as requested from the comments, here’s my recipe for chicken parm:

– 4 chicken thighs (you can used breasts of course if you like, but i like dark meat)
– 3 or 4 eggs
– flour
– bread crumbs
– sauce of your choice (i made my own tomato basil sauce)
– fresh mozzarella
– parmesan cheese
– olive oil
– spaghetti

preheat oven to 350 degrees. pound out the chicken with some plastic wrap on top. the chicken should be very thin and be 2-3 times larger than when you started. season the chicken with salt and pepper. pour some flour into a shallow dish. beat the eggs in another dish. pour bread crumbs into another dish (i didn’t have bread crumbs handy that day, so i toasted a few slices in the oven and put them in the food processor). dredge the chicken in the flour, then the egg, then the bread crumbs. cook the chicken in the olive oil until browned on both sides (shouldn’t take long as the chicken is now very thin). get out a baking dish and pour some of your tomato sauce in the bottom. place the chicken into the dish and spoon over more of the tomato sauce. top with mozzarella cheese and parmesan cheese. cook in the oven about 15 minutes or until the cheese is bubbly and brown. serve with cooked spaghetti. mmm!

i cleaned my desk today, yay! mostly clean, anyway. clean enough for now.

off i go to boston! whee!

I really want to tidy up my room before I leave town on Friday for Boston (going back east for another wedding and this time I’ll actually get to see Boston instead of just drive by it in frustration). Here it is, practically Thursday and it’s still a mess. I don’t know why it’s so hard to keep my desk organized. I watch those HGTV shows where they help people tidy up and become organized and wonder if I can do it, too. And I do, for about a week, until I fall back into my old habits of just stacking everything on my desk. Maybe I will be magically motivated tomorrow to do everything I want to do before I go away. Maybe if I had more of those letter stack things I could be more organized. Maybe, maybe. Hmm.

I had a pretty nice, low-key Christmas. I’m all about low-key holidays. Since we don’t have any family on this coast, it’s usually just me and my parents. We went back to our traditional celebration by opening some presents, going to see a movie, and eating a tasty dinner. Our movie of choice this year was Syriana, a political-esqe movie about government and the oil companies. It was much too confusing and drawn out and the story was really hanging by a thread. In the end, I couldn’t really tell you what happened except that the a) the government is bad b) oil companies are bad and c) people are bad. Don’t go see it.

For Christmas dessert, I made a pumpkin pie and some little pumpkin tarts. The tarts have a bit more sugar than the pie and it was all made with Splenda. It was pretty tasty. The only thing that was a little off was that the bottom of the crusts didn’t really get totally cooked through (but cooked through enough – I would have liked them to have been more brown on the bottom). I think it has to do with the fact that we use a little convection oven for baking because the regular sized oven is kaput. Oh well. Still tastiness to be had!

I was driving around today doing some shopping for Christmas dinner (I was on a quest for prime rib roast… which is also called standing rib roast… why do things like that have two names?) and when I was trying to find Smart & Final, I spied a restaurant called ‘Chinese Food & Donuts’. I was terribly amused. It made me wish I had a digital camera with me at the moment, but alas, I did not. The shitty camera phone wouldn’t cut it since I was driving in the car. Maybe someday I’ll go back and get some chinese food and donuts.

On another note, Julia came over tonight for dinner and I attempted to make Chicken Parmesan for the first time. I made my own marinara sauce with lots of fresh herbs (what was left in the garden anyway, the big basil bush is just about to die completely). For the chicken parm, Julia flattened them out with a mallet and then I dipped them in flour, then egg, then into some fresh toasted breadcrumbs that I made, fried them up and topped them with fresh mozzarella and parmesan. Man oh man, was it tasty. I almost forgot to make the spaghetti! But it turned out to be timed well because I started the pasta right after the parm went into the oven to bake and melt. It was actually quite easy (and quite tasty) and something I’ll have to make again in the future. And there’s leftovers! Ooo, I can have some again tomorrow!

Alyssa’s birthday party this year was a CSI themed birthday party. I made some CSI technician badges with people’s pictures on them and gave them titles such as “CSI Level 3” and “DNA Technician”. The badges were pretty cute, I thought. I used mostly silly pictures for the photos.

I also made a shallow grave cake for the occasion. I got a box of glow in the dark bones from Archie McPhee. It was actually a puzzle. I didn’t need or want to use all the parts. The rib cage was too large for the cake, so I cut it in half and used the front portion. I also only used the top portion of the skull. For the cake, I used a white cake mix which I dyed red (to make it really red you have to use a ton of food coloring – I used a whole jar of powdered red coloring). I covered it in chocolate frosting and used crushed oreos on top for the dirt. I put the skeleton down first and then sprinkled the “dirt” on.

Mmm, tasty.