Chicken Parma

This Sunday we’re taking a trip to Alexandra at sunrise to take some photos. It’s surrounded by mountains and pretty dense forest, so should make for some great landscape photography, particularly if there is a bit of mist hanging around as the sun rises.

Afterwards, we’re having lunch at the Commercial Hotel, which is the part I’m looking forward to most because they’re widely known throughout Victoria for having an incredible 30 different kinds of Parma on their menu.


Chicken Parma would have to be in my top 10 favourite meals (which are mostly made up of comfort foods) – as I’m pretty sure it is for most Australians. Parmigiana is a term that’s used pretty broadly here. Aussie Chicken Parma is not very close to traditional parmigiana. Usually in your typical pub, it’s a chicken schnitzel topped with Napoli sauce and cheese. But it’s also been extended so that it really covers putting any kind of topping on chicken schnitzel.

A while ago we stopped randomly at a pub that had a small chicken Parma menu. I don’t remember them all, but I remember that the one I had was topped with egg, bacon and cheese, and the whole lot was grilled so that the cheese was crispy, but the egg yolk was still a bit runny.
Heaven.

It took me about 20 minutes to decide on that one from a menu of about 8 different types – I can’t imagine how long it will take me to decide from a list of 30.

Its’ a tough choice –do I go with safe and innocent, like the ‘Italian’, or do I go right out there and choose something that I would never think to put on top of chicken if I were making it myself, like the ‘Bananarama Parma’? And most importantly, can you pass up something as glorious as the ‘Nacho Parma’? Because if there are two kinds of food that were ever meant to be combined, it was these. Although maybe Nacho Parma is more of a late night drunken food because it combines the beauty of one of the world’s greatest drunk foods with one of the world’s greatest comfort foods.


So any suggestions on which one might be the best choice are more than welcome, and I’ll definitely post some photos of whichever one I end up choosing – it is supposed to be a photography trip after all.