January Cooking

Bonjour Happiness inspired me to go back to basics. Breaded chicken has been a mainstay of the pantry for years. In fact, I remember when Ger and I lived in NY. From time to time, we would visit his parents vacation home in the Poconos which would result in a marathon cooking stretch of the “basics”. We would try and leave NY in time to hit Mr. Z’s supermarket, then Ger would wake me up early on Saturday morning to get me cooking.

 

The operation has been finely tuned over the years. Up above you see in the pyrex chicken breast trimmed of fat and cut in half length-wise. Then cookie sheets are lined with aluminum foil and swiped with vegetable oil (vegetable oil gives an extra crispiness to the chicken, I wouldn’t use olive oil here) then with the left hand you soak the chicken breasts in egg and milk and bread with the right. Cleaning the chicken took about 30 minutes, breading it all up, another 45, then another hour and 20 minutes to cook (approx 35 minutes per batch of cookie sheets).

The result is a massive amount of breaded chicken, which in a pinch can be sliced up for chicken ceasar salad, heated up in the toaster oven with mozzarella (ger’s favorite) served up over rice and salsa with plantains (em’s favorite) and a million other options in between.

 

Back in our NY days, we would then allocate the chicken for either my or Ger’s apartment and carefully put them in freezer bags for transport back to NY (along with meatballs and  few other staples, but that’s another post). At some point we figured out that we could save even MORE money if we re-used the plastic freezer bags for transport (Ger’s frugality, in particular, is legendary). These days I like to splurge on labels from the label maker (we like to live high on the hog).

While I’m at it this week’s soup is a vegetarian split pea, always comfy when there is snow on the ground.