|
All
Original Text & Photography
|
| 01 June 2004 - Finger Lickin' Good
When I was a kid, KFC (as it is now called, I think to remove themselves from the word “fried”, as hospitals tried to remove themselves from the word “sick”... but I digress…) was a pretty popular take-out fast-food restaurant. It was also a really great picnic staple for Friday evenings in the summer when we would pack up the old white station wagon with a dog and at least three or four out of the five kids and a Coke cooler full of my mom’s home made potato salad, some pop and juice, a loaf of white bread to feed the geese and gulls and a bucket of the Colonel’s secret recipe chicken. My dad would drive us all down to the Lakeshore and we’d picnic near the lake, the kids running off after dinner to feed the Canada Geese and get attacked by sea gulls (I was actually bitten by a seagull once and have not trusted them since). It was then that I acquired my taste for cold fried chicken…a taste I have not lost, by any means. There’s just something really satisfying about eating deep fried food, when it’s gone cold and is crunchier and somehow much less greasy (is that my imagination?) than when it was steaming hot. Especially chicken. Especially fried chicken. ESPECIALLY KENTUCKY FRIED CHICKEN. I can’t eat it warm – well, I can, but I don’t enjoy it nearly as much, that’s for certain. The
other night, I knew I had some buttermilk in the fridge (that
I had bought to make a cake that never got made) that was going
to go off shortly. I knew I would once again regret having bought
it and as well having never used it…so I decided to go on
a buttermilk binge. I knew I had an recipe for Buttermilk
Oven Baked Chicken (pilfered from Martha Stewart)
and I also had a recipe from Bon Appétit Magazine sitting
in my recipe file for a Buttermilk
Potato Salad I’d been wanting to try. So, S.
and I geared up for an evening of rather fatty food and tucked into
some not-so-wonderful potato salad (I liked it, S. didn’t)
and what turned out to be quite good “fried” chicken…that
actually wasn’t fried at all (unless you count the serious
oil spattering that went on in my oven, causing our smoke detector
to wail loudly at us until S. detached it from the ceiling and gave
it a good talking to).
|
