Vintage

From our Gatsby afternoon, some drinks, from the left (and not counting the lovely Hendrick's gin at the far left):

• mix (orange juice, lemon juice, grenadine) for a Ward Eight cocktail
• water x2
• root beer
• sangria (red wine, brandy, sugar, triple sec, lemon, orange, apple)
• ginger ale
• more sangria
• mint tea punch x2 (mint tea, mint, lemon juice, orange juice, sugar)
• lemon juice for Aviations

I also made fried chicken, the morning of the event (though I placed the chicken in a brine the night before).

I kept reading about how difficult it is to regulate the temperature of the oil, and I scoffed: amateurs, surely! Well, no. It's really quite difficult, and it took me a couple of tries to get it right (those tries resulted in blackened crust, but still pretty tasty chicken). Thankfully, I had a lot of tries, since I was frying twenty pieces of chicken, two or three at a time.

But overall, the chicken--and the rest of the food, and the drinks--traveled well to the picnic, so the preparations and work paid off. A lovely event.

Comments

[Andrew Anker]

Beyond lovely. Wonderful.

[Ezra]

Hendrick's: great Scotland product.

[Suvir Saran]

Did you fry the chicken in a cast iron skillet? That makes a great difference with the crust.

Also, I picked up from a seasoned cook, who had learned from a famous cook of the South, to choke the cast iron pan full of chicken pieces. For this, they quickly add around 8 pieces of chicken, a whole chicken, into the pan at once. This takes the oil from 375˚F to 300˚F as you place the last piece into the oil. And then you cook away, turning after you see a nice rich golden brown just below the surface of the oil. you do not want to turn too early. And then cook the other side.

You will see that the crunchy factor just gets better in cast iron.