My chicken parmesan recipe

Tonight I did something way out of the ordinary for myself. I cooked something. I am notorious  for not cooking. I'm not talking about a frozen pizza. I made a meal for my self.  I more often than not screw whatever I am cooking up and end up throwing it away.

I can boil stuff and poor sauce over it and I know how to make a mean frozen pizza but really that is where my skills end. Tonight I made some form of chicken parmesan that ended up being really good.

If you, like me, hate cooking you should try this recipe out.

What you need:

• Some chicken breast - I just bought a bag of frozen chicken breast from Publix
• Cheese - I used a slice of provolone and grated parmesan.
• Tomato sauce
• Spagetti 
• herbs and spices

Cooking this bad boy up:

Ok so first off you need to preheat your oven. This is my least favorite thing about cooking, waiting. I especially hate preheating because it takes forever and your not even cooking anything. Whoever tells you that you don't have to preheat is wrong. I have messed up so many things by not preheating the oven, it throws the timing off. 

While your waiting on this preheating oven, grab your self a pan and throw it on the counter. Poor some olive oil on the pan, just enough for a thin layer. Take however many chicken breasts you are about to cook and put it on the pan and poor some olive oil over top the chicken also.

Now this is where you can be really creative. Take your favorite herbs and spices and sprinkle them on top of both sides of the chicken. You can really use whatever you want it's up to you. I used bay leaves, rosemary, "Italian seasoning" mix, black pepper and a bit of red pepper flakes. 

Take your cheese and cut it into small pieces then put them on top of the chicken. Like I said I just used a piece of provolone I had in the fridge but you can use mozzarella or whatever you have laying around. I do highly recommend using some grated parmesan, however I'm sure it would taste fine with Ramano. Even a few pacs of the cheese you get from Dominos would work. 

After you have your cheese on there pour a bit of tomato sauce over top of it. 

When your done it should look something like this....

By the time you get done with all the prep your oven should be preheated, if it is go ahead and place the pan on the middle rack. I cooked mine for 50 mins. The package said to cook for 35 - 55 mins. if frozen so I pretty much did what that said. If you have thawed chicken you only need to cook it for about 25 - 35 minuets. I would definitely check the packaging just to be safe. 

About 15 minuets before it's done make some pasta and boil some tomato sauce. You can eat the chicken by itself but I like to drop a bit of pasta over it. 

When everything is cooked throw it on a plate and eat it. 

Some tips on finding new music.

Many people ask me how I find out about bands or know about new albums by established bands so quickly. The short answer is that I spend a lot of time hunting around the depths of the internet for new music. I listen to four times as much garbage as I do gold, I just download the gold and leave the garbage were it lies.

There are some things you can do to make music discovery a more fluent process. Over the years I have found a bunch of plug-ins and services that make finding the diamonds in the coal mine easier.

Ex.FM

The first thing your going to want to do is install the Ex.FM plugin. Whenever there is a download link for an .MP3 (or other audio formats) it puts a small play button next to it that will allow you to listen to the song without downloading it or leaving the page. It also automatically creates a playlist of any songs on a webpage.

It does a lot of other things but this is the most useful future in my opinion. Which leads me to my next suggestions.

Read music blogs and magazines. 


Seriously this is how I find out about a lot of music. I read a bunch of music blogs. I'm not talking like two or three I subscribe to well over 50+ music RSS feeds. This is were the latest music can be found and were you should look for hidden treasures.

Don't just limit yourself to Pitchforkmedia.com and rollingstone.com/ there are a lot of small blogs out there that do a excellent job.

Here is a list of a few of my favorite blogs.

http://prettymuchamazing.com/
http://www.tinymixtapes.com/
http://this.bigstereo.net/
http://www.quickbeforeitmelts.com/

These are just ones that I like, however different blogs cater to different tastes in music. Finding a few that you can rely on is a bit hard but not impossible.

Hype Machine

Hype Machine is a music blog aggregator. What it does is pulls all the music from thousands of blogs and puts them in one place. Here you can follow music blogs, friends, bands and even custom searches. It's a fantastic way to see what is trending in the bloggerspher.

Typing in bands you like and finding out what music blogs are posting them can help you find some that you might want to pay more attention too.

HypeM is also a great way to find remixes of songs that may have gone a little stale ... if your into that.

Last.FM 

This is by far one of my favorite things on the internet and has been for a while now. After you install a program last.fm tracks everything you listen to and creates radio stations based on that. It's almost like pandora but way better in my opinion. It has been keeping track of what I listen to and as a result has made some pretty awesome recommendations for me.

The secret here is actually going to your recommendation page and checking out what it has waiting for you every now and again.

The thing about last.fm is that you need to let it collect data before it is really useful. So if you want to get into it download the program, set it up to launch at startup and just forget about it. If you don't want people to know what your listening to you can also make your profile private.

While you at it check mine out here

There are of course many other things I do to help me find new stuff like trading music with a group of friends that have similar tastes as I do and other secrets that I am not willing to unveil ... yet.

How I made the header image without a scanner

I made the header image using nothing but a pad a pen my iPhone and photoshop. Here is how I did it.

1. First I drew The logo with a simple pen and paper. 

2. Then I took a well lit picture of the drawing with my iPhone (any other phone with a decent camera will work) 

3. Then I uploaded it to my Dorpbox and opened it in PhotoShop. It does not matter how you get the image to your computer from your phone, that is just how I did it.  

4. Next I adjusted the curves (Image > adjustments > Curves ) to blow out the background to all white and make the black stand out. 

5. Next I took all the color out of the image with the black and white adjustment (image > adjustments > black and white )

5. To make the black stand out more I went to adjusted the brightness and contrast. I took the brightness all the way down and the contrast all the way up. (image > adjustment > brightness and contrast ) 

 6. after that I just resized the image to a width of 800 pixels and uploaded it to blogger 

Thats it. 

If you don't have photoshop a lot of other image processing software has similor adjustments that you can do. Photoshop Elements should have all these tools. The most helpful in this is the curves adjustment but all you really have to do is isolate the black and get rid of the background somehow. 

And that 's how I made the header without a scanner in just a few minuets.