Bobby Flay Chicken Parm

I had a real hankering for some chicken parm last night, so I googled for a recipe. What a luck-game to be presented with one from Bobby Flay! Knowing him to have great accountability from a show that I have been willfully dragged into watching every Sunday, I decided to give it a try.

This recipe was easy to make, though the larger chicken breasts that I bought called for closer to thirty minutes in the oven, and I opted for store bought sauce in the interest of time. Like most of the comments posted, my chicken came out very soft and tender, and was probably the first time I remember strips of chicken to actually flake off onto the fork. I had never heard of panko bread crumbs before, but they created a more interesting, layered texture. They would probably make a great chicken cutlet dinner.

Next time I think I will try a combination of panko and traditional bread crumbs, and also look to use less ingredients. The egg and flour could have been cut in half to be less wasteful.

The chicken parm was served on a bed of pasta with a salad. I would have liked to try Flay's garlic bread recipe.

A Book Review and an Apology

I want to take back my earlier invectives against the short story and recommend to you the book I finished most recently, Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino. It’s a pretty compact (approximately 150 pages) collection of short stories--12 in all. These are stories about the extinction of the dinosaur, the movement of the earth around the moon, the mollusk's shell, stories about atoms, matter, and the expansion of the universe. They are also stories about love, desire, embarrassment, longing. Each one is fiction, fiction grown out of a scientific fact or, perhaps, it is the other way around--perhaps it is the fiction-- the characters, the art--which give birth to the science and to the fact. Or maybe it is just that the two mingle and coil (so beautifully! so fantastically!) until it is impossible to distinguish one from the other. But, should they be distinguishable? Is it important to separate fact from fiction, science from art? Is it even possible?

This is something I think about a lot and I really don't know. I DO know, however, that this book is a real treat but if you’re looking to collect a lot of literary capital you might want to try Leah’s current friend: Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace.

P.S. I just remembered another collection of short stories I love: Invisible Cities, also by Calvino.