Cooking With Cthulhu

[tyggerjai]

There are some lands where man was not meant to live. There is one such land - a land of forbidding, arid desert, of stone and sand, of an inexplicable number of placenames containing the letter "x" - for dominion over which men have fought and died, and in the end, it is the land that has conquered them. Men who wander will be found, stripped of their flesh, bones bleached in the sun. Cattle who wander will be found mutilated, with eldritch symbols cut into their hides, if they are found at all.

In recent times, men have told many tales to explain these disappearances - Roswell and Area 51, alien abductions and anal probes. But simpler times had simpler tales, of malign spirits that roamed the earth, wreaking senseless havoc and unthinking murder.

Spirits like El Papa Muerte (the Potato of Death), and, most horrible among them, El Pollo Diablo - the Devil's Chicken.

Standing 9 feet tall, with beady little eyes of fire and terrribly clawed horny feet, El Pollo Diablo would rise at night to feast upon the hearts of men disemboweled with a single mighty blow from his pointy little beak. Their skulls, and other little pointy bits would line his gizzard to help digest his next meal, for even the Devil's Chicken has no teeth. And to this day there are those who claim to have seen him, pecking around in the Valley of Death, and taking dustbaths where angels fear to tread.

At least, I think that's right. I skimped a little on the research, and my Spanish isn't real hot. It's a more interesting translation than Devilled Chicken, anyway.

This recipe is great for people who are supposed to be on a diet. I'm supposed to be on a diet, and I loved it. Not so good for people who *are* on a diet, though.

You'll want extractor fans for this one, too. Big, big extractor fans. Bigger than that. In fact, cook it outside. Or knock the kitchen wall out first. Switch your smoke alarms off, and don't say I didn't warn you.

Start with your chicken. Preferably, actually, bits of pre-killed and cleaned chicken. I started with breast fillet with the skin on, but so deeply is my body in thrall to my personal trainer, my hands started stripping and discarding the skin without conscious effort on my part. Your mileage may vary - on the one hand, anything that reduces the cholestorol count in this dish has to be good. On the other, by the time you're done, an ounce of chicken skin isn't going to be what kills you. Cut the chicken into thin strips, about the size of my little finger. Or your own little finger. Whatever.

Pre-heat your oven to about 150C. You're not going to cook in it, but you are going to batch process the chicken, so you want to keep the done batches nice and warm.

Make up your flour mixture. Take some plain flour, and add herbs & spices to taste. If you don't use cayenne or lots of chili powder, then it's El Pollo Blando (the Coward's Chicken), but some people like that sort of thing. Paprika is a must, too, and I use cumin, coriander, whatever else is lying around. Cajun/creole spice mix is always good - to those of us without effete pre-mixed ethnic spices, that means cayenne, paprika, black & white pepper, onion powder, garlic powder, cumin, thyme, oregano, and basil, or similar. Pre-mixes generally have a lot of salt, which is certainly traditional for a cajun mix, but I dislike smothering food with salt. Good ingredients rarely need it. Never eat bad ingredients.

So. Mix all that into the flour. Some people want recipes like this to have actual, like, amounts, or at least proportions, but I don't have the faintest idea what I used, so I don't see why you should get it easy. Add stuff till it tastes good, though I advise against tasting the straight flour mix, which will never taste good. Snort it, maybe, to clear the sinuses. And then you can make muffins from the stuff in your nostrils. If you like.

Make enough to cover all the chicken strips, obviously. I guessed, and was pretty close, but at the very start I thought I'd made too little. So you probably want to make less than you think you'll need. It's easier to make more if you run out than it is to separate the flour and spices back out by hand. Much, much easier.

Dip each chicken strip into the flour, and roll it around till it's well covered. Shake off the excess, and put the floury strips on a plate.

Heat Your Wok. I find woks ideal for this sort of frying, but you can use any heavy-based frying pan. The wok has great heat transfer and a fairly small base, so you can get a deep layer of oil without using gallons of the stuff. Most frying pans are very wide, so to get good coverage, you need heaps of oil. Not so much a health concern as a hell of a waste of oil afterwards. You want the oil to come about halfway up the strips. You can add enough to cover the strips entirely, but again, that's a hell of a lot of oil wasted.

I use olive oil, which is why my kitchen could currently be used as a backdrop for _The Last Hours of Pompeii_. bunnikins suggests vegetable oil, or some other high-temperature smoke-point oil (peanut?) may cut down on the smoke. Actually, I use the following:
3 parts olive oil.
1 part home made olive oil infused with garlic & coriander. Piece of cake to make - put roughly chopped garlic, bruised/crushed fresh coriander and olive oil in a sealed jar or bottle for a few days in the sun. Strain through a paper filter for those dripolater coffee machines, and decant into an old olive oil bottle. Same one you got the olive oil from in the first place, ideally. Never make coffee in a machine that needs those filters, incidentally.
1/2 part (or less) sesame oil, and a fantastic mustard & chili oil my parents got me from Milawa. Just a hint of this, to add some more diablishness. Diabloness. Something.

When the oil is really, really hot, start adding chicken. You want to do batches, so you don't cool the oil down by adding too much chicken, but you only want to do three or so batches. Too many batches, and the bits of flour that inevitably fall off the first batch will make the oil smoky and carcinogenic.

Just lay the chicken strips in the oil, and watch them bubble. It shouldn't take long before you see the top of the strip (if it's above the oil) start to turn white around the edges as the strip cooks from below. Turn the strips over a few times. You don't just want to cook the strips through, you want the outside to go crisp and golden. On the other hand, you don't want to overcook them. You'll get a feel for this. Or you'll burn a lot of chicken, or die from eating undercooked chicken. Painfully, I gather.

When each batch is done, put the strips in the oven on a biscuit stand, over a baking tray. Look smugly at the oil collecting on the bottom of the tray, and feel virtuous that you're not eating all that oil.

Serve on plates covered in very absorbent kitchen towel. I recommend serving with mashed potato, for that real artery hardening KFC feel.


And remember, kids, if *your* personal trainer says you can only eat chicken and vegetables for dinner, this technically counts! Huzzah!

sol.
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Comments

[kitling.livejournal.com]

Try grape seed oil for frying

olive oil is the worst for frying due to it being crap at getting reather hot and not burning

then again - we buy olive oil in the big containers :)