Glazed Carrots and Fried Chicken

Mark is spending the afternoon and evening at the country parish today and so is taking 'lunch' actually supper with him. His favorite food ever has always been fried chicken and we spent years not making it because I just couldn't get it to come out right, nice and crunchy on the outside, done yet moist on the inside, and spicy but still chickeny flavored. I finally got that solved with this recipe from my all-time favorite cooking show:

Good Eats - Fried Chicken

I only make two changes to the recipe:

1. Add enough hot sauce to the buttermilk to make it a nice rosy pink.
2. Use Emeril's Essence for the spice, well okay it's Emeril's original recipe but I leave out the paprika and double the amount of cayenne in it - do you see a pattern here.

Since Fried Chicken is Mark's absolute favorite and we are really trying to do healthy stuff I decided it was time to find new sides. Mashed potatoes, corn, peas and gravy just don't need to be eaten every week, well at least we don't need to eat them every week. This week I made it with pasta salad, just a throw together using Italian Dressing, a little feta and whatever veggies were around and the most scrumptious Glazed Carrots that I've ever tasted.

For the carrots we got some yummy brewed ginger ale, Mark loved finishing off the bottle and they were perfect, they didn't need additional anything - which is hard to believe in my house. I've tried lots of different glazed carrot recipes over the years looking for something that was like the fantastic carrots at Kobe Steak House where Mark's mom took us to eat a couple times. Over the years most of the recipes have always been too sweet, too mushy, too weird, too gingery or just too not right, this one however is fantastic. It's not exactly Kobe's, the carrots are a bit thinner and a bit more al-dente, but it's certainly the best one I've found so far and definitely Good Eats ;)

So the wonderful husband gets to take his favorite food along with him this evening and some yummy sides too!