Recipe: Biscuits
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 40 minutes
Ease: 4
Taste: 9
Leftover Value: 7
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!
Recipe: Fried chicken
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 9 hr 30 min--minimum
Ease: 6
Taste: 5
Leftover Value: 3
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Keep it in the Strainer!
Recipe: Cheese Grits
Source: The Pioneer Woman Cooks
Time: 1 hour 10 minutes
Ease: 4
Taste: 2
Leftover Value: Did not save leftovers
Down the Drain or Keep in the Strainer: Down the Drain!
As I press on through the cooking adventure that is this challenge, but also though the cooking challenge that is life, I'm continually adding to a list of foods-I-love-but-never-again-will-cook. Fried chicken has just joined this list.
Hubby has been aching for me to make fried chicken ever since he first flipped through The Pioneer Woman Cooks and saw the recipe for fried chicken. I always shy away from cooking recipes that involved massive amounts of oil for frying because: 1. It seems like such a waste to use all that oil for one recipe and 2. That's a lot of oil!
But I knew it was inevitable that I would one day make fried chicken.
Since I am cooking my way through The Pioneer Woman Cooks, I decided to raise the crazy element a little more by also making her cheese grits and buttermilk biscuits on the day I chose to make her fried chicken.
I made the biscuits before everything else so that I wouldn't have to think about them once I became consumed with rotating between dipping chicken into hot oil and taking it out.
A side recipe that I did not count in the 65 total that PW includes is for butter and honey which she serves with her buttermilk biscuits. I will admit, my butter wasn't room temperature and I had to microwave it a little, so perhaps that affected it (which is more than obvious from the above picture). Regardless, I'll stick with biscuits and regular salted butter.
The biscuits, however, were amazing. Not only did they taste like the real deal southern style biscuit you would expect, but they were simple to make too. I needed to add a little more buttermilk before I rolled them as they were too dry, but other than that they were a cinch.
Ultimately, there was nothing horribly wrong with the fried chicken. The coating consisted of spices, flour, and a little buttermilk--which I found interesting.
However, since with this recipe I was working with a whole cut up fryer chicken, there was a lot of chicken to fry and some of the pieces were rather huge, making it difficult to gauge how long to keep it in the oil.
I did like that after frying the chicken PW bakes it in the oven for 15 minutes.
If I was going to make PW's fried chicken again, I would let it fry two minutes longer per side, and then let it bake for five or ten more minutes.
But I'm not going to make it again.
While the coating was delicious, it was far too much work for something that Chicken Holiday has been doing perfectly for years.
If you don't have a Chicken Holiday near you, I'm sorry.
Now, the cheese grits.
Here is the first reason I never want to make cheese grits again.
And here is the second:
Okay, perhaps the second one is my fault. Maybe the first one is, too.
I don't want to offend my southern friends, but I totally and completely do not understand the purpose of grits. While they weren't horrible, they were the type of food you eat and think to youself, "Why am I eating this?"
To enjoy the grits, I mixed my bites with my mashed potatoes. But here is my question, how does one normally eat grits? Are they meant to be mixed with other foods? Are grits the type of food you serve with mashed potatoes, or instead of?
If you are a southern food expert or a lover of grits, comment below to help educate me.
No comments:
Post a Comment