Skip to main content

Hot chicken done right

I know everyone's jizzin their jeans over "Nashville Hot Chicken," and there are some good spots, but more often than not, places that advertise it are just giving you chicken with heat and no flavor, and that's sad. Honestly, those places should be ashamed; there are some good chicken places in Nashville. Granted, they're no Gus's Fried Chicken, but hey, they do their thing.
Well, here's a fun way to do it. To get a nice heat kick, I started off by dredging my chicken in flour seasoned with a couple teaspoons of ground smoked ghost pepper. I don't know about you, but I fucking love ghost peppers.
I followed the ghost pepper flour up with some of my balsamic mayo, then some bread crumbs mixed with a little salt and a bit of shredded parmesan.
After that, it was just a matter of frying that shit up in some vegetable oil. Outside of the chicken, I sautéed up some veggies and steamed some couscous. It was a quick and simple meal. I had to cut the grass first. Sue me.
I did a little plating, though. Not quite fancy, but better than just eating it all out of the fucking pan, right? I scooped a bit of veggies into one corner, then drew a line across the middle of the plate with some parsley oil. Quick.
I laid the chicken onto the parsley oil line, then dropped some couscous on the other side. I had my pickled zucchini that I didn't put on my purple hasbrowns in the last post, so I dropped a few chunks onto the couscous, then devoured the shit out of everything.
The veggies were simple, and they were fine. The couscous was okay, but the pickled zucchini definitely kicked it up another notch. And the chicken? Fucking baller. Perfect amount of heat, and a hell of a lot of flavor.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Restaurant week: My new Mexican restaurant

 As I mentioned the other day, my Mexican restaurant closed down. Luckily, they opened up in a new space a couple of months later. Great new look, new name ("Lopez Grill"), they've got a bar, staff is expanded, and the place is always packed. Business seems to be going great. Now, this isn't just a rehash of my post about the 'Dolo. While the menu is largely the same, there have been a few changes, plus I'm going to share a few things I've learned eating there. On my first visit to the new location (which was opening day, right when the doors opened; yes, I was standing in line outside with the other faithful), Señor Lopez brought me a bowl of their new salsa. He called it "guacamole salsa," but it's a jalapeño-based sauce. It's got an almost creamy texture, but is dairy-free (I asked for my vegan friend). Being a jalapeño salsa, it's got some heat, but not nearly as overbearing as some capsaicin-phobes may fear. It is perfectly bala...

Restaurant week: Polish food truck tasting

Due to a strange combination of circumstances, I recently found myself at a menu tasting for a soon to open Polish food truck called Halinka's Polish Eatery . I'm about 99% sure I was the only person in attendance who wasn't already personally known to the owner/chef, Magda, but it was a good time. Got to meet some nice folks and eat free food, but then I had to give feedback in public in front of other people, so that kind of sucked. Like, really fucking sucked. Pretty sure my face my was red the entire time. This is the price we pay for food sometimes. Our first course was a cabbage and mushroom pierogi with a side of beets. Apparently when the food truck gets going, the pierogis will be steamed, then finished either on a grill or in a skillet with some butter. However, due to facility constraints where we were trying the dishes, Magda had to serve them just steamed. Anyway, to the food: the cabbage and mushroom pierogis were fucking amazing. There was a tremendous depth ...

Stream recap: pseudo-bougie dinner party

 This past Sunday (1/18/2025) was my second cooking stream of the New Generation of ODG Cooking Streams. When I was trying to come up with a "theme" for the afternoon, I was thinking a lot about those fancy-ass restaurants where they serve you three bites of food on a fucking plate five or six times and, even though you're somehow full, it still doesn't seem to quite justify spending five million dollars just to eat there for two hours while everyone around you looks at you condescendingly because you didn't wear a goddamn tie. Fuck those people. Anyway, I decided I wanted to figure out a way to do that kind of fun, small plate, presentation-centric food at the house without having to break the bank. My first course, as a direct theft from The Bear , a show I absolutely love, was the mirepoix broth. I started the stream by starting a light stock, which means you don't roast the bones beforehand, using some pork and beef bones. For the mirepoix broth, I finely ...