Crazy in Alabama meal

I'm afraid I have no pictures as my camera is terrible at nighttime when I cooked this. To be honest I also changed so many ingredients that the meal probably wasn't very American either, but it sure was good!
I went about doing this recipe to the book with great intentions, but when it came down to it there were A) too many steps and B) the universe conspired against me.
The first drawback was not being able to get 4 chicken legs, my butcher had 3 in stock which he kindly divided into thighs and drumsticks for me. Then I ran out of ordinary breadcrumbs, so I used panko breadcrumbs instead. I've been addicted to these since Nigella Lawson recommended these for coating things as they don't get too greasy and they brown up wonderfully when cooked. I know they're Japanese in origin but hey, they taste damn good.
Due to this and my general gung ho nature in the kitchen I can't give you quantity's for what I cooked, but I can give you a kind of run through of what happened so that you can recreate a kinda Oven fried chicken dish at home. I will also point out that as this dish wasn't fried at all that it's a hell lot better for you than the original, the skins crispy and the chicken is kept juicy inside the crust.
cheaper, healthier and better tasting than a KFC any day and if this fool can wing it then so can you.

Oven fried chicken thing

• marinade 3 chicken legs that have been divided into thighs and drumsticks overnight in..
• 1 pot of buttermilk to which you have added, 1tblsp sweet paprika, 4 cloves of garlic and 1tblsp salt.
• pre heat oven to about 200'c
• put panko breadcrumbs in a shallow bowl
• let excess buttermilk mixture fall off chicken and then bung in the bowl 1 at a time with the breadcrumbs
• coat the chicken with as many breadcrumbs as is sanely possible and then remove to a oven friendly container (I used my lasagna dish)
• bung in oven and leave till golden on the outside, I think it was about 45min.

It really was that easy, and to serve make mashed potatoes. I added garlic and herb cream cheese to mine along with butter as I had some in the fridge that needed using up, which went really well with the sweetness of the chicken dish. I also made a tomato salad scattered with feta cheese and basil, which also needed using up, and I boiled some runner beans to go alongside.

This meal was a roaring success, and it got me thinking about how often you go to make one thing then have to make substitutions or just plain can't be arsed to do things in a certain way and it turns out great anyway.

I'd love to hear about everyone Else's dinners that just happened, so let me know if you have any story's to share.

crazy in Alabama meal plan

So I've been planning this crazy in Alabama meal and forgot to post anything! There's not a huge amount of food descriptions in this book but what I did find was a great passage that describes convenience food.

Young Pejoe has just moved in with he's uncle and aunt who pretty much live on ready made food, yet he's used to he's memaws traditional home cooking. Here's what he has to say about it...

"I suppose that Earlene's cooking would not have seemed as bad if I hadn't eaten at Memaws table all my life. Earlene had a thing for modern convenience foods. If it didn't come in a can, or frozen, or in a box with directions, she wasn't interested. We ate pop tarts in the morning, Boyardee ravioli at noon, Tater tots and Mrs Paul's fish sticks at night. Earlene didn't care whether we ate it or not. Once she'd heated it up and slapped it out there, she considered she had done her part. Usually Dove dined alone at the table while the rest of us sprawled in front of the TV with our plates in our laps.

This was Wiley's definition of good eating. Also Wiley had a sweet tooth and all of Earlene's meals turned out sweet one way or another, even the frozen French fries, even the Campbell's alphabet soup. I pined for Meemaw's black-eyed peas and fried chicken and the fat slices of tomato from her garden. Wiley said I was stupid, that was country food."

A great description of ready meals, no? I'm going to be honest and say that I recognise this scene from my own youth. I was bought up on a diet of fish fingers and chips with nearly everything, and I have been left with an incredibly sweet tooth.

This isn't to say that no cooking took place in my house, Every Sunday there was and still is a roast dinner. My dads roast potatoes have yet to be eclipsed by anyone Else's. He doesn't use goose fat or anything like that, plain vegetable oil in a separate pan from the roast and he basted them regularly.

I was confirmed of these potatoes superiority when I cooked them for the best cook I've ever known in my life (an exes dad, he's mum was a damn fine cook too) and they were asking how I got the potatoes that shade of golden round the edges whilst still being fluffy on the inside.

The thing was, cooking was for special occasions, the amazing birthday cakes related in the post for baking cakes in Kigali for example.

