I flipped through a few different cookbooks today trying to figure out what I wanted to try cooking for the blog today when I managed to stumble across a cookbook I had bought last year that I hadn't even opened yet. It was from Cuisine at Home again, this cookbook was called "Weeknight Menus". (They really should just put me on their payroll.) The first recipe on the list was "Chicken Parmesan". We have a winner!

Amazing as it sounds, I don't think I've ever had chicken Parmesan before. I think it is one of those items that I just tend to skim over on restaurant menus while I look for the steak or fish. Even though I cook it often, I tend to associate chicken with boring. Here's hoping that this dish isn't lumped into that category!

Chicken Parmesan with Fresh Tomato Relish

2/3 cup panko bread crumbs

1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

2 eggs, beaten

4 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, trimmed and pounded 1/4-inch-thick (5 oz. each)

Kosher salt and black pepper to taste

3 Tbs. extra-virgin olive oil

1/2 cup shredded fresh mozzarella cheese

1 cup chopped cherry tomatoes

2 Tbs. chopped fresh basil leaves

1 Tbs. minced capers

1 Tbs. red wine vinegar

1 tsp. tomato paste

- Preheat oven to 450ºF.

- Combine panko and Parmesan. Place panko mixture, flour, and eggs separately in three shallow dishes. Cut each chicken breast in half; season with salt and pepper. Dredge cutlets in flour, egg, and panko mixture.

- Heat 2 Tbs. oil in a large saute pan over medium-high heat. Saute chicken, turning once, until golden, 2-3 minutes per side. Remove cutlets to a baking sheet; top each with 1 Tbs. mozzarella. Cook cutlets in oven until cheese melts and chicken is cooked through, about 5 minutes.

- Combine tomatoes, basil, capers, vinegar, tomato paste, and the remaining 1 Tbs. oil for relish in a bowl; season with salt and pepper. Serve chicken over pesto pasta, topped with the relish.

I also made the suggested side, Pesto Pasta:

8 oz. dry mini lasagna noodles (mafalda; 6 cups)

2/3 cup homemade or purchased pesto

1 Tbs. lemon juice

- Cook pasta according to package diretions; drain. Toss together drained hot pasta, pesto, and lemon juice in a large bowl. Serve immediately.

Here's how it went down:

First of all, I should mention that having a good knife is probably the best investment you can make in your kitchen.  I do not have a good knife. Oh, it cuts things, but you really tend to notice the quality of your knife when you try to slice tomatoes. While I was preparing the ingredients, one of the things I had to do was chop up some cherry tomatoes. Little dinky tiny cherry tomatoes. As I tried to saw through them (and half the time ended up just smooshing the poor bastards), I realized how dangerous this could be. A dull knife causes you to press down harder, work harder, and thus you can end up slipping and really injuring yourself more with the dull knife than you would with a really sharp one. I have decided that a new knife will be my next investment (or, ahem, it would make an awesome birthday present as well.)

All nice and prepared.

The basil was quite an ordeal to get for this recipe by the way. I went to two different grocery stores to find one that had fresh basil, and when I finally did find it half of the basil was an ugly brown color, ugh. Of course I didn't notice until I got home, otherwise Kroger would be reimbursing me half my money (at least.)

Another funny random thing I did: We have chickens and ducks that we raise. Not for eating (much to the disappointment to the men living in the house), but for eggs. So we always have random chicken eggs and duck eggs sitting around the counters. I grabbed what I thought was a chicken egg to crack, it turns out it was a duck egg. They don't taste any different, but the shells on duck eggs are much harder to crack. You know whereas you sneeze too hard and you break the chicken egg, the duck egg you have to hit with a hammer to break. Ok, not that funny but I was amused. Onward.

Another ordeal I had to deal with was pounding out the chicken breasts. I had one chicken breast from a package I had bought earlier, and three other chicken breasts from a different package. The one from the first package was a LOT larger than the other three, so it was difficult to make them all the same size. Also difficult was the fact that I couldn't find a meat pounder to save my life. Like I mentioned in the blog before, our kitchen is under renovation, so everything that was in drawers and cabinets is now packed away into random boxes in different rooms of the house. In desperation, I tried a rolling pin:

Didn't work so well. Plus, it's a pretty awesome rolling pin and I didn't want to ruin it. Finally I found a cheap wooden meat pounder and that seemed to work semi-decently (after throwing all my weight into it smashing the chicken). I find it helpful when pounding chicken to put it into a ziplock bag. Don't close it, but that way it keeps from having raw chicken fly all over your kitchen (and yourself).

