Chicken Parmesan

Today I sold a couple of chiken parmesan, a dish that is as easy to make as it is good to eat. Basically all you need is chicken breast, marinara sauce, eggs, flour, bread crumbs, and cheese. I like to bread the chicken breast after seasoning it with salt and pepper. I bread it by dredging it in flour, dipping it in eggwash, and last the bread crumbs. After this I brown the chicken in a hot cast iron skillet and cook it in an oven of 350 degrees until the chicken is done. I won't give you an exact amount of time with this recipe as your mileage may vary and with chicken one should always cut it open and look to see if it is done just to be safe. Anyway when it is done I put some already heated marinara on it and a little cheese (I prefer sharp cheddar). Then I melt the cheese in the oven. In this time usually I heat up my rice, pasta, or bread, whatever I am serving the chicken on today. Thats it. Some parmesan cheese on top and maybe some herbs. This is sooooo good. Hope it works out for you!

Just a small note.

Got a digital camera today, so soon I will start posting photos of my food as well. I think it will help to illustrate some things.

Duelling Soups

Ok, today I made a soup using a technique I really enjoy. I call this the dueling soup technique. Its a fairly simple thing to do, but thats the whole point here. In my opinion this soup is brilliant in it's simplicity. I'll explain this technique a little more in-depth before I go more into the individual soup itself.
Basically prepare two really vibrantly colored soups with a similar thickness or consistency. Pour these two soups into a bowl at the same time and they will not merge with one another. If done right it looks like a yin-yang. If you really want to go all out do not make the separate soups perfectly balanced flavor wise. Plan so that when the two soups are mixed together the flavor then becomes complete. This is a little hard to explain if you don't understand what I am talking about. It's kind of like one half of the soup not having any salt but its kind of bitter, and the other half being salty and sweet. Together they should meld into something nice. Now if your flavor combos work together as well you have a fairly impressive soup on your hands. Today I made roasted red pepper tomato vs. spinach and celery with lemon. I used a nice little creme fraiche to tie it all together.
If you are stumped for flavor combos just remember to keep it simple. Think really basic and about what you might like to eat yourself, or perhaps what the person or people you are cooking for might like. This usually helps me.

Funnel Cakes and Meatball Subs

Ok, so today the two items I prepared today that stand out most to me are meatball subs and funnel cakes. I had never actually heard of a funnel cake before, and my variation is quite simple to make, but i'll get to the recipe itself in just a little bit. I was discussing deep frying with my sous chef and realizing we had thrown just about everything we could possibly think of into the fryer as of late when we had the wonderful Idea to make funnel cakes. They turned out pretty nicely, I was satisfied anyway. We covered them with maple syrup, chocolate syrup, whipe cream, sugar, all kinds of good stuff. Here is the recipe;

1 store bought pancake mix (the just add water kind)

2 water

Procedure: Mix it up, leave it thick (almost like cookie dough). When your batter is finished procede to ladel it into 350 degree fryer oil and fry until dark brown. Top with whatever, these things rock.

So on to the meatball subs. Who doesn't love these things aside from vegetarians? Marinara, meatballs, cheese, that easy. Keep it simple. Thats why meatball subs rock. For me as a chef it is also a low food cost meal for my staff that takes all of ten minutes to prepare, and most everybody loves. Its kinda hard to go wrong with canned marinara and frozen meatballs, combined with par baked breads. I have seen people mess this up, but its pretty hard.