Parmesan chicken with melted strawberries... kind of.

I decided that I’d try a new recipe that my mom sent for dinner one night. It seemed easy enough, and though there would have to be the ever so Hungarian substitutions of ingredients, I thought it was do-able. I had many of the ingredients at home already, I just needed a few things, namely strawberries, basil and parmesan cheese in a block. Justin and I set out for the cute lady’s fruit and veggie stand in search of the basil and strawberries. We were one for two, as she had no fresh basil. I didn’t think this would be a problem, since we were heading to the Spar grocery store as well. Once at the store, we found that there wasn’t any fresh basil there either. What to do? Well – we purchased some pesto and dried basil leaves and decided we’d figure it out later. Instead of parmesan cheese, I bought some Trappista (a cheese widely used in Hungary) – that shouldn’t be a big deal I decided. Ok, ingredients in hand, we returned home.

I should have known that the basil was just the first step. We were to combine some vinegar, jam and strawberries in a 3 quart baking dish. 11 x 17 it is, and in go the ingredients.

The chicken breasts came cut with an opening in them already, so we got to skip that step. The next thing was to cut a piece of cheese about ½ inch wide and wrap a basil leaf around it. Well, since we didn’t have the leaves, I started to spread some pesto on the cheese chunk and then rolled it in dry basil leaves. Justin’s advice was to dip the cheese into the pesto jar, but that just resulted in oily cheese.

OK, stuff cheese into chicken breast and seal with a toothpick. Toothpick? I don’t remember reading that on the recipe… dang, no toothpicks. Well, I have a lot of matches, so off came their heads, and we used them as the toothpicks. In my defense, the recipe said I could use “wood skewers” so we did…

We noticed that we had missed the “sprinkle salt and pepper” in a couple places, so we sprinkled liberally to make up for it. Moving on, we were to then cook the chicken in some olive oil to cook the outsides and seal the chicken. Justin was in charge of that and when the oil was warm, he went to it with the chicken. After the breasts had been cooking about three minutes, I realized that there were supposed to be TWO cloves of garlic in the oil, cooked first, then the chicken was to be added. Easy fix, I have some garlic powder. Justin sprinkled it on top and we were still in business. He put the cooked breasts on top of the strawberry mix and was ready to pop them in the oven… when we realized that the chicken was to be baked sans strawberries until the last few minutes and they were to be baked separately... Well, we had already put the chicken in with the strawberries so – eh… let’s just put it in the oven. Needless to say, it wasn’t the most delicious thing I’d eaten, but we laughed the entire time, and that’s what matters.

Look at that face... even though he knew it was going to be gross, he gave it the thumbs up anyhow - what a lucky gal I am to have him!!! (though I blame him for not reading the recipe)