My parents could cook I knew it yet we often had the easy option, which to my mind isn't always easier anyway. Think of an omelet, easy (once you get the hang of it) and super quick and a 100 times tastier than tescos finest!

It does seem that although people can and do enjoy cooking that it's seen as something that is the domain of either people with lots of time, like the image of country folk or lots of money.

Being someone without too much of either this seems strange to me, I do night shifts and so on some days it's straight out of bed and into the kitchen for dinner.

I don't make a great deal of money, I don't bring in even a grand a month and I've found that cooking most things from scratch saves me both time and money.

Why wait for a pizza to be delivered for 45 minuets when you can make pasta with a simple sauce in the same time?

I think I'm talking about this because I also saw Jamie Oliver's American food revolution on TV last night. It's pretty scary watching to see the hostility people have towards someone trying to help your kids live longer by giving them a balanced attitude towards food which will hold them in great stead for the future.

I wonder if maybe it's guilt and a worry that teaching kids restraint will lead to an eating disorder in later life.?

Anyway, this paragraph gave me what I was going to cook for this meal, fried chicken. Or in my case, oven fried chicken as a big pot of boiling oil scares the living daylights out of me as an image of me looking like a medieval solider who tried to capture a castle runs through my head.

I found the recipe for this in the book American classics by the cooks illustrated team. It goes through all the variations to give you the best method for the home cook. I'm loving this book for American food research and couldn't believe my luck when I found it in a charity shop for 50p.

Anyway I'm off to the butchers now and I'll post the results up in the next few days hopefully.

crazy in Alabama

I got really lucky with this book, as soon as I posted my reading list on my blog this was found in my local 99p store, yay!

I really wasn't sure what to think about this one before I started reading it, I haven't heard much about the author other than that this was a dark and bawdy comic romp of a book.

Personally the word bawdy puts me off a book, especially when it's wrote by a man and has a female main character. This has nothing to do with me thinking that men can't write a good female character (they can) but has everything to do with the fact that the word bawdy when used in conjunction with female characters seems to mean lots and lots of unrequited and unprotected sex in the most unusual places and ways. Kinda a more explicit carry on film in book form (ohhh matron)

Although this assumption was fulfilled up to a point by the murdering housewife on the run with her husbands head in a hatbox and dreams of Hollywood, it by far wasn't the most interesting part of the book.

This honour would have to go to the bulk of the book which is seeing the black civil rights movement through the eye[s] of 12 year old peejoe. You can see the influence of Harper lee's to kill a mockingbird , kind of a updated version of what happened next.

Parts of this book genuinely touched me, especially the young protagonists meeting with Martin Luther King, and he's involvement on the side of civil rights due to a child's sense of justice and he's lack of knowledge to the fact that these actions can be dangerous to not only himself but also others that he cares about.

The book marks Peejoe out as a outsider from the very beginning, him and he's brother Wiley are both orphans living with their memaw, when the world gets turned upside down by being made to go live with their uncle Dove in Industry.

As the race riots erupt over the killing of a young black youth over a swimming pool which Peejoe is a witness to we watch him and he's family get more and more alienated as they try to do whats right.

Peejoe is an outsider in every faction although he feels for the black community he's different, he gets away from a beating due to his skin colour when the local klu kluck clan starts firing on a peaceful protest but he's not part of the white community due to his sympathies for the "other " side. This difference is finally given to him physically when he has a accident which results in his going blind in one eye. For me this was a physical manifestation of the fact that he looked at the world in a different way from everyone else in the book. Peejoe himself wonders if he's been blinded because he's seen too much.

This isn't really a comfortable read, most of the people you want to have a break don't get it and a lot of the people you want to see suffer don't. It's not a weakness in the writing but it doesn't give you that warm glow at the end that some books do. I did say in one of my other reviews though that I like a bit of grit in my books and this one delivered it to me.

I did really enjoy this once I got into it after a slow start on my account (the book gets down to it pretty quickly) It's not going to become a favourite but I know a couple of my friend who'd love it due to it's dark humour and yes it's bawdy parts.

If like me your into the domestic side of fiction it may not be for you, but Peejoe's story made it worth reading for me alone. I'll let you know soon what I decided to cook.

