Fried Chicken!

Television’s Dr. Oz said on one of his shows that pregnancy cravings don’t mean anything and should basically be ignored. I would like to see him be pregnant and ignore a craving for anything. Maybe having a craving doesn’t mean that your body needs something, but it does mean that your body wants it and you can only ignore it for so long. This is how I have been with fried chicken. Now, I didn’t want to just rush off to KFC and eat some junk. I wanted real, delicious fried chicken. Since we didn’t have time to travel South or even take a jaunt into Manhattan, we decided to make our own.

Our backgrounds did not prepare us at all for cooking fried chicken. We’ve never even tried it. We were hesitant. And then I spotted this at Williams Sonoma. Ad Hoc is Thomas Keller’s Napa Valley restaurant. The kit contains a brine and a seasoning/dredging mix and is enough for two LARGE batches. It also contains very specific instructions for cooking it, which was good because we didn’t want it to turn out bad or under cooked.

It turned out delicious, and I highly recommend it if you are nervous about making your own batch! I think when we run out of the mix, we will try it on our own. The brine is a great way to make sure that your chicken stays moist, even though you have to keep in the fryer for a while, and there is no other way to bread the chicken then to dredge in the flour mix, dunk in buttermilk and dredge again. The result was super crispy, moist perfectly fried chicken!

We made a simple cauliflower cheese casserole to accompany it, since we knew we would mostly want to eat the chicken!

On a whim, I took the leftover dredging mix and buttermilk to make fritters!   To this mix self rising flour and a little sugar were added to just the right consistency.  I really wish I could give all of you an exact recipe, because these were killer! …Kind of a cross between a bhaji, and a hush puppy. A can of creamed corn would have come in handy:)