Chicky-Chicky Parm-Parm

Food Network Star January comes to a close with one of the best dinner recipes we've cooked here on MIHM. This week we made Tyler Florence's Chicken Parmesan and it was awesome. If you'd like to try this dish at home, here's the recipe we used from FoodNetwork.com. 

To tackle to two part recipe, I cooked the chicken while my mom made the sauce. Making an assembly line, I prepped the chicken by dipping each chicken breast in flour, then egg wash, then plain bread crumbs. Once the raw chicken was coated, I fried the chicken for 4 minutes on each side.

Assembly line.

Coating the chicken in flour.

Breaded and ready to fry. 

Frying the chicken in olive oil.

While I was handling the chicken, my mom was working on the sauce. It's always great to split the tasks because the prep time usually takes half as long as the recipe says.

Kalamata olives added a unique flavor to the tomato sauce.

Onion, garlic, basil, kalamata olives, tomatoes and bay leaves.

Once the chicken was fried and the sauce was finished, we added the chicken to a baking dish and covered it with sauce and grated mozzarella cheese. We squished the chicken in tightly, making it a little hard to separate each piece when we served it, but otherwise all was well. The recipe recommends using an oven-proof skillet, but we didn't have one of those so the baking dish worked in its place. 

 Chicken breasts ready to bake for 15 minutes.

Sauce and mozzarrella layers.

Served over fresh spaghetti pasta. 

Tyler Florence's Chicken Parmesan was amazing. The chicken was moist, the sauce was so flavorful, and because we used fresh pasta, the spaghetti was perfectly tender. The trifecta! The kalamata olives were a great change of pace from the traditional tomato sauce used for Chicken Parm. My mom, dad and I all really enjoyed this meal and we'll definitely be having it again.

To close out our month of cooking and cocktails, we celebrated Monday night with the sweet Spanish drink Tinto de Verano. Throughout my trip to Spain last spring I enjoyed MANY Tinto de Veranos and wanted to share them with my parents. We used this recipe which was quick and easy. They were a little too sweet to drink with our Chicken Parmesan but we all agreed that on a hot summer night, this would be the perfect refreshment. 

7up, seltzer water, red wine and a lemon for garnish.

Tres Tinto de Veranos ;-)

And lastly, for those of you who watch Parks and Rec, I hope this post's title made you chuckle as much as I did while typing it. See you guys in February!