 Hey y'all, it's Tammy with Color Valley Cooks and tonight we make chicken parmesan. Get ready for the greatest recipe ever. Hey y'all, it's Tammy with Color Valley Cooks. Today we're going to do one of our favorites out of the volume one cookbook. It's called Parmesan Chicken. I like to use whole grain spaghetti because it's healthier. I buy marinara sauce so that it's convenient. Of course you can make one. I have a recipe in my recipe book. We're going to use some Parmesan cheese and grate that. It's always good grated. I'll use some sliced mozzarella cheese and we're going to use some Italian style croutons to bread our chicken in. This is a great recipe in our first volume cookbook called Parmesan Chicken. Boy do we love it. It is great. So let's get started and start getting our chicken prepared. Okay I'm going to use these croutons and I just beat them up in a bag with my little meat mallet. So I do a good job of beating them because you want them to be in small pieces because we're actually going to use these to bread our chicken and it works really good. It's got a lot of flavor because all of the flavor that's in these croutons gets all over the chicken so you don't even have to season your chicken because these croutons do it for you. Okay I've got three pipe plates. One has my chicken, marinated and whole butter milk. Now you're going to want to buy thin chicken breasts so go ahead and get them already prepared as thin chicken breasts. Okay we're going to let these marinate for about 30 minutes in the butter milk. The next pan we're going to use, these are pipe plates, is a half cup of self-rising flour. Make sure you sift it if it's lumpy. Now then we're going to take our croutons and we're going to put them in this third pipe plate. So these are three steps when breading your chicken that you will have to do. So let's get these put in this one and we're going to start breading our chicken. Okay you're going to pick up a piece of chicken, one at a time, let it drip and get most of the butter milk off of it. Then you're going to put it in your flour and you're just going to lightly dredge it. I actually like to sift this flour because it works so much better if it's sifted to get just the right amount on the piece of chicken. The only reason you're putting it in the flour is just so that it will bind with the croutons. So now you're going to place it in the croutons and we are going to take these croutons and press them into the piece of chicken really really well. And that way the chicken's got a real good coating of croutons. So that's another reason when you beat up these croutons you want to make sure you can get them small enough because if you don't your breading will not be on the chicken cutlet evenly. So I just scooped my flour over a little bit and I bread each piece of chicken the same way. This is a preheated skillet. You're going to want to add oil, typically put in of oil. And once it starts to sizzle then we're going to know that it's ready to fry. So we'll put that down in there. It's time to drop the chicken so I'm going to drop the pasta. Teaspoon of salt to your pasta water. Alright it's nice and warm. I'm going to turn it down just a little bit. I think it's a little bit too warm. Okay we're going to put in two pieces of chicken. I may can get them all in here but I don't think I can. So we're just going to start out with two pieces at a time. You're going to cook these three minutes aside so I'm going to put my timer on three and hit the start button. If your oil is too hot they'll get too brown so make sure you turn it back down the medium once it's nice and hot so that you'll have pretty golden brown chicken breast. I'm going to go ahead and turn this nice and brown. So she flip them set your timer again. Looking good. Now I've got it turned down below medium and low. This is a large burner just so that it doesn't get too brown too quick. Okay while you're frying up that chicken and boiling that pasta go ahead and get you a jar of marinara out and pour it in a bowl, a pourable bowl if you have one. I'm going to use my batter bowl. Put a cup of water in the marinara jar, shake it up and pour it into the marinara and then just mix it up good. Wean so go ahead and get this ready okay so we don't take too long to make supper. Also open up your sliced mozzarella cheese and set it aside to get it ready to go on your chicken in the lasagna dish. You can also get a hand grater ready with your parm in it or if you buy parmesan in a bag then you don't have to even worry about that step. It can make the whole pound of pasta because now that May's off to college we don't have to cook quite as much but the recipe does call for the full 16 ounces for a family. It's best to put this on a timer so you don't forget about it and get it to brown. I like it nice and golden brown because then it's crunchy when you go to eat your chicken parmesan. I like to spray my lasagna dish. You don't have to but it just makes for easier cleanup. So we're going to spray our lasagna dish and the first thing that you layer in here is the spaghetti noodles. So a substituted regular spaghetti for wheat spaghetti. Just to make it a little healthier you can do what you want to. After you put in the noodles you're going to put in the marinara and you're going to pour it over the noodles. Now this is a lot of marinara. I don't know that I'm going to use all of it but I definitely want them to get nice and coated so it looks good to me. For what I said don't forget about the water or it's going to be dry. Now what we're going to do is take our chicken and place it on the top of the marinara. You do not want to pour your marinara over the top of your chicken. If you do then your chicken is going to get soggy. And that's what's so good about this dish is the crunchy delicious crust that we just put on this chicken. So we don't want to mess that up okay. I've got to scoot that one over a little bit to get everything in. Now you're going to peel off your mozzarella cheese and lay a piece of mozzarella over each piece of chicken. And then we're also going to take our parmesan and we're going to grate parmesan cheese onto the top of our mozzarella. You can save just a little bit for garnishing the top of the chicken when it comes out of the oven on your plate. We're going to get this in the oven and cook it until it's nice and bubbly. Alright we're going to slide this in the oven. Now this nice French baguette was on sale and I'm going to cut it cross ways and I'm going to put a couple of pieces for us to have with our chicken. I'm interested in making that homemade marinara. It's in my second cookbook. You can look under tomato pasta sauce. It is in there with the Italian meatballs okay. So we are going to give this a try with my wheat noodles because it's healthy. I'll just fill off my fork. So good. I like the chicken looks. And it's crunchy and delicious like it should be. Not soggy. Thanks for watching Colored Belly Cooks where we cook like mom and dad.