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.