On Chicken Parm

Everything but the recipe!

Welcome to the Tuesday post for all subscribers. Today, we’re talking about the first dish that I ever considered a “signature dish” of mine. On Friday, paid subscribers will get a recipe for yet another wintry salad. I’m on a roll, people!

As I’ve mentioned before, food was a way that I made friends when I got to college. I went hard on the baking (see brownies recipe here), but I really hit my stride when I realized how much everyone around me was craving a good, home-cooked meal.

I didn’t grow up eating a lot of chicken parm by any means. Much as I might try to fake it, I have no Italian-American heritage whatsoever. This was not a meal I was used to eating or making by the time I got to the ripe old age of 18. But I had decided to cut out beef, so meatballs with my spaghetti were no longer an option. I had to make something to go with my store-bought marinara and convenience store pasta, and I knew how to bread and fry. For some unknown combination of those reasons, I decided to make chicken parm.

I bought almost-expired breadcrumbs from the on-campus grocery mart, borrowed an egg from that week’s brownie stash, and used all three of the bowls I had brought to school with me. Into the first went some flour, salt, and pepper. I whisked an egg into the second one and thinned it with some milk. The third I filled with the powdery breadcrumbs.

I set a skillet on the communal stove that someone had accidentally set on fire the week before and warmed some olive oil. Bit by bit, I breaded the chicken, dipping it into all three bowls with a fork that soon became breaded in and of itself. It was tedious and slow going. I wasn’t sure if I liked it.

As the now-breaded, fried, and obsessively-checked-to-see-if-it-was-done chicken sat in the oven to warm, I boiled the pasta and unceremoniously uncapped the cold marinara, which I dumped over the chicken before layering it with some cheap mozzarella slices and cranking the oven up to 425. The broiler, it will not surprise you to learn, didn’t work.

I served it family style to a motley crew, and it was a hit. Turns out, college students love carbs and cheese and being fed for free. Who knew?

February of 2013 was the first time I documented making this dinner, but I know that wasn’t the first or the last. It became my signature dish, and opened my eyes to what cooking could do as opposed to baking. Nobody needs a brownie or a cookie. But they do need dinner every night, and on some basic level, recognizing that shifted something in my brain.

I went deep down the Instagram archives to find recorded evidence of my forays into cooking, and, as going down any archive can be, it was both hilarious and horrifying. Food styling (or appalling lack thereof) aside, I can tell by the captions that I was questioning where my love of food was going to fit into life after school, whatever else that void might hold. Cooking dinner every night became a focus and a foothold, reassuring me that I was good at something outside of the classroom.

I made chicken parm a few weeks ago for the first time in ages. As I was portioning the flour, eggs, and breadcrumbs into shallow bowls, I was hit by a wave of nostalgia. I savored the tedium of dipping the chicken, piece by piece, into the three bowls and the frantic “is it done yet” game I still play every time I cook chicken. I thought about how much has changed since the first time I made this dish and how strange it can feel to come home to a recipe. I thought about the things that drove me into the kitchen then and all that have kept me there since.

Did it all start with chicken parm? Maybe not. But somewhere between cooking chicken on an abused communal stove and pulling East Fork bowls out of my cabinet, I found my way to food, and for that, I’ll happily stand at the stove and wonder if the damn chicken is cooked.

Thank you as always for being a part of Page & Plate 2.0! I have ambitions to grow this newsletter by a lot this year, so please feel free to share it far and wide. As always, if you’d like to learn more about what I do in my every day life, you can check out Page & Plate. See you Friday!