craven.fr (.ox.ac.uk)

Sometimes coming up with a recipe is as simple as remembering that something exists. Chicken parmesan is one of my go-to dishes when eating out in the States; if nothing else on the menu screams out to be tried, I know that by ordering that I will always get a meal that I enjoy. But for whatever reason, it never even occured to me that I could make it at home. That is, until I ended up living in France and suddenly realised that I hadn't had chicken parmesan in ages.

The recipe below is aimed at being easy to make and using the most economical ingredients possible. Indeed, I like this dish enough that I don't need to get fancy with it to enjoy every bite, and by keeping it simple like this, it is one of the most frugal recipes I have as well as being one of the easiest and tastiest.

Ingredients

• 4 breaded turkey breasts, frozen*
• 1 can spaghetti sauce
• 600g fork-friendly pasta (like those spring-shaped ones)
• 1 cup grated emmental cheese

* I substitute turkey for chicken because my grocery store sells breaded turkey breasts in bulk, so buy buying a bunch of them and freezing them I save a lot of money on the meat. And I don't have to bread them myself.

Preparation

1. Cook the pasta. 2. Defrost the poultry in the microwave, then cook in a skillet while preheating the oven to 200° C. 3. In an oven dish, spread out the pasta along the bottom. Layer the poultry over that, then pour the sauce over the whole, and finally sprinkle the cheese over all. 4. Put in the oven until the cheese is melted and slightly browned. (My oven has a "gratin" setting that I use to get the browning effect, but this isn't a requirement.)

This is fairly vague as recipes go, but that is because this is a forgiving dish: as long as the key elements of pasta, sauce, meat, and cheese are all there, there is a lot of room for varying to taste!