Note- Serve this dish with a side of Microwave Taters. These two dishes were featured today in day two of the Iron Chef Moms Challenge. To view today’s results, be sure to visit the entry!

Parmesan Chicken
Yields Four Servings

4 drumsticks (the Aldi’s bag contains five drumsticks, but there will still be plenty of coating)
3/4 cup Parmesan cheese (in the dairy section, not in the shaker)
1 egg
1/4 cup breadcrumbs (I make my own and store them in the freezer)

In a shallow bowl, mix together cheese and breadcrumbs. In a separate bowl, beat egg until lemon colored. Dip chicken in egg, coating well. Roll in cheese. Bake at 400 degrees for 45-60 minutes.

Amy’s Notes: I removed the skin on the chicken drumsticks. Simply slip your fingers under the skin and pull to remove. I then proceeded with the coating. My drumsticks took 50 minutes to bake.

Note: This dish was included in the Iron Chef Moms Challenge. Please visit today’s post to get the scoop on the contest. Don’t forget to visit Meredith’s entry too!

Chicken Broccoli Lo Mein
Yields Four Servings

8 ounces thin spaghetti (if linguine is available, I prefer this over the spaghetti)
2/3 pound skinless, boneless chicken (3 chicken breasts, dethawed overnnight)
1 cup fresh button mushrooms
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 bag frozen broccoli pieces
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon white vinegar
1 tablespoon ketchup

Cook pasta as directed. Clean & chop mushrooms. Heat oil. Cut chicken in bite size pieces. When all the chicken is cut, add it to the skillet. Add mushrooms and broccoli to the skillet. Cook for five to six minutes or until mushrooms have released their liquid and chicken is cooked through. Add soy sauce, vinegar, and ketchup. Stir to combine. Add cooked pasta and serve immediately.

Serve with ramekins of applesauce.

Meredith, over at Like Merchant Ships, emailed me to tell me how much she has enjoyed my new blog. For her though, Aldi Supermarket is a bit of a hike and she believes that she can do just as well by buying the loss leaders at her local grocery stores and planning her menu around the sale options. She decided to offer up a friendly challenge and see who could save the most money, an Aldi Shopper or a Sales Shopper. I told her I was up for the challenge and am excited to see how well we both can do.
The game will begin this Monday and I will be posting my meals each day, but include a daily total for the day versus the weekly totals that I normally do. I will also include some tips for shopping on that particular day, as part of the challenge. Meredith will also be doing the same thing on her blog and I will include a link to her entry too.

Here are the rules of the game:

I will purchase everything from Aldi Supermarket.

Meredith will be doing a freestyle menu with no coupons and only using the grocery sales current from that week. She will not be using any items from her stockpile, only items purchased that week.

A daily breakdown will be given each day. The breakdown will include the menu, recipe, and cost breakdown.

The menu will serve four people. In larger recipes, we will be adjusting the cost to estimate a four person meal, or split the cost if one meal actually will be used in two different ways.

The menu will include a main dish and sides. Desserts and drinks will not be included in this challenge.

Staple ingredients under a ½ cup are “negligible,” for example in the case of flour, sugar, salt or pepper. Otherwise, these will be figured in as price per ounce and multiplied by the number of ounces used.

There will be a wrap-up at the end of the week and you, as readers, can feel free to critique our strategies, or offer up some of your own strategies.

Just for the record, I do want to say that this is just a fun and friendly competition. The idea behind it is not to see who will do better than the other, but more to share techniques for two different ways to shop. Both of these options do not require any coupon cutting and will show you ways that you can plan affordable meals for your family using two other types of techniques.

We are both very excited to be doing this contest and our families are excited to be eating so well this week.

Thanks to Meredith for posing such a great challenge! I hope that it will be as much fun for you as it is for us!