Guest Post: Jessie?s Subconscious

While I?m in China, I?ll have a series of guest posters and backlogged posts going up.

Hi all! Jessie’s subconscious here. While Jessie sleeps in China, I’m freed up to do a post about the kind of food I really like. You’ll read many post about tasty vegetables and so forth, like Beans and Cauliflower and Greenola? Noticeably absent has been a post about fried food. Until now. Now’s the chance for me to break out and make some of that delicious fried food I’ve been pining for ever since January 2009.

Fried Food!

Today I will be making a complete fried meal. One of the first fried foods that springs to mind is chicken, an item that will be featured prominently in this post. Chicken takes awhile to prepare, so we’ve got to start on that early. Begin by making a tasty brine. Brining is a great way to keep chicken moist and impart some extra flavor. A brine is built off the basic ingredients of water, salt, and something sweet. In this case I added thyme, bay leaves, lemon, and used honey as the sweetener. If you’ve got some nice non-clover honey, feel free to use that.

Each one tastes different!

Incidentally, Jessie took the camera with her and hid it, so I had to dig up the old one that takes crappy indoor pictures. Thanks, Jessie.

After brining the chicken for several hours, it’s ready for a coating and some frying. I used a potent double-dip combo of flour, paprika, rosemary, oregano, salt, pepper, and garlic, onion, and chile powders with coconut-flavored half-and-half in between.

Crappy camera.

Fry for 11 minutes at 320 degrees in peanut oil if you have it. Jessie doesn’t stock peanut oil, probably because of subsidies to the peanut industry or something. After 11 minutes, you should have something delicious-looking like this:

Even the garnish is fried. Notice Jessie's subconscious's drink of choice.

If any oil spills during the process, rely on the dog to clean up.

Maadba

But wait! What dinner is complete, with just the meat! (Poetry) You need your bread, fruit, vegetable, and sweet! (More poetry) (Milk takes care of the dairy, or have some fried ice cream). Good thing I thought of all of that ahead of time. Behold!





From left to right, polenta, tomato, banana, and Clif Kids bar. The bar got lost in the oil.

How can you turn down a dinner like this? Unfortunately, I’ll probably have to wait until next January to have it again.

And that’s it! My guess is that Jessie will lock down her subconscious for future posts, so enjoy while you can!

What’s your favorite fried food? Eggs don’t count!