I am Somer Canon: Shiftless lay-about, blog enthusiast, and more importantly, food lover. This blog will share my favorite recipes, cooking techniques, adventures in eating, and just about any subject pertaining to cooking and eating.
It is officially the Fourth of July holiday weekend. My family and I kicked off the weekend by going to my mother’s house (she and my stepfather are out of town for the weekend so we had the place to ourselves) and swimming. I also decided to take along a picnic of fried chicken. Fried chicken is so great as a picnic food because it can be eaten hot, warm, or cold.
As I was taking the chicken out of my refrigerator, I realized that I had yet to do a post on fried chicken. And I was ashamed. What the hell kind of “home cook” am I if I’m not bragging about my abilities to wow your socks off with my fried chicken? Oh, the humanity!
Folks, I am here to remedy the situation. The first wonderful thing about fried chicken is that it doesn’t need a recipe. That’s right, I’m not going to add a nice little formatted recipe for fried chicken. There are so many ways out there to do it that I’m not even going to waste your time. Well, I might waste it a little bit by giving you a few measurements and ingredients on MY particular version, but I completely understand if you want to skip over those parts.
To begin, let us talk about buttermilk. Almost all traditional fried chicken recipes call for marinating the meat in buttermilk. I had always assumed that it was to tenderize the meat and to keep it moist, but for the sake of looking like I know what I’m talking about, I searched the internet to find the reason. While tenderizing the meat is the reason cited the most, others also claim that it flavors the meat, helps the breading stick to the skin, and some other reasons that don’t ring all that true with me.
The fact is, if I have buttermilk I marinate the chicken. If I don’t have buttermilk, it isn’t marinated at all and still tastes awesome. You can take it or leave it. I just stick to the tradition because, hey, generations of grannies can’t be wrong. (You can also marinate your chicken Indian style with yogurt!)
Now let’s talk about which parts of the chicken to fry. If you’re making chicken for many people, I suggest buying either a whole chicken or a whole cut-up chicken and using all parts. I wouldn’t think to mention this if I hadn’t seen more than once someone making fried chicken for a crowd and serving only drumsticks or thighs. No. No. No. Some people like wings. Some people want breast meat. By golly, you better have all parts of that bird fried and accounted for if you want to please everybody.
Now let’s discuss hardware. Fried chicken is made in cast iron skillets. Period. There IS NO VALID DEBATE on this issue. Sure you can make your chicken on a sheet pan in the oven, but it’s not fried chicken, I don’t care how much pretzel crumbs you put all over it. Real fried chicken is made in cast iron.
Every good kitchen should contain at least one well seasoned cast iron skillet. It is a multi-purpose num-num maker. Also, if well cared for, that sucker will outlive your grandchildren. Good cast iron is one of those things bequeathed to younger generations and accepted with pure enthusiasm. Also, don’t treat cast iron cookware like you’d treat all your other cookware. Cast iron is special and needs special love. The internet is full of articles written by people fully prepared to beat you with your own cast iron skillet if word ever got out that you wash it with soap. Get a good skillet, season it, love it, RESPECT it. And make lots of fried chicken with it.
Method. Oh geez. The method is just as varied as the recipe themselves. Do you use a wet or dry coating? Do you fry in vegetable oil, butter, or shortening? It can get crazy.
As for me, I use a dry coating and I fry in canola oil. You can certainly add a few pats of butter to the oil for a little more richness, but I usually leave that out because of all the fat in the chicken skin.
My dry coating is mostly flour. I season the chicken meat directly with salt and pepper because those two things can tend to get lost in a coating and you really want to make sure that the meat is still flavorful. For a whole chicken, I use about a cup and a half of flour. To that I add some onion powder and garlic powder (about a teaspoon of each). I also add just a teeny bit of dried dill (I have a recipe for Chicken Kiev that calls for dried dill in the coating and it’s surprising the little zing it adds).
I’ve known people to use crushed up potato chips or cereal as their coatings for fried chicken. Play with it and have fun. Just make sure that if you make your own dry coating to be careful of ingredients that burn. That chicken has to fry for a while and too much of a delicate ingredient can put the whole dish in the trash.
My own chicken can have a few dark spots from that tiny bit of onion and garlic powder that I add to my coating. It’s not burned, I assure you. Like I said, it has to cook for quite a while to make sure all the meat is cooked through and the coating sometimes can’t take it. It’s a delicate balance. But boy that stuff tastes gooooood.
