Clean Crispy Chicken Parm w/Squoodles + Weekend Recap

Happy Monday! Big surprise this week- I'm on top of my game enough to have a post out on Monday!

We had friends over for dinner the other night and Harrison and I came up with this awesomely crispy chicken parm. I've never been a big chicken parm person but this was good, and we were able to throw it together pretty quickly.

Prep Time: 15 mins
Cook Time: 30 mins
Servings: 4

Ingredients:

• 1.5 lbs chicken breasts, thawed (we flattened our's out with a meat tenderizer then sliced each one into about 9 strips) ($6.00)
• 3 eggs, whisked ($.50)
• 1/2 cup corn starch  ($.40)
• 2/3 cup ground flaxseed (PS I found ground flaxseed at Trader Joe's for the best price)
• 1 Tablespoon Italian seasoning 
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 2 medium sized squashes, sliced into strips with a Mandolin  
• 1 tablespoon coconut oil 
• Salt & pepper to taste
• 2 cups of your choice of spaghetti sauce (I use garlic & basil sauce from Trader Joe's)
• 1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Set up your stations: 1 medium sized bowl with the corn starch, 1 medium bowl with the eggs, 1 medium bowl with the ground flaxseed mixed with the Italian seasoning and garlic powder, and a non-stick baking sheet.

Dip each chicken strip into the corn starch, then the egg, then the flaxseed/seasoning mix, then set on the baking sheet. Do this for all the chicken strips. Bake for 25 minutes. While chicken is baking, cook the squoodles . After 25 minutes, remove from the oven and glob 3 spoonfuls of the sauce onto each chicken strip, then sprinkle the mozzarella cheese on top. Put it back in the oven for another 5 minutes.

Top the squoodles with the chicken. We served it with my friend Allie's caprese salad and it. was. banginnnn.


So on to  the weekend recap. If you read this blog you may or may not have picked up on the fact that I am nerd alert central: I get my rocks off crunching numbers in Excel, making charts and graphs, learning new statistical methods, reading studies, and all things NPR. So when I found out that you can go on TOURS OF NPR'S HEADQUARTERS I booked that immediately. We did it Friday and OMG:

When you're listening to Morning Edition and other national NPR programs, this is where the producers sit:

We got to sit in the actual sound studios, put on headphones, play with microphones, nerd out big time. Fun fact: NPR listeners on the West Coast hear the best quality shows because of the 3 hour delay- producers can go back and fix little things they don't like by the time it airs in California, but here on the East Coast we have a mere 3 minute delay so there's not that kind of time. Crazy huh? Or is that just me?

We hit up the Building Museum to see the giant human maze  and I had a panic attack just looking at it:

That evening we went to Jazz in the Garden, then tried out a new restaurant rooftop called 1905 for a friend's bday (def recommend- food menu looked good and great beer and cocktail options):

Saturday I went on a Boomerang Tubing Tour (we decided to do a redneck theme for our party) for a friend's bday we loaded a coach bus with booze and food and rode 2 hours to the Shenandoah valley..beautiful and so fun!

Nothing says redneck like temporary tats and lime-a-ritas. I don't even want to talk about how hard I scrubbed my arm to get my tats off before church the next morning...

Sunday we hit up a new DC brewery called Right Proper Brewing Company and they had this super funky mural that I am obsessed with:

Linking up today with Biana- come play!