Celebrate with Chicken Parm
There is nothing like breaded Chicken covered in homemade sauce and topped with fresh melted Mozzarella and Parmesan Cheese! Throw in a side of homemade spaghetti and a piece of toasted garlic bread and oh baby, you have yourself one delicious dinner!
Chris is my better half, and since we started keto (low carb diet), we decided Holiday's and Birthdays are our days off to enjoy whatever we want. For his birthday this year he wanted his favorite, Chicken Parmesan. We don't have an Olive Garden in town, we live far away from my mom's wonderful Italian cooking (even though we aren't Italian) and we love to cook, especially together! So, I decided to whip up a batch of my homemade sauce (Recipe can be found below), Chris handled the breading and chicken, and together we made the noodles, homemade. The recipe for the noodles is not our own, but also shared below.
We paired a nice cabernet wine with our meal, we prefer red wine, but traditionally with chicken, white wines will pair better. The garlic toast was just store boat frozen, as we did not want to buy a full loaf of bread being on Keto we are trying to avoid the extra carbs being around.
Chris handled the breading and cooking of the chicken breasts. He pounded the chicken down to
make them thinner and then mixed some bread crumbs and seasonings together, dipped the chicken in an egg yolk bath and then in the bread crumb mixture, coating the chicken before placing in the heated (on medium) cast iron pan. Typically, we buy plain bread crumbs, this allows us to add what seasonings we want when breading. Some of my favorites to add are, onion powder, garlic salt, parsley, salt, pepper, oregano, and if I am feeling spicy chili powder or paprika. I am not big on measuring things out as I make them, I eyeball it, so I can't exactly tell you how much of each seasoning he used, I'll have to measure it out next time. The pre-mixed bread crumbs at the store also work great! They usually have one with Italian seasonings already mixed in. Chris cooked off the breaded chicken breast in a cast iron pan and finished them off in the oven. The cast iron pan is very helpful as the chicken can finish being baked in the oven, you can heat up some sauce in the pan with it, and then switch to the broiler to melt down the cheese! Using the broiler on high only takes a few minutes and it gives you those crispy spots in the cheese, so good!
Noodle Time
The spaghetti noodle recipe came from the cookbook: Rustic Italian Food by Marc Vetri with David Joachim foreword by Mario Batali. I've also used recipes from Pinterest to make homemade noodles.
It calls for 3 cups of semolina, but I used regular All purpose flour and it worked just as well, and about 1 cup of water.
A few tips:
- I mixed it by hand
- Too dry is better then too wet
- We used our pasta attachments for our Kitchen Aid mixer and as the noodles dropped out I had some flower on the plate and tossed the new noodles and previously dropped noodles with the flour to keep them from sticking together
Shelly's Homemade Sauce
My homemade sauce I made the following way and would be plenty for 4 servings of this meal. Here is how I made it:
1/2 a large Onion, diced
2 large garlic cloves, diced
2 Tblsp of butter
2 28 oz cans of whole peeled tomatoes, undrained
1 15 oz can of tomato sauce
1 Tblsp each of basil, parsley, orgenao, salt and pepper (this is dry ingredients, I did not have the fresh on hand)
I melted down the 2 tblsps of butter in a sauce pan on medium heat, added the onion and garlic (sprinkled with season salt and pepper) and cooked until the onions became translucent.
Next I added the 2 cans of whole peeled tomatoes and the can of tomato sauce. I used a wooden spatula and broke the whole tomatoes into quarter pieces so they would cook down faster. Then I added the seasonings and brought it all to a boil stirring occasionally.
After it boiled for about 3 minutes I turned down the heat, covered the sauce and let it simmer for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Removed it from the heat and let it cool down before putting it in the blender do make it a smoother sauce. You can leave it chunky if you would like.
A few tips:
- you can always add more spice you can't take it away - so feel free to use less and add more as you taste it
-I prefer to let the sauce cool before putting in the blender but you don't have to - then I heat it back up when we are ready to eat
-Making it the day before may allow some of the flavors to meld together more - I do this with soup sometimes