Bee charmer

It took me ages to decide what to cook for this post. Fried green tomatoes seemed the obvious choice but there was a problem. You can't buy green tomatoes in England. Hard flavourless red tomatoes yes, but green tomatoes no.
In fact the only way to get them is to grow them yourself, and not wanting to be an a##hole I thought better of going in someone Else's garden to help myself.
The next best choice seemed to be a barbecue as it was mentioned alot, but I'd already cooked one and I fancied something different.
The back of the book is sprinkled with recipes and whilst perusing these and drooling at the idea of dessert I had a brainwave. Idgie is called a bee charmer and when she shows her skill to Ruth it helps cement their relationship, so a cake with honey in it seemed perfect!
I found this recipe in Afternoon teas by Susannah Blake, these buns are incredibly sickly but good. Only have one at a time and they are one of the few cakes that I actually prefer cold as they mellow a bit.

Honey buns

pre heat oven to 170'c, 325'f, gas 3

put 60g butter, 50g caster sugar and 4tblsp honey together in a saucepan and heat gently until the butter has melted.

remove the pan from the heat and add 80ml milk and one large bearen egg.

sift in 115g self raising flour and stir in.

spoon the mixture into a 12 hole cupcake tin and bake for 20min.

once the cakes are cool spread with icing made from

2oog icing sugar and 2 tblsp lemon juice. Add sprinkles for extra whimsy.

Picture yourself munching on these whilst going on some crazy adventure in 1930's Alabama. Flowery dress of dungarees are optional.

fried green tomatoes at whistle stop cafe

I started reading this at the beginning of August, and at the same time I was reading a review at booksnob for the wonderful book Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. Whilst reading all the comments and wonderful conversations going on about the hardship about growing old alongside my own experience of working in a care home for the elderly it made me read the book rather differently than other people.

The book centres around a cafe run by two women in the 1930's that was the heart of the community, going between time we learn about the residents in the town of whistlestop through their connection to the cafe.

Running alongside this main story we get pointers and set ups to the stories through the friendship of middle aged Evelyn couch and the elderly Cleo Threadgoode who lives at Rose Terrace nursing home where Evelyns mother in law lives.

The book is populated by lots of quirky characters and is meant to be heartwarming and show the value of friendship no matter how strange friendship that may be.

The book is a lovely read but that's what makes it fall short for me, I like my novels with a bit more grit and reality in them than this one gives you.

Although the idea is lovely, I don't see how Ruth and Idgie who run the cafe who are obviously lovers and who will sell their food to the black community would have had no repercussions or reprisals at that time in history with the politics of the time being what they were.

The head of the local klu kluck clan is the towns sheriff and very good friends with the cafe owners , and whilst he may disagree with what they do sometimes he leaves them to their business and even helps them out of a few scrapes.

Whilst the book does touch on some serious subjects in the book, racism, domestic violence and even a murder in the town. It always just feels like a yarn of days gone by, never gone into with enough detail whilst knowing that it will all work out in the end.

Even though I did like the characters they felt like characters of today rather than from a different time period. The characters were who you hoped you would have been if you lived then, a transplant of modern day morals into the past.

Everyone is pretty tolerant and the people who aren't are from outside of their immediate community of Whistlestop.

In general though it made me think has society changed that much? We don't seem to get over our prejudices just place them somewhere else, at the moment the papers are always talking crap about Muslims and illegal immigrants and whilst reading a paper left out by a resident on my night shift I read someone saying in the comment section that the middle east should help with the aid for Pakistan instead of Britain as they're the same religion and we're not. How sad and narrow minded is that?

Then we come to the relationship between Evelyn and Mrs Threadgoode, how I wish I could see this. Unfortunately most elderly people in homes aren't like this.

Most who do talk about the past will repeat the same stories over, and for alot of them the past just seems to painful to talk about.

I can't say I blame them as their generation was so independent and amazing and it must be incredibly depressing to think about the things you can no longer do and to think about alot of people who you shared these things with who have now passed away.

Whilst reading these bits of the book I felt an incredible sadness, I just wanted to be able to have this friendship with the people that I know.

Overall this is a lovely book and if unlike me you can put aside your disbelief that people can be this nice than you'll probably really enjoy it. It's not a bad book but it also isn't a amazing book.

I'll let you know what I've cooked for the book in the next few days.

Down to Earth dinner

Each chapter in She Flew the Coop has it's own name, and the first chapter after the prologue is called Down to Earth.
In this chapter we meet one of the main protagonists Vangie Nepper a self proclaimed homemaker, accomplished gardener and home cook.
We get to hear through her own thoughts and daydreams whilst gardening how she ended up with the life she now. Not a bad life, but a life with something missing none the less.
Vangies tells ups that she was raised to be a housewife and make her husband happy by her mum, yet it was her dad she aspired to be like the most. This is shown to us by her wanting to go flying with her beloved father when he's crop dusting when she was little, yet somehow this part of her got lost through the years.
In this chapter we also have a story about how on her 23rd wedding anniversary she invited all her neighbours to a cookout much against her husbands wishes who is miserly with both money and emotions.
The description of this meal got my mouth watering.....

