If you thought adding blue food coloring was cheap, how about tweaking the tint on the picture of the food?
Here, for your gall bladders delight, are my greasy contribute to the Blue Party; Blue cheese batter dipped Cordon Blue.
(also in the picture is a deep fried cornbread. Because what else are you gonna do with a ton of batter and hot oil but fry things)
Chicken breasts cut into small strips
Bacon
Veggie oil
Batter:
1 cup all purpose flower
1 cup ice cold water
1 handful of ice cubes
1 Tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 Tablespoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese.
So I was aiming for a tempura type batter here. The recipe for that is the same as above just without the spices and blue cheese. I also originally planned on making a blue cheese dipping sauce, but the blue cheese I got was really crumbly, almost a powder. Instead I mixed it into the dry portion of the batter. The flavor came through in the end, so that was good.
The rest was really easy. I had the small cuts of chicken that I sat on one end of a piece of bacon that was laid out. I rolled it up, stuck a toothpick in it, then cut the extra length of bacon off to be used in the next bit of chicken. I ended up getting about 4 little rolls out of each strip of bacon.
I then dipped it into the batter, and dropped it into a pot of hot veggie oil for about 3 minutes. The end product wasn't really what I would call fine dining. In fact, I only ate about three at 6pm, and wasn't hungry again for the rest of the night. Normally, when deep frying, the layer of batter creates a barrier to the oil as you well know, but when inside of the batter is bacon, that barrier doesn't really matter. It just traps the bacon grease in. Also, I could only taste the blue cheese and bacon, and not much else.
Finally, here is a non-tinted picture of the goods.
Alright, so I had a bit of a stomach bug yesterday, and felt well and truly awful. I couldn't eat anything. To fix it, I thought I'd take the age old home remedy of a platter of heavy deep fried food, what you see here: Chicken nuggets, popcorn shrimp, onion rings, and french fries, all made from scratch. And what a colorful presentation it made!
-4 chicken breasts, cut into nuggety chunks.
-1 pound of shrimp, precooked, deveined, and deshelled.
-1 yellow onion, cut into rings.
-5 russet potatoes, cut into fries.
-1 can bread crumbs.
-7 eggs.
-flour, garlic powder, salt, black pepper.
-peanut oil.
Combined the bread crumbs with the other dry ingredients, saved the flour, which was in a bowl by itself. Stirred the eggs to make an eggwash. Then, more or less, you roll what you want fried in the flour, then the eggwash, then the breadcrumb mix, and into the fryer with the peanut oil. I had it at 375 degrees Farenheit. After each item was done, I'd hit it with a bit of salt, and the shrimp I squeezed lemon juice onto. We ate all this with three sauces: honey mustard, cocktail sauce, and buffalo ranch. Shaun made the buffalo ranch, Mike made the other two. Over all it was pretty good.
Can't tell you how well the cure is going to work on my delicate guts, but you know, all those old wives tales are pretty hit and miss. Ring the porcelain bell!
