from the oven

On Sunday I went grocery shopping with the roommate. I tried not to buy much because I still have a lot of food that needs to get eaten. Therefore, I decided to get to work in the kitchen. I made three things, all mostly oven-based, totaling maybe three or four hours. There's rosemary bread, rosemary potatoes, and chicken parmesan. Ingredients and instructions are below. I'm still trying to work out the kinks in the layouting ... I'm not fond of the way the lists look.


First up was the rosemary bread. I followed this recipe from AllRecipes.com, which is a great site to procrastinate with. Sometimes I find myself browsing recipes for hours. The ingredients are as they were listed originally, but I used fresh rosemary from the apartment complex across the street (so convenient, I love it!). It was designed for use with a bread machine, but since I don't have one, I sort of made it up as I went.

Ingredients:

1 cup water

1 1/2 teaspoons active dry yeast

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 1/2 teaspoons white sugar

1 1/2 teaspoons salt

2 1/2 cups bread flour

1/4 teaspoon Italian seasoning

1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper

1 tablespoon dried rosemary

Process:

warm up the water and add the yeast to it

wait about 10 minutes until the yeast blossoms

add olive oil, sugar, salt, and flour to the mix - knead

add in the seasoning, pepper, and rosemary - knead

place the dough in an oiled bowl covered with a towel

put the bowl in a warm place and let rise for an hour

punch the dough down and let it rise for another hour

bake in oven at 375F for 30-ish minutes until browned on top

So during the hours while waiting for the dough to rise and such, I prepared the potatoes and chicken. First went the potatoes. They weren't looking too good but I figured they still looked okay enough to eat.

Ingredients:

red potatoes (I used 5 small ones)

rosemary sprigs (wash them first)

French or Italian seasonings

olive oil

Process:

cut up the potatoes into equal-sized portions

in a bowl mix the potatoes with some olive oil and seasonings

stick it all in a shallow pan (I used a pie pan)

tuck in the rosemary sprigs

bake in oven at 350F for about hour and a half, checking every half hour and mixing around the potatoes to make sure they're even

While the potatoes were in the oven and the bread was still rising, I went ahead and prepared the chicken that I had set out to defrost before we left to the grocery store.

Ingredients:

chicken breasts (2 large pieces)

1 cup or so of bread crumbs

1 egg

parmesan cheese

Italian seasoning

spaghetti sauce

olive oil

Process:

cut chicken into desired size and smush flat or slice them to no more than 1/2" thick

crack the egg into a bowl and beat it

get out a plate and spread out the bread crumbs with some parmesan and Italian seasoning mixed in

dip the chicken into the egg and press both sides into the bread crumbs (the egg helps the crumbs to stick)

put some olive oil into a frying pan and put the stove on medium

cook the chicken on each side until just browned

put the cooked chicken into a shallow pan (I used the pie pan again)

pour spaghetti sauce on top and sprinkle parmesan cheese over that

bake in oven at 350F for about 15 minutes

That's what I've been eating for the last few days. And that's what I'll be eating for the next few days as well. Everything turned out okay, but nothing was fantastic. Next time I'll probably go back to making white bread and just work on perfecting that. I think in conjunction with the rosemary potatoes and chicken parmesan, the rosemary in the bread was just too much. Oh, and if you look closely at the picture, you'll see the fine use of my crocheted trivets. The purple rectangular one actually turned out to be a great size for the loaf pan. Go figure.