The next part was pretty easy, just cut them in half then dredge and saute. My only issue was one of the chicken breasts didn't pound out so thinly, so it took longer to cook than the thinner ones.

Also as a side note, remember to wash your hands thoroughly after handling raw chicken. I know this is something that is often beat into our heads, but it bears repeating often.

Before I started to saute the chicken, I had put a pot of water on to boil for the pasta. I originally had intended to saute four chicken breasts at a time, but as you can see from the picture I could really only fit two in at a time. This, on top of the fact that I had a much thicker chicken breast to cook (which took longer) caused the pasta to be done way ahead of time.

That's ok, just part of my learning curve still. I didn't change the recipe so much this time, but one thing that I did do was instead of using fresh mozzarella and grating it, I just bought a package of it pre-shredded from the store. For two reasons: Convenience and price. I'm too poor to be buying fresh mozzarella all the time.

The recipe for the pesto pasta says to use homemade or purchased pesto. Luckily for me, my mom grew about 3,000 pounds of basil last year and made a whole bunch of pesto out of it! She froze it in cubes in an ice-tray. I defrosted three of them and tossed them into the pasta. Another thing; if you're at the store looking for the pasta, look for pasta called "mafalda" and not "mini-lasagna" which was what I was doing :)

The final result! It tasted pretty good. If I make it again, I would make more of the tomato mixture since I thought it went awesome with the chicken and could have ate a lot more of it. The pesto pasta was really good as well. I didn't notice until I was typing the recipe for this blog that I completely forgot to put in the lemon juice for the pasta. My boyfriend will be happy about that. However, in my opinion the lemon juice would only have made it taste better. Personally only one piece of chicken was enough for me, so keep that in mind if you're going to make this recipe, since you'll be making a total of 8 pieces of chicken. Enjoy!

Well here it is, my first post on my new food blog. Hopefully things will run smoothly! Basically the point of doing this blog is so people can read about an amateur cook (me!) trying to cook and see what I do right/wrong. I will write out what tips and notes I figure out or have during the cooking process, and hopefully post some pictures that don't come out too badly.So lets begin!

When I cook dinner, I have a few cookbooks I take recipes from. I'm not nearly good enough yet that I trust myself to actually make my own creations and have them taste good. My method is grab a cookbook, and make everything in order starting with the first recipe and ending with the last recipe. I've been doing this semi-successfully for over a year now. I have numerous cookbooks going at once, so when I use a recipe from there I'll give the name of the cookbook and write out the recipe.

Tonight I made a recipe from a cookbook called "Cuisine for Two" from the magazine "Cuisine". Their website is www.cuisineathome.com if you want to order their books. I really like their magazines/cookbooks since they show step-by-step how they make the food, and I will try to do the same.

The recipe tonight was "Balsamic Pork Tenderloin with Lemon-Honey Sauce". Now, growing up I wasn't a fan of pork and I think that was because I always just associated pork with DRY (sorry mom). Since I made myself make all these recipes from beginning to end, I've realized that I actually DO like pork! Here is the recipe:

Marinade:

1/4 cup balsamic vinegar

1 Tbs. whole-grain mustard

1 pork tenderloin, trimmed (12 oz.)

Salt and pepper

For the Grapes:

8 oz. red grape clusters

2 tsp. olive oil

Ground black pepper

For the Lemon-Honey Sauce:

2 Tbs. sliced shallots

1 tsp. olive oil

2 Tbs. dry white wine

1 sprig fresh rosemary

1/2 cup low-sodium chicken broth

2 Tbs. fresh lemon juice

1 Tbs. honey

1 Tbs. cold unsalted butter

- Preheat grill to medium-high. Lightly brush grates with vegetable oil.

