Where’s the fun in having a kitchen blog if the bad stuff is all neatly swept under the rug, or shoved down the garbage disposal, so to speak? None at all, really. Be honest. Other people’s mishaps are entertaining. Plus you get the benefit of learning from someone else’s stupidity.
Back when I was extremely young and married to my first husband (that sounds so Elizabeth Taylor, doesn’t it?) we were broke and starving which is what a lot of extremely young married people are. I think it’s all those stupid songs about livin’ on love and that kind of crap.
Anyway, our cupboard was bare except for a very few staples like salt and pepper and flour. Have you ever tried salt and pepper flour balls? No? Then you haven’t lived. Or you’ve lived better than me. One of those.
My husband decided he wanted fried chicken for dinner and since he’d finally found a job we had a little food money. (Is it just me, or are you hearing Loretta Lynn faintly in the background? God, but I hate country music.) He stopped off on his way home from work the day before and bought two whole chickens and the rest of the stuff I’d need to make a fried chicken dinner.
Now, my mother hadn’t taught me how to cook anything that wasn’t “add water and stir” and in her defense she really hadn’t had time to. I was only 15 years old. (Cue ‘Dueling Banjos.’) So, here you have a completely inexperienced cook making her very first real dinner ever, and of all things it’s fried chicken.
I knew I’d probably need most of the day to accomplish this great task, so me and a stripper named Bobbi got started early afternoon working on those chickens. You’re probably wondering what a 15 year old girl was doing with a stripper named Bobbi in her kitchen and all I can tell you is hell if I know. I can’t remember every little detail, can I?
The first problem was the whole chickens. Bobbi and I unwrapped and washed them and stood there with our hands on our hips for a few minutes staring at those chickens trying to figure out what to do. Bobbi finally took the bull by the horns or rather the chicken by the legs and started cutting. The first thing she did was split the chickens in half down the breast. This couldn’t possibly be right because now all we had was just four big pieces of chicken so she turned ‘em sideways and split those pieces again, cutting across the breast. Now we had eight big pieces of chicken that didn’t look quite right.
I got in on the action then and started telling her where to cut and before you know it we had two whole chickens cut up into the weirdest looking pieces you’ve ever seen. Then it was time to move on to breading them.
We got a couple of bowls out and put flour in one of them and an egg and milk mixture in the other one. We seasoned the chicken with salt and pepper then I dunked the chicken pieces in the egg wash, then in the flour, then back in the egg wash, then back in the flour and then I put the chicken pieces on a plate because that’s what Bobbi said I was supposed to do. It seemed right at the time.
Finally I got all the chicken pieces battered and got out a skillet and filled it up with cooking oil. I turned the flame on high and by the time the oil had heated up a funny thing had happened. I had what now appeared to be a big papier mache’ looking blop where my chicken pieces used to be.
No matter. I pulled those gloopy, sticky chicken pieces apart and fried them one by one which was a very quick process because of the high heat and all. Before I knew it I had a platter full of golden-brown, fried chicken with about 1/2 an inch crust on the outside of each piece. Each piece that was leaking pink. Pink means raw.
Then I got upset. I knew I couldn’t put the chicken back into the oil because it would burn if I tried to cook it any longer. Next came the tears and out went Bobbi, leaving me alone in my time of need. I was really upset, too, because my husband was an asshole. I just knew he was going to rip my head off for that because this meant we’d be going hungry for dinner again.
I was beside myself and I panicked. There was only about fifteen minutes before he was due home from work and since I couldn’t think of anything better to do I went out to the pond at the back of the trailer park (yes, I said trailer park) and had myself a good cry and waited for the screaming to begin.
But it didn’t. I waited and waited. I knew that way more than fifteen minutes had gone by, by then. Eventually I heard footsteps and I knew it was him. I braced myself and got ready for the ass-chewing.
Instead he patted me on the back and asked me what was wrong; why wasn’t I at home? I started apologizing about the chickens and he just laughed and said he’d already fixed them and that I’d just messed up by cooking them with the heat up too high and that they were perfectly fine. That’s probably the first and last truly nice thing that sorry bastard ever did for me.
It was a bit of a lie. The chicken was edible but that 1/2 inch crust was… Well, different and weird, much like the chicken pieces themselves.
The moral of the story is don’t get married when you’re 15 and strippers named Bobbi don’t know a damned thing about making fried chicken.
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