I'd like to introduce myself. My name is Elizabeth and I am most definitely a foodie. I am 20 years old and attend Michigan State University, despite the fact that I'm spending nearly all my time here in sunny old England, UK. I'm a psychology major and have no idea what I'll be doing with my life after I graduate, but I'm proud to say that I am in a band called the Narcotics, and I'm also a budding cook! Well, we'll see about that, but I'm certainly working on it!
I always grew up with amazing food. My mother is a fantastic cook and is always making wonderful things to eat. It's quite intimidating trying to cook with someone so talented over your shoulder, but she has taught me some wonderful techniques for which I am very grateful.
Anyway, since I'm over in England with time to spare, I've decided to do some cooking--instead of just eating! So far I've been very pleased with the results.
My mother, being her generous self, had given me some of her own self-canned jars of items like jam and salsa for my boyfriend's family. One of the items was actually a bruschetta mix which was made with tomato, garlic, basil, olive oil, and a few other herbs. I shall ask her sometime for the actual list of ingredients if you'd like, but that's what I noticed off the bat. Anyway, my boyfriend's mum had gone to get some bruschetta bread, which is basically just flat, long sliced Italian bread so that I could use it to make dinner that night.
Given that we were already going to have an Italian starter, and happened to have four boneless chicken breasts in the fridge to work with, I decided to go for something vaguely Italian for the main course as well and decided to make Chicken Parmigiana. That is basically chicken breasts topped with tomato sauce and melted parmesan cheese over that. To start, we put the chicken breasts in the oven which I'm not sure of the preheated time, I'm sorry, but I think it was something like 250*C. Please don't quote me on that, I'll ask my boyfriend for sure, because it was his oven and he had done the preheating. We lay them in a row and put them in to bake a bit.
While we did that we took out a sauce pan and minced some garlic (2 small cloves) and red onion and scraped them into the pan which had been prepped with a sprinkle of olive oil. We added a can of tomato sauce to that when the lot had cooked a bit (careful cos garlic tends to burn quickly) and mixed that together for a while before adding sprinklings of oregano, basil, salt, pepper, crushed and dried chili peppers (which added a FANTASTIC spicy kick to it) and a few capers. We didn't bother to measure any of it, just chucked them in the pan and stirred.
After the chicken was cooked most of the way through, we took it out and poured the hot tomato sauce over top of them. We went to find some parmesan cheese, but to our shock there was none! There was, however, a block of hard white cheddar in the fridge so we grabbed that and grated it over top until there was a nice layer over each breast and popped it back in the oven to melt and finish cooking.
While they were doing that, we began to grill the buschetta bread to make them toasty and pour the canned sauce into a bowl. It was a tiny bit tomatoey to the taste, so we decided to kick it up a notch by mincing another clove of garlic and tossing it in, along with a very VERY small dash of balsamic vinegar (hardly any as its a very overpowering taste). We brought that to the table and while Paul was setting up the table for dinner (after he had chopped up some greens and veggies for a small salad) I pulled the delicious smelling chicken out of the oven. What was awesome about the tomato sauce was that any juices from it had gathered in the bottom of the pan (which was lined, by the way, with a plastic reusable sheet) and had sort of marinated the chicken and left it beautifully moist.
Everyone loved it, and I must say, I was SO proud of the meal.
So proud that I was inspired to get up at silly o'clock the next morning to make myself an omelette! It was stupidly simple to make. I cut up a strip of bacon into small little pieces and tossed them in a pan that had been prepped with a bit of butter. I waited for the grease to come out a bit before throwing in half of a diced white onion. While those were cooking a bit I whisked 2 eggs into a measuring bowl and poured it over the ingredients into a pan. Looking back I should have probably used 3 eggs, but never mind. I then got strips of camembert cheese (a delicious, creamy French cheese) and folded the egg in half so that it was almost like quesadilla. Oh, and I had sprinkled a TINY bit of crushed red/chili pepper into it too. It was deliscious. Creamy, with a tiny bite of the sour-ish cheese and savoury bacon and yummy browned onions. Best start of the morning ever.
Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed my ramblings and that they were not a jumble of text on a page. I'll try to post a picture of the meal for you if you'd like! Give me feedback and let me know what you like or would like to see in posts and I will love you forever. Haha! Thanks for reading!
Stay hungry.
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