Holiday Cooking: Fried Chicken

I know we’re all supposed to be making Christmas cookies and mincemeat pie in honor of the holidays, but look, I can’t control my cravings. And it just felt like time to finally learn how to make fried chicken the way my mom makes it. Fried chicken is conceptually easy and massively difficult to execute properly. Here are some tips, from my mom’s brain to your mouth. (Hungry?)

1. Buy thighs/wings/drumsticks, wings only if you enjoy fruitless gnawing, and breasts never. Don’t even waste a good chicken breast on fried chicken—the skin to meat ratio just isn’t in your favor.

2. Brine the chicken overnight in a big pot of salt water. It works for turkey, it works here. Brining seals the meat and prevents it from soaking up too much oil.

3. Salt and pepper each piece (make sure they’re dry). Get a big paper sack—IMPORTANT!! Plastic bags are unacceptable–and fill it with flour, plus a sprinkle of oregano or parsley if you’d like. Drop each piece in and shake it up. Make a huge mess. You can dip it in buttermilk or something first, but it’s not totally necessary.

4. The oil MUST: Be hot but not too hot. Try for 300-degrees if you have some way of measuring that. Ideally you have a rusted 1970s deep-welled electric griddle with a fitted lid, if not, improvise something that will shield you from spattering grease. Use any kind of vegetable oil; thanks to the hippie co-op’s poor selection, I mixed sunflower with canola.

5. Keyword SECRET INGREDIENT: Bacon grease in the oil. The morning you make this chicken, fry up a ton of bacon and give it to your happy roommate. Save the grease and add it to the oil that you fry the chicken in.

6. Drop in some pieces. Don’t crowd them. 13-15 minutes on each side, or just flip them when, according to my mom, “the brown begins to creep up the sides of the chicken.” A thermometer should read 160 or thereabouts when you stick it in a piece of the done bird.

7. Drain, drain, drain. Paper grocery bags massively layered with paper towels works.

Pair with:

- Collard greens, either steamed (healthy version) or sauted in a little of that bacon grease you’ve got.

- Mashed potatoes, if you’re going to be totally obvious about it. My family eats something different, a rice concoction that I won’t even try to explain.

- Biscuits. Make them (it’s easy) if you have a good oven; if you have a bad one like mine, improvise.

For wine, you can do one of two things. Pair it with a mid-priced American Merlot, which is what virtually every wine columnist will tell you. (They are very bad people). Or, pair it with champagne, or a derivative thereof that you can afford. I recommend any kind of “Crémant de…” It’s like champagne, except made in French regions that aren’t, you know, Champagne. Crémant de Bourgogne, Crémant de Limoux, you get the idea. They’re about $15-20, half the price of any self-respecting Champagne and often just as good.

And there you have it.

Treehouse of Love

I think I had a short-lived Tumblr on which I posted something about this a long time ago, but my cousin Linda built a sustainable treehouse on her land in upstate New York, and there’s a really interesting interview with her about the experience here. I dunno, I think it’s pretty rad, even if I am from that breed of people who revels in “incapable-ness” that Linda mentions. I should also point to her business, which features a product that is LIFE-CHANGING for people like me who, for reasons of color, wash their hair not that often.

Better Homes and Gardens’ Junior Cookbook: A Photo Essay

I don’t have much to add to Ezra’s fine post about cookbooks worth buying, but take a look at the Better Homes and Gardens Junior Cookbook photo that he used as a visual. I sensed a hint of mocking, as if the Better Homes and Gardens Junior Cookbook series isn’t a serious culinary-literary work, one deserving of the utmost of respect. Beg to differ, sir. Proof? My highly cherished 1972 edition, passed down to me by my mother. Glorious photographic evidence after the jump:

How Conversations Go

My dear friend J. gave me The Book of Laughter and Forgetting for my birthday this year, and I took a crack at it because it’s been almost 6 years since I read that other Kundera book that everyone reads at some point. I had to put it down after awhile because it was too disjointed for my tastes at that moment, but if you were to open it up at random and pick a passage that rings true, you could do worse than this:

Everyone likes Tamina. Because she knows how to listen to people.

