Parmesan-Dijon Chicken

As much as I am learning to love cooking, I have to say, taking a "night off" last night felt pretty damn good. We polished off the French pot roast and I made a big fat salad with tomatoes, red onion and sliced hard boiled egg (using the egg slicer from Fiance's mom! Isn't it cute?)

Then we stayed up until almost two in the morning playing Rock Band. I'm slowly getting better at slappin' da bass, and hit my first 100% on "Fat Bottomed Girls"! I had to do a victory lap around the apartment.

Lego Rock Band Freddie Mercury approves.

But now that the fridge is nearly empty, I've got to get back on the horse so we can, you know, sustain ourselves. Tonight, I wanted something easy and delicious, but something very different. So I clicked around on the web until I found tonight's recipe.

I have a few go-to recipe websites that I turn to in my times of need... thenest.com or allrecipes.com, for example ... but my mom (who else?) introduced me to Betty Crocker's website. I have to hand it to their web developers; they made a very well-organized website. It's never hard to find anything on there, and their search engines (unlike some too-rigid recipe sites) are complacent.

When Leslie came over on Saturday to make us dinner, she left us a package of boneless skinless chicken breasts - perhaps one of my most favorite and versatile items to cook with. I needed to use them tonight before they went bad, so I went on the Betty Crocker website and searched for easy meals using the BLSL (boneless/skinless) chicken. My only criteria was, I wanted to use everything I already had in my own kitchen - or only have to go out and buy one item. I stumbled across this recipe for Parmesan-Dijon Chicken and was sold. Everything for this recipe was already in my pantry or fridge and it sounded delicious.

YOU WILL NEED:
1/4 cup of butter or margarine, melted
2 tablespoons of Dijon mustard
3/4 cup dry bread crumbs
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
6 boneless skinless chicken breast halves (1 3/4 pounds)

As far as equipment goes, you will also be needing a shallow dish, a large plastic zip-close bag and a 9x13 serving pan.

Surprisingly small mise-en-place!

For my version of this recipe, I will be using Panko breadcrumbs - perhaps the best breadcrumbs ever. They're Japanese breadcrumbs usually used for frying, and they are coarser and flatter than what we use here in the States, making for a crunchier crunch.

On the left: regular bread crumbs. On the right: Panko

Also, I'm going to use a four-cheese blend instead of straight Parmesan. On the side I will be making frozen peas and jasmine rice.

Jasmine rice is one of my favorite side dishes. I had gallbladder removal surgery in May of last year and jasmine rice was one of the few foods I could eat post-op. After five days of nothing but Jell-O (that is not an exaggeration), jasmine rice was a welcomed change.

If you don't know what it is, jasmine rice a white sticky rice from Thailand, also called "fragrant rice" or "scented rice"  It doesn't smell exactly like jasmine, but it's still a pretty yummy scent. It is a staple food in Thai cuisine, high in fiber, and is a source of iron, protein, calcium, vitamins B1 and B2, phosphorous and a nifty little compound called niacin (source: Bangkok Companies).

To be quite honest, I out of all of those, I had never heard of niacin, so I decided to look it up. Turns out, niacin is a B-complex vitamin, used to reduce the amount of cholesterol and "fatty substances" in your blood. It's also used to treat a deficiency disease known as pellagra. Fancy that! (source: PubMed Health)

Well, enough about the mystical properties of jasmine rice, let's get cooking.

1. Heat oven to 375. Mix melted butter and mustard in a shallow dish until well-mixed. Mix the bread crumbs and cheese in a large plastic bag (I added thyme and oregano to my breadcrumbs mixture).

2. Dip one piece of chicken at a time into the butter mixture, coating all sides. Then place in bag of bread crumbs, seal bag, and shake to coat. 

3. Place chicken in single layer in ungreased 9x13 pan

4. Bake uncovered 20-30 minutes, turning once, until the juice of the chicken is no longer pink when centers of the thickest pieces are cut.

5. Serve and enjoy!

That was by far one of the easiest quick meals I've ever done and it took so little effort! There were so few ingredients and it came out phenomenal. My only gripe was my own fault. I forgot to turn the chicken halfway through, so the bottom Panko crumbs were a bit mushy. This is a dish I will definitely be making again (next time remembering to turn the chicken).

I have NO CLUE what's on next week's docket. All I know is that on Sunday I'm getting together with a group of old friends for some good old-fashioned fondue. Sometime over the weekend though I gotta go food shopping and prepare for another week's worth of dinners to present to you. I have some old favorites and stand-bys I'm looking forward to sharing, as well as trying out some great new recipes!

Until next time, you hot stuffs you ;-)