My grandmother was always nervous about undercooked chicken so she always boiled the chicken before coating and frying it. She would then throw egg noodles in the broth made from boiling the chicken and it made for a damned good meal. I know that the thought of boiling the chicken before frying it horrifies some people, but if you’re nervous about undercooked chicken, it’s a great way to make sure your meat is cooked and reduced the frying time. Sometimes when I get to missing my grandmother, I make that very dish, the chicken with egg noodles, just so I can feel close to her. And it still makes for a damned good meal.
Even if you’re dedicated to be a healthy eater, I really hope that you don’t forget about fried chicken. I don’t expect you to eat it more than once or twice a year, but it has such history in our country. Its grassroots run deep and many of us who were born to “salt of the earth” families treasure it as a family tradition. Like apple pie and hotdogs, fried chicken is AMERICAN.
My mom is a really picky eater. It’s infuriating sometimes how picky she is. There are so many foods she simply doesn’t like or only prefers to eat them the way she makes them. (That’s not to say she has no ground to stand on in that last statement….my mom is a great cook.)
All my life, my mom has gushed over her grandmother’s Creamed Tomatoes and how much she loved them. I had the pleasure of eating the dish once, but I always found it amusing to hear my mother go on and on about a food because that’s just not like her. Unfortunately, the bearer of that recipe has passed away, and presumably, the recipe has gone with her. I thought it would be a nice birthday present for my mom to make her a big steaming pot of Creamed Tomatoes since I know she hasn’t had any in literally decades. I turned to the internet.
I was surprised at the limited number of recipes I saw. Creamed Tomatoes (also known as Tomato Gravy) is something that most people that I grew up around are familiar with. It’s one of those great Depression Era recipes that can feed a lot of people for super cheap. Yet, the internet is decidedly barren with recipes for this dish. A lot of the recipes that I was able to find were heirloom recipes passed down through the generations, but they are all so different that it has made me nervous about trying the recipes.
However, last night I tried the first recipe on my list. It comes from a place called CDKitchen and the recipe can be found here.
It’s not a long process to make this dish. I used canned tomatoes as the recipe instructs and aside from the homemade biscuits that I had made earlier, this dish was ready in no more than 15 minutes. (If you want to use fresh tomatoes, no problem! Just seed and peel the tomatoes, cut them up and stew them in a very small amount of water and salt for 15 minutes before beginning the actual recipe.)
The most common way (or so I’m told) to serve this dish is over homemade biscuits. Just like a gravy. It’s pretty good that way, actually and is a great one-dish meal for hot days.
This dish was velvet-y and creamy. The texture was amazing. However, I was a little disappointed in the lack of dairy or cream in this dish. The creaminess in this particular recipe came from a very strong slurry of milk and flour..so much flour in fact that the dish tasted faintly of raw flour. It smelled amazing, though and was really quite good. I think if I could work a little with it, it would be a fantastic dish.
I’m hoping to find a dish that has a lot of actual cream in it and not so much thickener. However, the downside to that request is that if one is not careful, the acidity of the tomatoes can cause the dairy to break apart and you end up with a dish that either tastes like vomit or has those tiny dairy pearls in it that are entirely unappetizing.
I will create a post for every recipe I try. I will then make a more detailed post of the one I choose to make for my mother with more pictures and more hints on getting that perfect creamy texture, because that can be tricky with acidic ingredients like tomatoes.
Until then, this is a perfectly good recipe and I encourage you to give it a try. When autumn comes and starts to cool things off, this would be a fantastic quick dinner. Enjoy!
I’m starting to feel better and am venturing back into my kitchen to start cooking for my family once again. Because we knew to expect the same drama with this pregnancy as with my first, when I first got pregnant my husband went to the grocery store and basically bought a bunch of junk that would be easy for him to prepare for himself and for our son. As it turns out, he ended up mostly eating takeout and beef-a-roni right out of the can (gag). So now I am left with a kitchen and a freezer crammed with a bunch of crap that I wouldn’t normally buy, but in order for me to make room for my usual cooking staples, I need to try to use up some of this stuff.
While looking at the shelves in my kitchen that I use for a pantry, my eye was caught by the large stack of tuna cans. “I’ll make a tuna casserole to use up some of that, ” I thought. I’ve never had tuna casserole before…unless you count Tuna Helper. I’ve certainly never made a tuna casserole before, so I consulted cookbooks and the internet for a recipe. There’s certainly no shortage of Tuna Casserole recipes on the world wide web, but to be honest, none of them really got me excited. Each one had the same structure and basically the same ingredients and I just was not wowed.
