Recipes #6, #7: Chicken Parmesan & Zucchini with Parmesan

Earlier today, I decided that I wanted to make dinner, since I rarely have time during the week. Ryan's mom bought me two cookbooks for Christmas: Giada's Kitchen: New Italian Favorites and Barefoot Contessa Family Style. Those of you reading this probably know about my obsession with Giada (and Lisa's obsession with Barefoot Contessa, haha). Well, I decided to try something semi-new, and go with Ina Garten for tonight's dinner.

The zucchini with parmesan was taken directly from the Barefoot Contessa cookbook. Here's what you need:

8 medium zucchini

Good olive oil

2 large yellow onions

Salt and pepper

1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

First, cut the onions and zucchini. For the zucchini, cut them lengthwise, and then cut smaller pieces, like this:

Next, heat up 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large pan and add the onions. I'm going to confess....I cut up the first onion and saw how much there was, and decided to only use one. I'm slowly learning to like (cooked) onions, so I didn't want to overdo it. And after I was all done, I was quite glad I didn't add that second onion. Anyway, you want to cook these for at least 10 minutes on medium-low heat, until they start to brown. Another confession: I cooked them for about 20 minutes. I wanted to make sure they were completely cooked. But if you aren't like me and don't need your onions to be 100% tender, then 10 minutes should be just fine!

After the 10 (or 20) minutes are up, add half of the zucchini, 1 tsp of salt and 1/4 tsp of pepper. Toss occasionally for 10-15 minutes. I ended up adding all of the zucchini, since I didn't want to deal with the two batches. The reasoning behind two separate batches is because they end up more "steamed" then "sauteed"....oh well, whatevs!

After the veggies have been cooking for the 10-15 minutes, add in the parmesan cheese and cook for an additional 30 seconds. Now, ideally, I think the cheese is kind of supposed to brown the veggies, but this didn't exactly happen. Oops. Maybe because I added too much olive oil (I'm convinced I did, because I didn't use two onions....the whole time it just kind of seemed like there was too much) or maybe because I ignored the recommendation to cook the zucchini in two separate batches. Oh well! The parmesan cheese (oh, and of course I added more than 1/2 cup, since I'm cheese-obsessed) ended up melting, instead of browning anything. But it was okay because they tasted yummy! Here's the end result:

So now onto the main dish! I've made this chicken parmesan a few times before. It's a recipe that oringated from Ina Garten, but Ryan's mom taught me how to finish the dish a little differently, which is the way I did it tonight. Here's what you're going to need:

6 skinless boneless chicken breasts (I always just buy the 4 pack from Foster Farms)
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
2 eggs
1 1/4 cups seasoned dry bread crumbs
1/2 freshly grated parmesan cheese (ok...I just use the kraft stuff for this)
unsalted butter
good olive oil
mozzarella cheese
Prego traditional tomato sauce

You start out the same as my last recipe, where you take the chicken breasts and cut off the fat and pound them until they are about 1/4 inch thick.

In case you're curious, here's the tool I use for pounding.

I swear that's the toughest part of this recipe. Next, you take out two plates and a bowl. On the first plate, mix the flour, salt and pepper. In the bowl, beat the eggs with a tablespoon of water. On the second plate, mix the breadcrumbs and parmesan cheese. Then, you take each chicken breast, coat it in the flour, dunk it in the egg mixture (make sure it gets everywhere) and then cover it all over with the bread crumb-cheese mixture.

After coating the chicken breasts.

After that's done, heat up 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 tablespoon of olive oil into a large pan. Cook each chicken breat for a few minutes on medium-low heat. I probably let them cook for about 4 minutes on each side, but of course it depends how thick they are.

When I first put them into the pan.

After flipping them over. Yum, nice and brown!

I cut the chicken breasts in half, so I ended up with 8 altogether. Therefore, I did them in two batches when I first cooked them. Once all of them are cooked and transferred to a plate, pour some of the Prego sauce into the same pan. But be careful! It may spray up at you...

Anyway, when I normally make this, there is always pasta. But for some reason, I chose not to make pasta tonight. So usually the extra sauce left over in the pan is mixed in with the pasta. You can just pour as much sauce into the pan as you think you need to coat the chicken and mix in with the pasta. I let the sauce heat up for a few minutes, and then placed the 8 chicken breasts into the sauce.

For this part, don't worry too much if the chicken breasts are kind of on top of each other. It's not as important for them to have their own space since they are already fully cooked. Unfortunately I don't have any more pictures to show, but the next step is to add the grated mozzarella cheese on top of each breast, and leave them in the pan (covered) until the cheese melts. And then it's ready to serve! Enjoy =)