Food Network

Southern Fried Chicken

I love fried chicken as much as the next girl, who loves fried chicken, who’s not from the South… but my grandma was, so it’s in my blood, right there with biscuits, and gravy. And I’m a fan of soaking your chicken in buttermilk, so it’s moist and juicy. However, many of you know that one of my children has a dairy allergy, so what is one to do? Enter Paula Deen, who is from the South- so that’s legitimate. She has given us a fantastic recipe, which we (a.k.a. my sister the chef) have adapted, full of juiciness and flavor… (BTW do not be dismayed by the cup of Sriracha, it’s really not spicy.)

As organic as possible:

3 Eggs

1/3 cup Water

1 cup Sriracha sauce

2 cups Flour

1 tsp Pepper

Season Salt

1 – 1 1/2 to 2 lb Chicken

Oil for frying, preferably Peanut

In a medium size bowl, beat the eggs with the water. Add the Siracha and stir. In another bowl, combine the flour and pepper. Generously sprinkle the chicken with season salt. Dip the seasoned chicken in the egg/Siracha mixture, and then coat well in the flour mixture.
Heat the oil to 350 degrees F in a deep pot. (Using a deep fry thermometer if you have one.) Do not fill the pot more than 1/2 full with oil. Fry the chicken in the oil until brown and crisp. Dark meat takes longer than white meat. It should take dark meat about 13 to 14 minutes, white meat around 8 to 10 minutes.

You can find the Paula Deen’s original recipe from Food Network here.

 

Diets

I like to start diets at the most inopportune times, like two days before Thanksgiving or on Christmas eve. I don’t know what my problem is. If I had to psychoanalyze myself, I’d probably say I was setting myself up for failure. But that is not how it feels at commencement; it feels very earnest as in “I don’t care what tomorrow is, I’m starting today!” But you can imagine how it ends.
So the past couple days, I’ve been contemplating, let’s just call it, healthy eating. The list of reasons why is boring, and redundant, so I’ll spare you and me. Then I’m reading this article from Food Network magazine about how much activity you need to do to burn off certain popular summer treats. And some of it is not relatable; I don’t row or play tennis. I don’t play basketball or jump rope (that’s actually a hilarious thought), and on a plus side I don’t eat lobster rolls… which means I just spared myself an hour of swimming, awesome! I do have the yard work thing under lock down which means I burned off two pieces of fried chicken last night (that’s like the same as a reuben sandwich right?) Anyway I put down my bag of honey mustard pretzels and said ok. Let’s do it. There’s not even a holiday scheduled for weeks so there’s that, momentum.