Wow, it's been a few days since I had anything new up here. I've been closing at work this week, and that severely limits my cooking time. The last thing I feel like doing after getting home at 9pm is cooking dinner. It's been a takeout week.
So anyway.
You know how people say that Olive Garden isn't real Italian food? Well, they're right, but who cares. Olive Garden is the whip. The salad, the bread sticks, the long waits, and usually not great service. I love everything about it. The thing I love most about it is chicken parmesan. I've always loved it. I don't think I ordered anything else off the Olive Garden menu from the first time I ate there at 12 until I was 26 or 27. It's still my favorite thing, and it's usually my go-to birthday meal.
So, you might be surprised to find out that I've never actually made chicken parmesan. Maybe I'm afraid of ruining a good thing, because even if I love something, if I have it prepared badly once, it can ruin my enjoyment of it forever. I still cant eat a grilled chicken sandwich from McDonald's and that whole fiasco was 10 years ago. Maybe it was just laziness, but all I know is that it's time for me to face my fears, and try to conquer my favorite meal.
I looked around, and found a recipe over at Blog Chef that looked easy and tasty, I got all the ingredients I needed, and started mentally preparing myself.
So, since the recipe calls for the chicken to be browned in a pan, and then transferred to the oven to finish cooking, I figured why not use my cast iron skillet that I've had for two years, and just cured yesterday? First mistake. I've never cooked with cast iron before, and making something I've never made before in something I've never cooked in before just had trouble written all over it. I should have heeded the signs. Second mistake...I wasn't wholly paying attention to what I was doing, and managed to forget to add the flour to the breadcrumbs/cheese mix. Third mistake...I put one of the chicken breasts in the breadcrumbs without dipping it in the egg first.
Pretty!
I realize that I've made all these mistakes, but I figure I'll soldier on, and just see what happens. I get the chicken in the skillet, and it starts smoking, and I don't know if that's normal or not, but whatevs, keep going. I turn the first piece of chicken...all the breading is stuck on the pan, and none on the chicken.
I decide to just start over. I've got plenty of chicken, because it was on sale, so why not.
I do it all again, and I don't make any mistakes. I'm using just a regular non stick skillet. While searching for the pan to put the chicken into the oven in, I smell burning, and realize that one side of the brand new chicken batch is totally burned. Ruined.
So, yeah. We ended up having take out chicken wings from BW3's.
So, that's how I ruined dinner(the same dinner) twice in one night.
It takes talent, people.
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