Barefoot Bloggers: Parmesan Chicken

How great is it to come home from a long day at work to the smell of dinner cooking? Now imagine dinner looked like this:

And it tasted as good as it looked. (Maybe even better since I didn't have to cook it, heh.)

Bill took over the shopping and cooking duties for me on this one, so he made a few modifications to his taste. (Base recipe link is available here.) He opted for romaine lettuce instead of mixed greens, and whipped up a balsamic vinaigrette instead of the lemon (just switched out balsamic vinegar for the lemon juice).

Big thumbs up from me, and a smaller thumbs up from Bill. The chicken was moist and tasty, specially when you got everything together in one bite. Bill thought the chicken could have used more flavor (and when you ate it by itself, some additional spices would have been nice). All in all, I'd have to say this is a recipe that I'll gladly add to the week-night rotation.

Thanks to Megan of My Baking Adventures for picking a great recipe! And don't forget to check out the other Barefoot Blogger entries for this.

(PS - Like the Rolling Rock shot? LOL That's his preferred method of cooking. One beer plus cooking makes him a happy camper.)

TWD: Mixed Berry Cobbler

Oof, another photo finish (it counts if I took it out of the oven at midnight, right?). I gotta get back to some semblance of a schedule round here. One thing that's good about late night baking, the house has a chance to cool off before the heat starts ramping up again.

This week, Beth of Our Sweet Life chose Dorie's Mixed Berry Cobbler. I groaned when I saw the 60-75 minute baking time. We're in the middle of another typical Colorado summer in these parts. That means most of the week is in the 90s until well after dark with a few days that back off to the 80s. And of course, the 80 degree days just don't seem to work out for me schedule-wise. After tasting the cobbler tonight though, I'd cook this baby if it we were in the middle of a hundred degree month long heat wave. I had to stop myself from eating half the pan, and I still managed to get a stomach ache before I quit.

Dorie calls for either fresh or frozen fruit in the cobbler. I probably should have tried some of the abundant fresh berries from the store, but I figured that this would probably normally be more of a fall/winter dish for me, so I opted to graze through the frozen fruit section to see what looked good. I knew I'd put blackberries in, but I'm not a fan of raspberries and Dorie cautioned against using too many strawberries (they make the cobbler too watery). The mango jumped in my cart while I was being seduced by the bag of dark sweet cherries and I had my fruit trio.



I went by the book for everything else. (Well, I forgot the lime/lemon at the store, but I threw in some dried lemon peel because I had a jar.) I even included the pepper because the whole concept just intrigues me. I'm not sure either affected the final taste, but it's worth experimenting next time around.

I loved the taste of the biscuit topping with all that lovely juice, and I can't wait to experiment with different combinations of fruit. The cherries and mango almost seemed to get lost in the cobbler this time around so I'd probably bump up the amount of those next time. I tried to keep the amounts of each about even as a baseline. Now that I'm thinking about it though, I'd definitely like a few more cups of fruit in the whole thing. The amount of juice to crust was great, but the fruit was a little sparse.

As always, don't forget to check out the rest of the TWD cobblers, and head over to Our Sweet Life for the recipe!