One of my favorite dishes my husband makes is chicken parmesan. He’s been making it since our early years of marriage and it’s one of those dishes that has withstood time and still tastes great as a leftover.
It’s also a dish that I’ve never tried to make before. I (mostly) do the Mexican dishes and he does the Italian dishes.
One of the reasons I’ve never ventured into Italian cooking is because my husband really likes making his sauce from scratch. I just don’t have the time or patience to make things from scratch. Making chicken parmesan is already a labor of love and with two little ones, I just don’t have the time or desire to make my own sauce.
While my husband grew up with homemade sauce, my mom was never one to spend too much time in the kitchen and any meal we had was always semi-homemade. I don’t think it was because she wasn’t a cook either. I just think long hours at the hospital as a nurse made her appreciate her time at home and want to spend more of it with me and my dad versus slaving away in the kitchen.
My mom recognized when a ready-made ingredient was easy and sometimes even better than homemade and definitely used that to her advantage when meal planning. There weren’t a lot of fresh ingredients or chopping that I remember and whenever we had pasta, the sauce was always from a jar.
Taking a page out of my mom’s playbook, sometimes when you get a craving for chicken parmesan (or chicken parm, as we often call it) and want it served up quickly means you need a shortcut to get to the good stuff.
So during my weekly (who am I kidding? More like multiple times weekly because I’m always forgetting something) shopping trip, I grabbed all the ingredients for chicken parmesan along with some Ragu® to speed up the process and get to the good stuff even faster.
But to mix things up a little, I opted to try a chicken parmesan sandwich. My husband insists that everything is better as a sandwich so I figured he’d be all about this recipe. And I was right, thus the birth of the Chicken Parmesan Sandwich was born.
Sometimes finding the magic mealtime takes a little effort and a little creativity. I love that all of these years later, standing in a grocery store I was reminded of my busy mom’s time-saving tips and with one simple substitution was able to combine one of my childhood meals with one of my children’s meals.
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Friday 8th of February 2019
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