Fried Chicken Update

If you read my previous ravings about Thomas Kellar’s Buttermilk Fried Chicken recipe you’ll remember that I complained about wasting all the leftover buttermilk and flour mixture. Well, there is now a solution to that! Invite friends over for dinner and fry 2 chickens AND onion rings! That uses all of the flour mixture and then some and definitely uses all the buttermilk. Hooray! It still wreaks havoc in my kitchen, no matter how hard I try to be organized. I even had Jeffrey helping me this time but it still makes a mess and takes up yards of counter space. BUT, in the end, a moist, crisp chicken that everyone enjoyed and pretty easy to clean up. The Fried Onion Rings turned out to be the hit of the evening! We just processed the onion rings as if they were pieces of chicken, and used up the last of the flour and buttermilk….perfect!

Because I fried two chickens, I used my warming drawer, thinking that this would keep the chickens warm while I fried the rest of them. BIG mistake. Kellar recommends that I leave the chickens on the racks laid over a jelly roll pan and if sitting there for more than 10 minutes, put the chicken pieces into a 400º oven for a couple of minutes to re-crisp and warm them up. This is a better way because the chickens in the warming drawer ended up with a soggy/greasy bottom side.


I prepared a Sweet Pea and Avocado Vichyssoise for the first course. Along with the chicken and onion rings, I served a chopped salad, garlic French bread and sweet corn on the cob.

I also made a Peach Ice Cream for dessert from Kellar’s book…it’s an adaptation of his Cherry Ice Cream recipe, served over a mixture of raspberries, blackberries and chopped peache and topped with homemade caramel sauce. It wasn’t as “peachy” as I thought it would be but I think it’s because the peaches this year aren’t as flavorful as they’ve been in the past.

Now if you are worried about the oil, cholesterol, and calories in fried chicken, one of the guests brought an article about what to counter the fried chicken with. Grapes! Eat about a cup and a half of grapes for each piece of chicken! I sure hope that’s not an “urban myth!” I tried to find it online but all I could find was a site about reducing bad cholesterol and the upshot of that article was: Red wine contains resveratrol, a substance found in grapes which has been proven to increase good cholesterol. or this article at solveyourproblem.com: You may have read about the low rate of heart disease in France. It led researchers to believe that the French habit of drinking red wine with meals contributes to this. Apparently some of the non-alcoholic ingredients in red wine raises HDL and suppresses the body from producing LDL.

Purple grape juice works the same way. It will work like red wine to lower the fat level in your blood. The LDL lowering effect of red wine and grape juice comes from a compound that grapes produce normally to resist mold. The darker the grape juice, the better.

Grapefruit juice does the same thing and it may also help your body get rid of that nasty plaque. However, neither of these two site look like a "medical" site so I guess we will have to keep our fried chicken dinners down to once every few months! :-(