Matt & Mal : In the Kitchen!

One thing I love about Matt living off campus is that he has his own kitchen! Granted, there are kitchens within the residence halls, but I just prefer going over to his place to cook/bake or whatever!  While he does a majority of the cooking, I'm learning and doing my fair share ;)

Thanks to Pinterest, I've been finding lots of yummy food and desserts that I want to try.  When we finally have a weekend night when neither of us is on duty (and because the weeks are too busy), we usually try to make something!  This past Saturday, we made Ritz Cracker Crust Baked Chicken and Parmesan Roasted Potatoes. Oh. My gosh. They were both DELICIOUS and I could not get over the fact that I helped make them (trust me....my family has too many bad stories of me in the kitchen, and I had just recently had a stupid mac-n-cheese incident with Matt!).

 Lemme just tell you, these potatoes were out of this WORLD. SO GOOD!

 Chicken coming out of the oven!!

If you're interested, here are the recipes for these yummy dishes:

Ritz Cracker Crust Baked Chicken
Ingredients:
 - 6 boneless, skinless chicken breasts
 - 1 sleeve of Ritz crackers
 - garlic salt
 - ground black pepper
 - 6 teaspoons of butter

Directions:
 1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
 2. Run crackers through food processor or crush with rolling pin* until they are very fine.**
 3. Rinse each chicken breast with cold water, roll in the crushed crackers and place in a greased 13x9 baking dish.
 4. Sprinkle with garlic salt & pepper.
 5. Place 1 teaspoon of butter on each chicken breast.
 6. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour or until chicken is no longer pink inside.

*I definitely just put the crackers in a gallon sized ziploc bag and started smashing.
**We also found it better to have several big cracker pieces for extra crunch.

We also adjusted the recipe for just 2 chicken breasts.  I mean, obviously we were going to eat 6 in one night! ha!

Parmesan Roasted Potatoes
Ingredients:
 - 6 medium potatoes, cubed
 - 4 tbsp olive oil
 - 1/2 tsp garlic powder
 - 3/4 tsp salt
 - 1 1/2 tsp sweet paprika powder
 - 1/4 tsp black pepper
 - 5 tbsp shredded parmesan cheese

Directions:
 1. Preheat over to 400 degrees.
 2. Cube potatoes (about 3/4 inches). Place in a baking dish.
 3. Add the olive oil.
 4. In a small bowl, mix garlic powder, salt, paprika, black pepper and parmesan cheese.
 5. Sprinkle the mixture over potatoes and mix so cubes are covered.
 6. Bake at 400 degrees for 45 minutes.  During baking time, remove potatoes 2-3 times to toss them and prevent from sticking to the bottom of the pan.

Enjoy!