Day Fourteen--Chicken Parmigiana

Well lookie here. I'm actually posting tonight after dinner. What a fine dinner it was too. Are you sitting down? It wasn't a Jamie Oliver recipe tonight. I know, I know, I felt like I needed to branch out a bit. I turned to dear old Martha tonight. I used to get her Everyday Food magazine and it had a lot of good recipes in it. This came from the Everyday Food website.

Chicken Parmigiana over a bed of mixed lettuce.

I made her tomato sauce instead of just buying a jar of sauce. It wasn't as tasty as Jamie's sauce last week, but it did make a LOT. I am not sure what I'm going to with it all. I suppose I will put some in the fridge for pizza and then freeze the rest.

This was a really easy dinner to do. I had it all put together from scratch in about 25 minutes. I made the sauce first and then started on the chicken. I got three organic chicken breasts and I split them in half so it made six cutlets. I browned them in a pan for a couple of minutes and then broiled it with mozzarella on top. Mozzarella. I'm spoiled now by the balls of cheese. I will not buy pre-shredded cheese again. In fact, as soon as I can get my hands on some citric acid I'm going to try to make my own.

The good news about this meal is that Aidan loved it. He even ate the salad and said he liked lettuce. Breakthrough! Everyone loved this meal. I was going to do some writing about eating locally but I don't really have the energy to do it tonight. I'm doing a lot of reading and trying to figure some stuff out. I will write about it soon though. I promise. I think that is all I have now. Until tomorrow, happy cooking. =)

Day Eight--Baked Pasta with Tomatoes and Mozzarella

Tonight's dinner was a huge success. Win. Score. It was so delicious. It took some planning and part of it was a little more work than usual but so worth it. So, on to the dinner. We had:

Baked Pasta with Tomatoes with Mozzarella.

My first issue that I had with this recipe is that it called for a type of pasta that I've never heard of, nor could I find in the store. Thankfully google helped me out. The pasta was orecchiette. Basically it's a pasta that is shaped kind of like an ear. It's got what looks like a thumb print in the middle. I made my normal pasta recipe...and this is where the extra time comes in... and spent 45 minutes making little pasta ears. The whole time I was making them I was worried that it wasn't going to make enough but it did.

The sauce. Oh, the sauce. It was so good and I think I will use this sauce recipe for every pasta dish I make and I might even use it on our pizzas. It was so easy to make and I was able to use organic tomatoes. Did I mention that it tasted good? Yeah, I think I did.

Dinner didn't stop there though. No. Tim has been whining for a pie lately. I picked up some rhubarb at the store on Sunday. I also picked up some organic strawberries. I made a pie crust first thing this morning and then at lunch time made the pie. I was disappointed with my crust. It didn't really stay together while I was rolling it out and I ended up just pushing it down into the pie plate. It had a crumb top so thankfully I didn't have to put a crust on top. Top the piece of pie with a spot of whip cream (which Connor helped make) and it was the perfect dinner tonight.

To wrap up, all four of us loved this meal. It was easy to make... minus the pasta ears. =) Again, Jamie Oliver, you rock!

Cost of dinner: **figuring out**