A Cookbook A Week: Chicken Parmesan

The chicken bowl was just a happy accident.

So one of my goals this year is to become more useful in the kitchen. With Daryl working full-time I need to take some of the dinner work off her plate (so to speak), and so I'm now responsible for at least one dinner every week.

For the last few months, my efforts have been rather hit-or-miss: pasta with sauce, hot dogs, etc. I tried to get away with my night also being take-out night, but that's not so good since take-out night is another night off for Daryl as well. So I was trying to figure out a way to go about getting better in the kitchen when some friends on The Well decided to start a "Cookbook-A-Week" project, wherein they pick a different cookbook off their shelves each week and cook something from it.

This sort of arbitrary framework can serve me well. This way I have to go through each cookbook, find a recipe, make sure I get to the store to buy what's needed for it, etc. That means a little bit of thought will go into it and hopefully some decent meals will come out of it. Plus, I'm hoping I can end up with a handful of things I can cook regularly in the future.

Since Daryl only has 6 or 7 cookbooks, I decided I'd actually do a cookbook a month, cooking four dishes out of each one. The first one I grabbed was Cook's Illustrated's The Best Recipe, a compendium of hyper-obsessiveness in the guise of a cookbook. The Cook's Illustrated folks do things like cook creme brulee 37 different ways to determine the absolute best way to prepare it. There's not a whole lot of imagination in this cookbook; what is has is lots of staples and building blocks, theoretically prepared the best possible way.

My cooking night is going to be Wednesday, but I decided to start on Saturday since we had to cancel Daryl's birthday dinner & a movie due to child illness. I started with Chicken Parmesan. Aim high, you know? With Daryl acting as my sous chef, I managed to make my way through the entire process with aplomb (if I do say so myself), and I didn't even poison my family with raw chicken!

It wasn't difficult to make, though it was labor intensive. A few specifics -- I used panko for the coating, and I think that was a good call. It gave it a really nice light crunch. Linguini noodles held up a little better than regular spaghetti would have, and if I had done a little better job of pounding the fillets it wouldn't have taken quite as long to cook.

Still, I have to say I'm pretty damn proud of myself. It was really tasty, both for dinner and a few days later for lunch. I don't know if this will enter any sort of regular rotation, since it's a little time-consuming -- we only have about 45 min of total prep time between getting home from work before the going-to-bed routine starts -- but for weekends, special occasions, etc., I might pull it out again.