But is she really listening? Or is she merely looking at them so attentively, so silently? I don’t know, and it’s not very important. What matters is that she doesn’t interrupt anyone. You know what happens when two people talk. One of them speaks and the other breaks in: “It’s absolutely the same with me, I…” and starts talking about himself until the first one manages to slip back in with his own “It’s absolutely the same with me, I…”

The phrase “It’s absolutely the same with me, I…” seems to be an approving echo, a way of continuing the other’s thought, but that is an illusion: in reality it is a brute revolt against a brutal violence, an effort to free our own ear from bondage and to occupy the enemy ear’s by force. Because all of man’s life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ear of others. The whole secret of Tamina’s popularity is that she has no desire to talk about herself. She submits to the forces occupying her ear, never saying: “It’s absolutely the same with me, I…

I didn’t understand why I underlined that when I read it, except that it seemed important. Then I started listening to the conversations I was hearing on a day-to-day basis, and realized that that’s how most of them go, most of the time.

Everywhere you go, there they are

I always thought I wasn’t meant for high-tech, Internet-capable phones. I don’t text enough, talk enough on the phone, play enough games, and so on, to require the capabilities that the high-tech phone offers. About a month ago I was trying to decide how to spend a few hundred bucks: buy a used piano, or buy the G1 phone? Truth be told, the former would have probably made me happier, because playing piano happened to be something that I got really good at really quickly. But the dorkiness of it all led me to quit, and I miss it.

I came pretty close to buying a junked piano on Craigslist, but then I remembered that I rent, not own, and moving a piano downstairs into our basement (the only reasonable spot for it) would have been unpleasant if not impossible. So I bought the damn Google phone, got it today, and yes, it’s kind of great.

So for the first time in my life, I checked my Gmail from my phone today. Guess who the premier message was from? A total stranger! Confidential to one Ms. Mcgee: No, I am most certainly not “kickin’ it in Marin still.” Have fun at your square-dancing party and double-check your friend’s address next time, lameface.

Christmas Ornament of Choice

It’s been kind of a shitty week. Last night I gave up, cracked a bottle of Prosecco, and needlepointed a Christmas ornament of a Santa Skull. I feel better.

Tannin FAIL

I almost forgot to mention, RV and I went to Friday Night Flights a few weeks ago at Beth’s wine shop, and tried some delicious Thanksgiving wines. One of us saw the Evil wine, an Australian cab whose label calls to mind the meme that won’t die:

Although I found a handful of positive reviews online for the Evil/Fail wine, I’m forced to conclude that it is an epic FAIL. It’s a minefield of harsh tannins, accented by a dose of oak as subtle as a sledgehammer. It’s a gooey, fruit-bomby, disgusting mess.

So there’s your wine review of the month.

Red Bull and Cold Hard Cash

Um, wait a minute. Are you implying that CSPI is going to help me enter a class-action lawsuit against the makers of Red Bull, thus yielding a windfall settlement of epic proportions for every person in this country who ever had one too many Jager-bombs?

That would be pretty cool, actually. I had blamed my own bad judgment and my cousins for egging me on that night, but apparently it wasn’t our fault! Now, if they could only do the same for Bacardi 151, I may never have to work again.

Pretty As A Feather

OK, I’m the first to admit that this is pretty weak, especially since I’ve done it before, but man do my friends have the best tattoos. This is Erin’s:

Meet the New Music, Same as the Old Music

Every now and then I put my eMusic.com account on hold for like three months, because why should I be spending $15 just to stare indecisively at my computer and feel musically overwhelmed? I have too much music anyway. But then I reinstate it and see all this fun music that I probably should have downloaded, oh, three months ago. Like Ra Ra Riot. Sorry guys, I’m late to the party as usual. But look, they had me at “cello.”

I also see that the Righteous Babe label has been added to the eMusic repertoire. RB mainly consists of Ani Difranco’s (overly) lengthy discography. I’ve long since deleted all but about three songs of the four Ani albums that I used to own. I know it’s silly to be embarrassed by long-lost musical loves, but I am. Her career has consisted of putting out the same basic song, looped continuously save for a few lyric changes, for the past, what, 17 years? Except for one album, which I grudgingly admit is still kind of worth listening to: Dilate. I know you can’t just cram a totally unrelated album into a very distinct movement years after the fact, but if I could, I would. I spent the first two years of high school listening to Dilate, Call the Doctor, and (a bit late) Live Through This, pretending to understand exactly what they were all singing about. I didn’t really get it until later.

Now, give me some music recommendations that are heavy on the strings yet still have drumming in them.