Chicken Parmesan & Italian Salad

Matt has been trying a lot of new recipes lately, so I've had the good fortune of coming home most nights to a delicious home-cooked meal. The other night Matt tried out this New York Times recipe for Chicken Parmesan and it was an instant hit; honestly better than any restaurant chicken parm I can remember having--and I'm the person who always gets chicken parm at Italian restaurants. I think it helped that Matt used chicken thighs, which never fail to pack more flavor and tenderness than breasts, and made his tomato sauce with San Marzano tomatoes, which are widely raved about as being the best canned tomatoes.

There is also much chatter about how most San Marzano tomatoes sold in the United States are "fake" (see, e.g., this article, or the dozen other like it). If you want to go to a speciality grocery store and seek out a can of tomatoes with its own certificate of authenticity, I'm sure they'll be delicious, but for both quality and convenience (and a decent price), Matt and I always use this brand Cento and their "certified" peeled San Marzano tomatoes. You can readily find it in grocery stores, but this brand has lots of different varieties, so make sure to look for these cans in particular; we've accidentally bought a different variety and it hasn't been the same. Whether these are "fake" or not, they reliably result in flawless tomato sauces.

So we weren't just eating a lot of cheese and fried breaded chicken, we chose this Bon Appetit Iceberg Salad with Italian Dressing to go on the side. I love salads but hate when you have to buy a lot of one-time use ingredients or spend ages assembling one; it often seems like you either have a boring salad with what's in your fridge, or a great one with a lot of particular ingredients that take forever to put together. This salad falls in the happy medium of being composed almost entirely of things you already have in your fridge, but is still interesting and delicious. Perhaps Matt and I are a special case, but we almost always have fresh mozzarella on hand, since Matt's homemade pizzas are an almost weekly occurrence. Even if you don't, if you make this salad with the chicken parmesan, you'll need the fresh mozzarella for the chicken already, so it won't feel like an extra purchase. And since provolone is basically just a slightly sharper version of mozzarella, feel free to sub in regular shredded mozzarella instead of making a special trip to the deli section for provolone. And lastly, I'm not a fan of peperoncini, so I'd just as easily omit them, but since they are brined, they last forever in the fridge, so having some around for whenever you make this salad is no big deal.

Enjoy!