- Whisk balsamic and mustard together in a shallow baking dish. Add pork and turn meat to coat; marinate 10 minutes.

- Season pork with salt and pepper; place pork directly over heat. Cover and grill 5 minutes. Turn pork and grill 5 minutes more, or until pork registers 155ºF on an instant-read thermometer. Remove pork from grill, let rest for 5 minutes, then slice into four pieces.

- Toss grapes with oil and season with pepper. Grill grapes over direct heat, covered, for 10 minutes.

- Saute shallots in oil in a saucepan over medium heat for 2 minutes. Deglaze pan with wine, add rosemary, and cook 2 minutes. Add broth, lemon juice, and honey. Bring to a simmer and cook until liquid is reduced to 1/4 cup, 3-4 minutes. Discard rosemary sprig and whisk in butter. Serve with sauce.

Note: One thing I've learned over the past year of cooking is make sure you have all your ingredients out, and prepared like the recipe asks for before you start. I don't know why it took me so long to realize this, but when you got food on the stove, and then realize you need to chop this, and pour that... it just gets hectic and food ends up getting burned or cold before anything else is finished.

So here is what *I* did:

I bought a pork tenderloin and when I unwrapped it lo-and-behold there was actually TWO in the package. I could either double the recipe and save the rest for leftovers, or freeze the other tenderloin I didn't need. I decided to freeze it since I'm sure I'll come across another recipe needing pork tenderloin and I won't have to buy one then.

Looks good huh? Here's the pork marinating the balsamic/mustard sauce.

One way that I really deviated from the recipe as written is that it's WINTER here, and I didn't feel like getting the grill up and going (I also have a strange phobia of actually grilling on a real grill, but that's beside the point), so I decided to use a grill pan and grill it on the stove in the kitchen instead.

Brush it with oil so it doesn't stick when you turn it over. (Same goes if you're using a regular grill.)

I suppose now would be a good time to say this really isn't the best time to be starting this blog since my kitchen is in the middle of being renovated. This means that we don't have a range hood over the stove to help with all the smoke. So here's a warning: This will be SMOKEY if you want to grill it in the house. I opened the window and even though it was cold, I managed to keep from setting off the smoke alarms.

Another thing I noticed about this: Make sure your meat is at room temperature before you start cooking. What I did basically was take it out of the refrigerator and throw it in the marinade, then throw it on the grill. This keeps your internal temperature from rising to the desired "doneness". The outside of the pork was getting rather dark while I was waiting for the internal temperature to reach 155 before I finally decided that enough was enough. It took it off the pan, set it on a plate and tented it with some aluminum foil. I figured it would still continue to "cook" a little more, and trichinosis be damned. (Note: It's actually pretty safe to eat pink pork. Due to new techniques, most pigs now don't have trichinosis. There were only 5 American reported in 2004 to have trichinosis, and this was believed to have been from wild game, not pork. Besides, dry pork = unhappy me.)

While I let the pork rest, I threw the grapes on the pan to cook. This was a first for me, I've never even heard of grilling grapes before, but I'm willing to try anything! This is why I love trying all these recipes, I might find something completely out-there that I love. While the grapes grilled, I started in on the lemon-honey sauce.

Here's the wine deglazing the pan.

One thing I've noticed is that while a recipe will say "...add all this liquid and let it reduce by half, 3-4 minutes" it ends up taking me more along the lines of 7-8 minutes, and I don't know why this is. But there you go, sometimes don't go completely by what the recipe says and just eyeball it until it looks right to you.

Take out the rosemary and whisk in the butter and you have yourself a pretty damn good sauce.

I cut the honey and lemon in half personally since I'm not a huge fan of sweet sauces, and I know my boyfriend isn't a fan of lemon, so this should appease us both.

Here's the final dish! You can pick any side you want to go with it, I had some leftover potato salad I threw on the plate to eat with it.

I'm happy I didn't overcook the pork. The texture was perfect and juicy. The grapes tasted really good actually, but I really think they're more for presentation than anything else since it's a real pain in the butt to try to get the grapes off the stem to eat. I also cut the pork in 10 slices instead of the 4 the recipe calls for, since if I did 4 slices they would have been really really thick. I would make this recipe again, it came out real good.