Super Easy Chicken Parmesan

Now that I am feeling better in my pregnancy and able to do more cooking for myself, I am basically back in charge of making and deciding on dinner. I don't mind recipes that take hours but when I am trying to get a lot done in a day, sometimes you don't have hours to spend on dinner.

David and I have been looking into buying different types of meats lately because we have ground beef a lot and leaner, non-red meats would be better for us. We decided we weren't ready to learn how the heck you make a whole ham or turkey when there's only two of you and no good way not to cook it all at once so we looked at the "convenience" meats. We decided on chicken patties.

My mom used to make chicken parmesan using chicken patties instead of breading them yourself and cooking for an hour. We also never ate it over pasta but apparently, that's quite common.

So here's the recipe:

frozen chicken patties
red pasta sauce (we used a garlic cheese variety but you can use anything)
white cheese (we had an Italian blend cheese we were trying to use up. I believe my mom usually uses mozzarella)

Bake the chicken according to the package but not for the entire time. Our chicken needed 14 minutes so I cooked them for 10. Then spread a generous amount of sauce on each patty, making sure to go all the way to the edges. Sprinkle cheese on top, also going all the way to the edges. Put back in the oven with the broiler on for the rest of the time. Then you're done! It's really that simple and they taste so good.  And by not cooking them for the whole time and then broiling them, the chicken doesn't get dried out. If you want, you can put the sauce and cheese on when they go in and cook them for the whole time but I think the sauce would make them kind of soggy then.

If you don't have pasta with them, you will probably want to have spaghetti soon because you will have lots of leftover sauce, depending on how many patties you make. We only made 3 and used maybe a quarter of the sauce.

If you don't serve these with noodles, you can serve them with basically anything. I would've done a vegetable and maybe mashed potatoes but we weren't very hungry last night. You can also serve them on buns and make a sandwich out of it. We ate ours plain.