Fresh chicken was on sale at the store, so of course I bought too much. I ended up having to freeze some…which just kills me. If I’m going to freeze the darned chicken, I don’t know why I don’t just buy it frozen. I guess part of me always thinks that I can use up everything that I bought, preparing a whole bunch of meals and then storing them for later. I’m still working on making that work in the real world though.
Since I had chicken available, and spaghetti sauce was on sale, I decided that I’d make some Chicken Parmesan. I scoured the internet and my cookbooks, and as usual came up with about a dozen recipes that all sounded great…but every one also sounded like they would take the better part of the day to prepare. I’d love to have that kind of time, but let’s face it, the blog isn’t called Hectic-Kitchen because I have a bunch of time on my hands!
So the recipe below uses jarred spaghetti sauce as the base of the sauce. Because the chicken breasts that I bought were pretty thick, I cut them in half so they were thinner. If I’d started with the frozen, bagged chicken breasts I probably would have been able to skip that step. While most other recipes that I found called for a meat hammer to beat the breasts so they would be thinner, I hate using my meat hammer on chicken. No matter how hard I try, I end up with chicken splattered somewhere in the kitchen where it wasn’t intended to go.
You have to cook the finished product a bit longer, but these turned out really moist, so I’m sticking with the no-hammer method.
Don’t be overwhelmed by the number of steps in the recipe. This is actually pretty quick to make, taking about 20 minutes of active preparation and then another 30 or so to bake.
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