Birthday Treasures Revealed...

I finally have a bit of time to post a few goodies! It's been busy around here with various birthday celebrations and prior to that-well, I think I already mentioned about the eBlogger robot kicking me out for a bit. Anyways, July 26 was my birthday...

So here, some of my birthday goodies!


Stilaholic Nartian gifted me the gorgeous Nature's Palette in the Orchid colorway! Thanks so much, Nartian! I think she knows my sock yarn stash is a bit weak in the 'nearly solids' category for handpainteds! And does it show? I used a gift certificate from another friend to get the other yarns shown-Koigu PPPM, nonetheless. Another friend got me this tea which I need to try, but the packaging is so cute that I am afraid to open it! (Note the two cute little cherry-figure motif boxes...) I also got some of this weird linen/viscose stuff called "Iside", which I am still trying to figure out...I originally thought how cool it would be for a cute little tank, but clearly I don't think it will be enough. There are 175 yds per skein and I purchased 4 of them, but: a) I am not a tiny gal b) this really doesn't seem to work well knit up at 4 st/inch. It seems to be headed for shawl/ette land...Gorgeous color, though!

And here is how I spent my day...

Making this...

And this...

And doing this...


Yes, it was an attempt to make a Bake Sale Betty's Fried Chicken Sandwich! (This past week's food section had an article featuring the famous sandwich-and much to my delight-included the recipe for it!) I confirmed what I always somehow knew in the back of my mind: the $8 per sandwich is well worth the price! Don't attempt this at home, folks!

OK, if you want to do it, go ahead...I dare ya! Even if you could execute it perfectly, you could not convince me it was worth the effort and cost of having to purchase those 2 quarts of vegetable oil to fry the chicken in, let alone the cabbage, red vinegar, olive oil, jalepenos, etc...not to mention the time you wait for the oil to heat up to 365 degrees Farenheit!

I like to consider myself a fairly decent cook, but I will confess that deep frying is something I have never become proficient at. I did read sometime, long ago, that it was a tricky thing to deep fry-getting the right temperature and holding it there. I wish I had tried it out sooner after reading said article, since the fine points seemed to have escaped me as I made my attempt to fry up the 4 chicken breasts that I had carefully double-coated with buttermilk and flour...Alas, my attempt resulted in somewhat anemic chicken breasts with oil-soaked, gooey (yet tasty) coating.

In my haste (and hunger) I then conveniently forgot to get any pics of the final product! However, remembering about the temperature issue with deep frying, I followed my instincts and heated the oil back up to the requisite 365 degrees and finished frying up the 4 tenderloins-each turning out much better than the earlier larger breasts. The smaller pieces definitely helped keep the heat up and fried up much nicer.

Here, what remains of the tenderloins.


The black specs are what got attached to the batter, since it was fried in the remaining oil from the earlier breasts. Despite the gummy covering of the large breasts, the overnight salt/buttermilk soak did pay off, and even the large breasts were still pretty tasty and tender.

The coleslaw is wonderful-much harder to mess up, though I am sure that the published recipe is a different than what comes out at the bakery-I don't recall the coleslaw being as moist, so I used the entire head of cabbage, since I love the coleslaw anyway. Now I've got more left over for snacking!

So...I guess this exercise had more than the one purpose of teaching me the true "Value" of a Bakesale Betty's Fried Chicken Sandwich...it made me work a bit harder to help burn off the 955 calories that the sandwich is supposed to contain! That's 23 "points" in Weight Watcher's language!-lol! (Which, BTW, I had the WHOLE sandwich today which exceeds my daily 'point' allowance by 3! But that's another story...) Oh-and the added benefit of going to Bake Sale Betty's to buy my fried chicken sandwich?-it is on the same block as ARTICLE PRACT! Fried chicken sandwich and yarn?! I'm THERE! Man, I sure hope she doesn't ever stop making these puppies!

OK, so I'll focus more on my knitting next time I post...