First of all, most of these recipes called for peas. I hate peas. They are too sweet and when they hit the back of my mouth, I start gagging just as I do when I try to eat sweet potatoes. I just can’t stand that weird starchy sweetness.
Second, most of these recipes only contained a sparse sprinkling of cheese. Umm, excuse me, I thought Tuna Casserole was supposed to be a cheesy dish! Why are these recipes telling me to skimp? Not me. No way. I decided it was time to play mad scientist of the casserole community (ok, not really but I like that title) and make up a casserole recipe of my own. It wasn’t a terribly ambitious undertaking. It’s Tuna Casserole for crying out loud. My two-year old could do it with relative ease.
Cheesy Tuna Casserole
My Recipe
2 cans of albacore tuna in water
1 can of cream of mushroom soup (cream of chicken will also work)
2 cups frozen chopped broccoli
2 Tblsp. butter (NOT margarine, you need real butter)
1-1/4 cup milk
1 tsp. onion powder
1 tsp. garlic powder
salt and pepper to taste
6 slices American cheese
1-1/2 cups uncooked rice
Shredded cheese to top (about 1-1/2 cups)
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.
Cook your rice. You can use quick cooking or instant rice, but I use regular old rice that takes about 15 minutes to cook. Because it’s cheaper and comes in bigger packages. That’s not only economical, but keeps me from having to buy rice every time I go shopping.
In a large pot melt butter. Add condensed soup and milk. Stir to break up the soup. Add salt, pepper, onion powder and garlic powder. Add frozen broccoli and heat through. Drain tuna and add. Add American cheese one slice at a time.
Beware! This smells really freaking good.
Now add your cooked rice and stir to combine. Pour into a casserole dish.
Sprinkle shredded cheese over the top. Be as sparse or as liberal as you like. I like the top pretty much covered.
Place in your oven and bake for 15-20 minutes.
Mmmmm. Melted cheeeeeese. Mmmmmmm.
Trust me on the addition of the American cheese. It adds a very mild “cheese” flavor, but more importantly it adds a rich creamy flavor. It’s just something extra.
I used rice instead of egg noodles….mostly because I had rice and not egg noodles. Boy am I glad that it worked out that way. This whole casserole was super creamy and smooth and was just so palate pleasing. It really was very good and tasted much more interesting to me than a lot of the recipes that I looked at seemed.
I don’t have a final product picture because, well, it’s a casserole! It basically just plopped on the plates and sat on the plates in a very un-pretty lump (delicious, but not pretty). I do, however, have this picture:
Because I’d rather look at that than an overly thought out presentation of culinary mastery any day. Also, I suck at pretty plating and I thought a picture of my beautiful family would be better!
I hope you try this recipe. It’s easy, quick, and very economical. It’s also a classic dish that anybody would appreciate at a potluck dinner. Have a friend who just had a baby? Make this for them. You’ll be the best friend they have for like a year! Enjoy!
And for those of you who are still unfamiliar with my personal blog, you can find it by going to the top left of this page and clicking on the “Other Great Sites” link. Once there, click on the link that reads Merry Wife of Canon (or you can just click the link I just gave). That blog is not as neglected as this poor wretch of a site. It’s not a food blog, but it’s personal. But as I promised in the video, posts are coming for this site and I apologize for the overly long hiatus.
Posted by Somer on February 18th, 2010 at 11:45 am
I know it’s only February, but I thought that now would be a good time to discuss nutrition. As you can probably tell from this website, I am not above eating the occasional horrendous meal consisting mostly of empty calories and exorbitant amounts of fat. However, since I cook most of the meals that my family eats, I try to make sure that most of them are nutritious and healthy. I’m not a nutritionist but I’d like to share with you a few of the simple things that I’ve learned where healthy eating is concerned.
Look at your plate.
How colorful is the meal you are about to eat? Is it mostly a beige and brown meal? Believe it or not, by eating a meal that is full of natural (i.e. they occur in the food naturally and not by process) color, you are pretty safe in assuming that you are eating a meal full of essential vitamins and minerals. You want to eat food that is dark and green, dark blue/purple, bright orange, and red. When you are eating processed food and fried food, the colors will tend to be a beige and/or brown color. While this is fine in smaller portions for certain meals, you certainly don’t want it to make up the bulk of your meal.