"I baked a pork tenderloin, sliced it Texas-style, and then made a barbecue sauce from scratch.

 The recipe got wrote up in the newspaper- it was that mouthwatering.

I fixed potato salad, slaw, devilled eggs, baked beans, and fresh string beans from my own garden."

Sounds delicious doesn't it? I had to try and make my own version of this for my book inspired meal, I then remembered that in Consuming Passions that there was a recipe for barbecue sauce and also one for potato salad, something I can never get enough of in all it's variations.

I then had to find a recipe for homemade baked beans, I wasn't going to be able to do a whole barbecue and I can't afford to treat all my neighbours anyway.

I found the answer in one of my cookbooks called Home Food by Richard Whittington, this book has loads of recipes from around the world from home cooks. And right there in the section on the US of A was a recipe for slow-fried pork steaks with boston baked beans.
So along with my adaption of this recipe i made potato salad, home made barbecue sauce, summer coleslaw and green beans not grown in my own garden.

I don't often cook meals that are so time intensive even though I really enjoy cooking and it made me think about how the characters in the book must feel about domesticity.

To be told that this is the best way to show how much you love someone is depressing, yet these women used it to their own advantage and expressed themselves through the domestic sphere. Even better yet is that when the women eventually break free of their own prisons they don't suddenly stop doing what they used to like doing, they're just doing it for themselves now.

I love the idea of that, as when I'm cooking or doing anything like that I'm doing it for my own amusement and just hoping that others are enjoying it too.

I haven't got any pictures of the meal I'm afraid but I'll give you the recipes for all of the recipes over the next few days along with drawings of how it kinda looked.

she flew the coop

I really wish that i could call this book a good chick lit book without the awful connotations that go with it! It should probably be called middle aged chick lit, but that sounds so insulting. This isn't a book just for middle aged women although its mainly about them.

It does have a kinda happy ending like those sort of trashy novels do but in a completely different way. You leave this novel feeling like you've chewed on something quite substantial, kind of like some of the food described in the book.

The book starts with 16 year old Olive Nepper drinking poison and going into a coma because shes pregnant with the local preachers baby, which in the 1950s we all know to be a bad thing.
The story then progresses and we meet other residents of this small southern town Limoges in Louisiana and get to know them and their troubles.

This book is dark in plot yet michael lee west uses a light touch in the telling of the story.
This is definitely a book to make you laugh and then cry, sometimes all in the same chapter. Throughout the book are many delectable descriptions of food and recipes, and these arnt just added in as pretty extras.
Whilst the society around them is outwardly controlled by men in the forms of both the church and husbands, in their own domestic spheres these women are god and get out alot of their frustrations and emotions out in what they cook.
The most obvious and heartbreaking example of this are "Sophie's beaten biscuits" a meal that she starts to cook for herself when she thinks her violent husbands out for the night.
I personally loved this aspect of the book but i have a feeling that if you don't think about food all the time like i do that you may find the constant food chatter irritating.
One thing that i did find unsatisfactory about this book for me was the ending, two of the women ended up conveniently widowed which made it feel a bit moralistic in a everyone gets their just desserts way.
Considering the era in which the book is set it kinda made sense since one of the husbands would have been able to run of with he's wife's inheritance.
But i feel that if your going to go down the moralistic route that you should go whole hog. For one man to get killed off for having an affair but letting the preacher who got a sixteen year old pregnant and then grooms and seduces a thirteen year old which results in her walking home bleeding severely only getting tarred and feathered before hes made to leave town seems out of proportion to me.
I know life doesn't work that way but if you take the route of righteousness in a book i want full payback!
Saying all of that though i did really enjoy this book, West is very witty and funny. One of my favourite lines from the book was "A hard dick has no conscience" which made me laugh out loud so much that my partner insisted on knowing what was so funny and then being thoroughly unamused.

I would recommend this book, but i would also warn them that there is alot of sex in this book and not all of it is nice. Overall its quite feelgood in character and would make you feel better if your having a crap time with men, yet in not too twee a way.

In my next post I'll give you the details for the southern feast i devised.