Friends, Chicken Parm and Apple Pie

This weekend the weather was pretty nice. A little cloudy for my taste, but thankfully it's not gotten too cold just yet! (thought on the weather this morning I heard maybe a little snow on Friday!!) We are so blessed to have a wood stove, and have not even had to turn on our heat yet!!! Maybe we will have a nice mild Maine winter.... (wish full thinking!)

On Saturday I spent the day downtown with my friend Anne. We planned this day a month in advanced! Anne has two beautiful kiddos who keep her on her toes as well as a full time job AND they are building a new house!! I am also pretty busy these days, so it took us a full month to get a day together! We went shopping and ate lunch in the park, it was so much fun catching up with her! I don't know where fall went, but it seemed to have skipped us! We were hoping for beautiful fall tress to take pictures of sadly the trees are either still green, or brown and dead looking. The colors this year have not been their usual.....Yesterday after church I was in a baking mood, so I turned on my Christmas music (yes I start listening to it now!) and made a home made apple pie! (I cheated and bought the crust) but the rest is from scratch! I got my recipe from one of my favorite cooks book, The Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook Bridal Edition. I got this book as a wedding gift, six years ago! and still use it all the time. It has great ideas for making smaller portions since I'm pretty much always cooking for just the two of us.

It first tells you how to make a crust, which I usually do... but I didn't want to get into that big of a mess yesterday so I used Pillsbury!

6 cups thinly sliced, peeled apples

1 Tbl lemon juice

3/4 cup sugar

2 Tbl four

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/8 tsp ground nutmeg

Sprinkle apples with lemon juice. In a large bowl stir together the 3/4 cup sugar, flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Add apples. Toss until coated.

Transfer mixture to the pastry-lined pie plate. Bake 350 for 1 hour.

For dinner last night I made chicken Parmesan with gnocchi. I first discovered gnocchi on a cooking show, some guy made it and it looked AMAZING! When we went to dinner for our anniversary at the start of the month I had lobster with gnocchi and I fell in love! On Friday night while grocery shopping at Shaw's we picked up a few bags of frozen raviolis that were on sale for a dollar... mixed in to the freezer with the raviolis were bags of frozen gnocchi! I was soo excited!!! So we added it to our dinner last night. For anyone who does not know gnocchi is a potato pasta. Tastes just like pasta when it's plain, but it's thicker (kind of like french fries) I just love them!!

I got the chicken parm recipe off Pinterest/myrecipes.com but I totally changed it! Here is what I should have done...

1/4 cup flour

1/2 tsp dried oregano

1/4 tsp salt

2 egg whites lightly beaten

3/4 cup panko (Japanese breadcrumbs)

4 (60z) skinless boneless chicken halves

2 Tbl olive oil

1/2 cup jarred tomato-basil pasta sauce

1/2 cup (2oz) grated Parmigiana-Reggiano Cheese

3/4 cups (3oz) shredded part skim mozzarella cheese

Mix flour, oregano and salt. Roll the chicken in the flour mixture. Then coat with egg whites and roll in the panko.

The next part I don't want to type because I didn't do it. But it says to fry the chicken in a pan for 3 min on each side and then bake in the oven until done. I didn't want to fry it... so I just baked it at 400 for 40 minutes. I also did not use panko because I didn't have any, just plain bread crumbs was fine! I topped my chicken with Parmesan cheese and (TERRIBLE I KNOW) cheddar cheese because I didn't have mozzarella!! It was still very very good. We topped the chicken and the gnocchi with pasta sauce and enjoyed! We are both having the left over for dinner tonight while I'm at school.