Chicken Parmesan Roll-ups
¼ | cup olive oil |
1 | onion , chopped fine |
6 | garlic cloves , minced |
1 | (14.5-ounce) can diced tomatoes |
½ | cup chopped fresh basil |
1 ½ | cups shredded mozzarella cheese |
½ | |
6 | thin-cut, boneless, skinless chicken cutlets , about 1 1/4 pounds |
½ | cup panko bread crumbs |
1. Adjust oven rack to upper-middle position and heat oven to 475 degrees. Heat 2 tablespoons oil in medium saucepan over medium heat until shimmering. Add onion and cook until softened, about 3 minutes. Stir in garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds. Add tomatoes and simmer until slightly thickened, about 5 minutes. Off heat, stir in half of basil. Transfer half of sauce to 8-inch square baking dish.
2. Combine mozzarella and Parmesan in medium bowl; reserve ½ cup. Add remaining basil to remaining cheese. Pat cutlets dry with paper towels and season with salt and pepper. Top cutlets with basil-cheese mixture, leaving 1-inch border at bottom of cutlets. Roll up tightly and arrange, seam side down, in prepared baking dish.
3. Toss bread crumbs with remaining oil in small bowl. Top chicken with reserved cheese, remaining sauce, and bread-crumb mixture. Bake until chicken is cooked through and crumbs are golden, 15 to 20 minutes. Serve.
I actually broke this recipe up into two stages since I was transporting it. At home, I made the roll-ups first and froze them in two layers in a Tupperware freezer container. Since I was feeding four adults and four kids, I roughly doubled the recipe. I didn’t really measure the amount of chicken. I got two large packages of fresh boneless skinless chicken breasts and cut them into cutlets, getting about four good cutlets per breast, and there were two large breasts per package. I am still not great at making chicken cutlets, so I had lots of trimmings that didn’t make it as roll-ups, but that was no problem—I used those for the Chicken,Charred Tomato, and Broccoli Salad. Usually I would just use thawed frozen chicken breasts, but I knew I wanted to freeze the roll-ups for traveling, so I had to start with fresh this time. If I can plan ahead well enough, I might stick with the fresh chicken for this recipe in the future, because they were easier to cut and pound than the thawed usually are.
To make a simple recipe even simpler, I skipped measuring mozzarella and parmesan and instead used the Italian blend shredded cheese from Aldi, which had both types of cheese in the blend anyway. I chopped up a ton of fresh basil, stirred it into a large helping of cheese in a small mixing bowl, and started rolling. I had a wide variety of sizes of cutlets, but I figured that would work out since I would be serving a wide variety of sizes of diners. It wasn’t particularly pretty, but here’s what I had to pop in the freezer the night before our trip:
The chicken traveled well buried in ice in the bottom of a cooler, and thawed in the fridge after we got to New York. When it was time to make dinner, I put together the sauce (I took all the ingredients with me, figuring that if we lived closer I wouldn’t have raided her kitchen to make dinner for them!) I roughly followed the recipe, adapting it slightly to double the amount of sauce and adding a bit here and there to make it more like the Quick Tomato Sauce I love. The two recipes are pretty close to begin with, so it wasn’t much of a change. Once the sauce had a few minutes to bubble, I poured a bit in an 8x11 baking dish (I think, although I didn’t measure it. It was smaller than 9x13.) In went the roll-ups, which packed in there pretty tightly.
No measuring--just keep sprinkling until it looks good |
And that’s the last picture I have of this dish. Once it was on the table with sides of pasta, sauce, a green bean-wax bean-carrot blend, and a big bowl of Fluff for dessert, it was gone in a flash. It worked out fine without the sauce on top, although the sauce on the side was gone pretty fast. I should have more than doubled that to feed our hungry crowd. Kids and adults alike devoured it, and there was one little roll left for someone’s lunch the next day.
If you’re making this, and you want to make it even quicker and you aren’t as fanatical about homemade sauce as I am, you can really streamline it by using a good jarred sauce instead. It’s an easy dish that’s impressive enough for potlucks or even a dinner party, but easy enough to make for a weeknight family dinner. If you try it, let me know how it turns out for you!