Okay, I’ve been delinquent for a couple of weeks, for various reasons. Consequently I will give you not one, not two, but three recipes to atone for it. To wit, tonight’s menu:

• Chicken parmesan sandwich on ciabatta
• Cranberry-Clementine spinach salad
• Sweet poppyseed dressing
• Goats Do Roam, 2005

Before I go on, I should note that despite my failure to report on it, I have been keeping up on my Sunday dinners for the last couple of weeks. After the spaghetti puttanesca, I actually visited with my parents to have a Sunday dinner with them; last week, I took full advantage of a friend’s recipe for Moroccan chicken to feed a date (with a girl! I know! I can’t believe it either!). Neither situation lent themselves very easily to photography — not without confusing and alarming people — but now we’re caught up, and everything is okay.

The chicken parmesan recipe comes from my mother, who credits the Kraft foods website as her source. In fact, even when you get past the recommendations to make everything with something that rolls off of the Kraft assembly line, there are some surprising and stupidly easy recipes to be found there. I would recommend it, particularly to someone who has about a twenty minute window between arriving home from the gym and resorting to eating light sour cream with bread crumbs in it.

Someone like me, in other words.

So, bless Mom’s heart, here’s her complete recipe:

Whoever cooks at your house will love this. It’s fast, easy and really tasty and you only dirty ONE dish. We got two dinners out of it and we both loved it. You can prepare it ahead and just fling it in the oven when you’re ready.

Easy Chicken Parmesan

700 ml Pasta Sauce (1 large can - Hunts, etc.)

6 Tbsp. Grated Parmesan Cheese

6 Small Chicken Breasts (about 750 grams or 1-1/2 Lbs.)

1-1/2 Cups Grated Mozzarella

Preheat over to 375 degrees.

Place sauce in a 9 x 13 baking dish. Stir 1/4 cup of parmesan into the sauce.

Add chicken, turning to coat both sides. Cover with foil.

Bake for 30 minutes. Remove foil.

Top with remaining parmesan and mozzarella cheeses.

Continue to bake until cheeses melt and sauce is bubbly - about 5 minutes or so.

Serve over cooked pasta.

*** Note: If using larger breasts, cut in half lengthwise. You can also just open them up down the middle to flatten them out.

Because I can’t leave well enough alone, I made a couple of changes to this:

You could argue this is because I wasn’t in the mood to boil pasta, but honestly I just wanted to have something that I could eat in front of the television. It’s messy, and man is it ever cheesy, and just about perfect to eat in front of a surprisingly good football day.

The cranberry-clementine salad is one that I owe to my ex-girlfriend, the Dental Hygenist. I used to make it for her all the time, though because I’m obsessive pleaser I would use fresh oranges instead of the ones from the tin, and I added dried cranberries to offset the nuts.

Ingredients are simple, but the trick is to balance things out:

• Pine nuts (though you could easily do almond slivers, or even walnuts)
• Baby spinach, now that it’s not poisonous any more and you can buy it by the bag again
• Dried cranberries
• Clementine oranges (fresh in season; tinned out of season)

When I made this for her, I did insanely careful things like wash the oranges to get rid of all the pith — and while they do look prettier, frankly it doesn’t change the flavor much. In truth you just want to make sure that the cranberries and nuts are in roughly equal proportion, and then add the oranges as you like.

Raisins would be a bit weird with spinach, I think, but if you’re feeling truly experimental you could hazard into other dried fruits: Cherries and blueberries are available in the same places you’d find dried cranberries. You might notice, however, that they are sickeningly expensive, so I’d probably reserve those kinds of ingredients for a special occasion.

Besides, dried cranberries taste pretty good on your cereal the next day, and spare you the sinking feeling of pouring $25/kg. dried cherries on your All Bran.

I learned how to make the dressing over the course of the same activity (that is, making dinner for the ex), though this particular edition is a little sweeter than others I’ve made:

Half a cup of sugar is going to seem like a hell of a lot when you pour it into the bowl with everything else. Keep in mind, though, that when I was trying to clean out my fridge when I first moved into my house, three people recommended apple cider vinegar as a cleaning agent. Let me say that again: Apple cider vinegar is an effective cleaning agent for stainless steel appliances. Don’t worry about the sugar.

All the same, don’t be too liberal with the dressing, either. You have little seedless oranges and dried fruit there to help you with sweetness, so you don’t need to worry too much about strong flavors.

To accompany all of this, I went with a wine that I know and love. Goats Do Roam is a cute name for a very good, popular red wine from South Africa that boasts a “Rhône-style blend but with a Cape flavour.” It plays very well with the chicken, settles down the mixes of sweet and bitter in the salad, and is more or less perfect with a dessert of fruit and the leftover mountains of cheese I bought to make all this.

You really can’t lose with this one. It makes a hell of a lot of food that you can use in a lot of ways — on a good absorbant bun in a sandwich, over pasta in a more traditional dish, and if you’re feeling really creative (read: lazy) you could chop the chicken, throw it all in a pot with some vegetables and make a soup. The dressing keeps forever, and even if you don’t feel like screwing around peeling oranges or investing in cranberries, it works just as well over plain spinach or any other vegetables you feel like.

Good food that you can eat all week, and turn into all kinds of other goodness. What more can a single body ask for?