Every so often, though not as much as I’d like, I try to make a home-cooked meal. Sometime around early August I decided to plan a Labor Day get-together with some friends. Why on earth would I need to do that three weeks in advance? Because I had the bright idea that I would make a grand attempt at Thomas Keller’s fried chicken, and I needed that lead time to mentally prepare myself. I mean, have you seen Ad Hoc at Home? It’s a massive tome that outweighs many of my law school text books.
Thomas Keller’s Ad Hoc at Home v. Secured Transactions
Thomas Keller is an extremely well-respected chef, and I’ve always wanted to eat at his restaurant, The French Laundry, but alas…$270/person prix fixe menus are not quite in my student budget these days. I have been thrilled to own this cookbook because I had grand plans of using the recipes and tips inside, but in two years of owning it, I’ve only attempted three recipes, all of which were delicious, but all of which required a lot of prep work and time.
Lies, Chef Keller. This is a tome of lies.
Within the pages of this beautifully photographed book is a fried chicken recipe that I’ve dreamed about trying since I first opened the book. However, first the chicken requires a 12-hour brine, so it’s not exactly a weekday friendly meal. The second consideration is the sheer amount of food it would make, so having people over seemed necessary. (And let’s be honest…I’m not above being a show-off when the situation warrants).
I finally decided that I would make my first attempt at this chicken over Labor Day since a) I would have a long weekend to prep, and b) I felt safe ignoring school work for a day or two of the long weekend.
I set out to purchase my ingredients, and already ran into problems in the produce section when I looked for fresh thyme for the chicken brine. For whatever reason, there was a run on thyme, and the store was completely out. I picked up a package of “poultry herbs” instead, figuring that Chef Keller would appreciate my ability to improvise. I grabbed the fresh parsley, lemons, and other various produce before heading to the meat section.
Truth be told…I’m a pretty lazy person, so my first instinct was to grab an already butchered chicken. Unfortunately, the only butchered chicken available was skinless chicken breast and a pack of drumsticks, and both of those packs were super-expensive, so I decided to bite the bullet and get a couple whole chickens that I would break down myself. I felt reasonably confident, especially since the cookbook has beautifully detailed photos, complete with instructions.
Warning, you are being set up for failure…
That evening I set out to create the brine since the chicken would spend most of the next day in the lemony sauna I was creating. Everything was going well, I added all the lemons, peppercorns, garlic…and cilantro? Yes, years of cooking with cilantro apparently seeped into my unconscious and rendered me incapable of selecting parsley from the produce section. I threw the herbaceous impostor into the pot, along with some sage and rosemary that Chef Keller did not ask for. I figured I was already veering off-course with the cilantro, why not go whole hog, or hen, as the case may be?
Yum…salty lemon water.
The next day I got up bright and early to work out my frustrations on my whole chickens. I felt like Julie Powell in Julie & Julia when she “confronts the duck” toward the end of the movie. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the lilt-y stylings of Julia Child guiding my hands, so I ended up with a butchered chicken…literally.
Apparently my chicken didn’t want to keep its skin.
Apparently my chicken knew that I normally eat it both boneless and skinless, so the skin started jumping off of it the further I went along. What the heck good is fried chicken without the skin?
This is an actual text I sent after finishing the chicken.
But this is the case of the GOOD idea chicken, so this incredibly long-winded story has a happy ending. Despite the errors along the way, the chicken was incredible, if I do say so myself.
Holy crow…that’s some good chicken!
The batter, despite my chicken skin issues, was crispy and savory, just like friend chicken should be. The meat was moist, salty from the brine, but bright from the lemon. There was a hint of herbs, but none of the cilantro. Overall, the chicken was a huge hit, and I was thrilled with the outcome.
The overall meal of the night was a success, complete with an Ad Hoc pineapple upside-down cake for dessert. The nice thing about chefs is that they often have simpler dessert recipes since they aren’t pastry chefs, so the cake was nothing I couldn’t handle.
Oh yeah.
So you may, if you’ve actually been willing to read this far, be wondering about the bad-idea brownies I’ve promised in the title. Well, those came the next day, on Labor Day proper, the day I had promised myself would be dedicated to study and schoolwork. A few pages into Secured Transactions, I decided I needed chocolate sustenance to get through the rest of the day, and decided to make brownies. I justified this decision by telling myself that it would only take me about half an hour to throw the batter together, and the baking time would give me an opportunity to go back to reading.
Brownies…::drool::
My friend sent me the Baked cookbook as a thank-you gift over the summer, and I had been eying the brownie recipe for a while, so this seemed like the perfect day to try it out. When I started pulling out ingredients, something in the universe was trying to tell me to turn back. Go back to your reading, said the voice in my head. Pish posh, I said back to myself. This won’t take long. Who cares that I don’t have the right about of baking chocolate…I’ll just sub in cocoa powder.
That’s a lot of butter…and only 3/4 of the chocolate I was supposed to use.
And so, undeterred, I pressed on in my quest to make homemade brownies from scratch on the one day I planned to study. Short on chocolate, I went on, adding more cocoa powder in its place. Then I went to the sink and started washing some of my utensils as I went along, until I realized the dogs were licking something off the floor. I looked down and realized I was standing next to a puddle of water. Cringing, I opened the cupboard under the sink to find it flooded. Apparently our garbage disposal had a crack, so when I dumped water down the drain it had been leaking into the cupboard. Hubster came in to assist in the clean-up, which took about 20 minutes to finish.
The aftermath of the clean-up.
Too little chocolate, 20 minutes lost to clean-up…these were mere speed bumps in my quest for brownie goodness. I continued on making my brownie batter until it came time to add the espresso powder, and I suddenly realized it was missing.
I searched high and low and couldn’t find my powder, so I decided to improvise. I had espresso-roast coffee beans in my coffee grinder, so I thought I would just grind it at a finer setting and add in the fresh powder. It seemed like a brilliant idea until I couldn’t get my grinder setting to go below my normal coarse setting.
Oh grinder, usually you’re so good to me…
For those of you keeping track at home, I’ve now had a small flood, lost an ingredient, came up short on another (sort of vital) ingredient, and now my grinder was impeding my process even further. I thought there might be a jam in the gears, so I decided to empty out the well of the grinder before trying to reset it. That worked well enough that I was able to get to a medium grind, so I decided I could live with large grains of coffee beans. I added the beans back in and went to work.
Then, and I have absolutely no idead what possessed me to do this, I picked up the grinder for something, and spilled the beans everywhere.
Yep. That is a quite a mess.
It was official…the universe was punishing me for my decision to put my desire for fudge-y deliciousness over my need to study for class.
In the end, those were the best freaking brownies I had ever made, and it was worth the entire 90+ minute time that it took me to do it. When faced with the choice between brownies and categorizing chattel, I’ll choose chocolate every time.
Heaven.
I just may plan ahead next time. -J
Arbitrary and Delicious 