While it's on my mind...

Some of my most interesting culinary discoveries tend to be made when I'm alone and improvising meals from what's in the pantry. I had one such successful experiment this evening.

I warmed a small pan and coated it with butter. I put one chicken breast in the pan, sprinkled on some red pepper flakes, and drizzled some light, zesty italian dressing over and around the chicken.

I let this cook on medium-ish heat while I was boiling some rotini, occasionally drizzling on more italian dressing and flipping the breast over. At some point I pulled the wheat germ out of the pantry and sprinkled it on both sides of the chicken, allowing it to crust up a little.

Pasta drained, I began to worry that pan-frying the chicken wasn't getting the center cooked properly, so I put the chicken on the pan for my little toaster oven, dumped the remaining butter-dressing-germ-etc remnants from the pan over the chicken, and baked it for a few, closely-watched minutes.

I sprinkled a fair amount of parmesan cheese over my pasta and served my chicken breast on top.

The chicken was really tasty. I'm pretty sure if I added more dressing to the pan near the end on the process that the butter-dressing-germ-etc mixture would have mixed deliciously into the pasta to compliment the chicken.

Overall I was extremely pleased with the outcome and I'll probably try the recipe out on my room mate sometime this week and see what he thinks.

Update: I made a recipe card for it.