortunately?) for the forward trajectory of my career in academia, I did not end up incorporating much of what I learned into a later body of research.

I did, however, leave Columbus completely and utterly changed as a home chef.

My roommate for the Medieval Summer Slavic Institute, Ines, hailed from Madrid, had spent much time living in Naples, and produced the most amazing concoctions in our slender galley kitchen. I was no stranger to the kitchen, myself, at the time, but my culinary naivety is striking in retrospect.

Pasta with Spinach and TomatoThat summer was of such staggering importance to my future in the kitchen, because Ines taught me how to cook without a recipe. And not just in the sense that one becomes so familiar with a dish after cooking it several times, there is no need to look at the recipe. She taught me how to use instinct and experience to assemble random items at hand into delicious food.

Now, I’ve had to revert back to a more recipe-oriented standpoint in recent years. Recipe culture on the Internet is, perhaps necessarily, more precise. Submission to formalized recipe sites requires exact measurements of all ingredients, not only for consistency, but also so that submission software can calculate nutritional information. Oftentimes, I will publish recipes on this blog and elsewhere with ingredient measurements that work… but that I don’t necessarily follow when I make the dish. Or I’ll include instructions for fudging the amounts one way or the other.

This Saturday, however, I was reminded of my purely recipe-free summer with Ines. I was over at my parents’ house for my weekly dinner and Star Trek with Neilbert. It was a warm summer day; a couple of ice cold beers (literally, I left mine in the freezer too long) helped to cut the heat, but I couldn’t imagine cooking anything too heavy. A pasta dish in the tradition of recipe-less cooking from Ines seemed the perfect solution.

PASTA WITH SPINACH & DRIED-TOMATO

So, this is the recipe part of the blog, right? But in accordance with everything I said so far, it’s not going to have a list of exact ingredients. Cooking is supposed to be something of an art, so use your own tastes and judgement to figure out how much to use. Here are the items I used in this dish:

olive oil
minced garlic
diced onions
spinach
paprika
dried tomato (here’s one way to make them)
pasta
salt

I started by sauteing the garlic and onion in olive oil; that’s pretty much how Ines started nearly every recipe I ever saw her make. When the onions were looking softened and a little crisp, I added the spinach. Now, I’m sure Ines would never settle for less than fresh spinach, but the only thing Neilbert and Saundra had around the house was a box of frozen spinach, so that’s what I used. I added more olive oil as the initial dose got absorbed.

Meanwhile I cooked some pasta. How much? I don’t know, I just eyed it up, and based on my vegetables cooking on the next burner over, I made a guess. I cooked it for about five minutes at most; another habit I took from Ines was cooking pasta very al dente. Before I met her I would have considered it under-done. Now, it’s just the way I eat.

While the pasta was boiling, I added my dried tomatoes to the spinach amalgam and added more oil (as that was my intended main medium of the “sauce”). I also included a healthy dose of paprika; something I’ve learned from Hungarian cooking is that there is really no such thing as too much paprika. Once the vegetables were heated through, I tossed them with the pasta. I didn’t add salt directly to the finished product because Neilbert has salt sensitivities, but for anyone not on a salt-restricted diet, it’s pretty important. There are so few seasonings in this dish that the salt goes a long way to bringing out the natural flavors in the vegetables.

This recipe is great on its own, of course, but it can also be dressed up in a number of different ways. Bacon is a great addition for meat lovers, as would be a number of crumbled cheeses like feta or goat.