In general, the avocado is tasteless or very mild in taste. It’s very easy to punch up the flavor with herbs, citrus, and spices. Use simple mashed up avocado in place of mayonnaise on your turkey sandwich. Make a big bowl of creamy guacamole and serve it with pork chops or chicken breasts instead of just tortilla chips. Use it as a way to make a smoothie extra creamy and thick. Add it to a citrus based pasta salad for an extra punch. It’s recommended that you try to consume avocado at least 3 times a week. Since they can be expensive, though, try for a once a week consumption.
FISH FISH FISH FISH.
Fish is good….for the most part. Read this article. I’ll wait.
Fish is super good for you to eat, again for the most part. If you are pregnant or have a frail condition, you certainly want to avoid larger fish such as tuna, shark, swordfish, and other huge fish to avoid mercury poisoning. We like to hear about those lovely Omega 3 Fatty Acids and oily fish are one of the best places to get it. Salmon is good. Sardines are great. Mackerel is divine. The internet is flooded with thousands of recipes for fish.
If you’re still one of those people who hate fish? Look, you really ought to try to get your palate used to it. Start with a very mild fish like flounder and start working your way up. Try different recipes. Use fresh ingredients. Citrus and fresh herbs make almost any fish taste better.
Dark Leafy Greens
I know that I made mention of these above, but this category is seriously one of the most important. It’s a super food. No joke. Here, read this.
I’ll tell you one thing, my freezer ALWAYS has frozen broccoli and spinach. They can sometimes be flat and the taste can get old, so you turn to the internet to spice things up. One of my favorite ways to spice up a bag of frozen spinach is to add a can of stewed tomatoes and about a teaspoon of curry powder along with a pinch of salt and pepper. It makes a great side dish to any week night meal. And honestly, I prefer my broccoli steamed with no flavorings added.
In the summer, when all of those beautiful salad mixes are out, I like to buy some and have side salads with ever meal dressed with a simple lemon vinaigrette ( I almost never buy salad dressing).
Whole Grains
Hugely important in every diet. Here’s a short article.
One of the easiest grains to have access to is brown rice. I’ll be honest with you, I do not care for brown rice and planned to never buy it again. However, I’ve decided to give it another chance. I recently read that, instead of preparing brown rice the way you might prepare white rice, bake it. So, I’m going to give it a whirl.
My favorite whole grain is bulgur wheat. I love Tabbouleh. You can find so many recipes for it online and you can find bulgur wheat quite easily in most supermarkets.
Don’t forget about oatmeal. I try to eat oatmeal for breakfast every day. I get SICK TO DEATH of it, but I still try to eat it. I buy dried fruit and add a little bit every morning to make it more interesting.
Elementary School should have taught you the “elementaries”.
The rest of the important stuff, you should remember from elementary school. Do you remember the food pyramid? We need to remember that. Remember being taught the difference between processed sugars and natural sugars? Here’s a must read on that subject.
It’s still pretty simple. Eat your fruits and vegetables. Drink lots of water. You need calcium (either through dairy or other means). Beans are good for you. You don’t need more than 4 oz. of lean meat at your evening meal. Dessert is nice, but not needed. Snacks are recommended but should consist of nuts and fruit instead of candy bars and potato chips.
As I said before, I am not a nutritionist. I’m just a mom and a housewife who has learned these very simple facts concerning nutrition. The most unfortunate thing about eating healthy is that it is so much more expensive than eating junk.
A few things that I always keep on hand to help me with this are frozen fruits and vegetables (not as perishable and more affordable in the long run), canned tomato sauce, stewed tomatoes, and diced tomatoes. Don’t buy premade tomato sauce as it can contain a lot of unhealthy ingredients that you don’t want…and it’s way more expensive. I try to buy whole grain pasta (but read the labels on those. They aren’t always really whole grain). And I’ve always got both green and black tea on hand. Oh, did I forget to mention tea? Ok, here:
Drink Tea.
Green tea is thought to be great, but is lacking real world evidence. So what? It’s loaded with antioxidants! Read this.
Although it isn’t praised as much as green tea, black tea is super too! Read this.
As you know, I like to make homemade (i.e. not made from a pre-sweetened powder) iced tea. I also like to make iced green tea. We love it and drink it by the gallon!
There. That about covers all of my personal knowledge concerning nutrition. I’m by no means a professional and I’m sure I still have a thing or two to learn. I hope someone out there finds this helpful.
I am Somer Canon: Shiftless lay-about, blog enthusiast, and more importantly, food lover. This blog will share my favorite recipes, cooking techniques, adventures in eating, and just about any subject pertaining to cooking and eating.
