Fancy Gap fried chicken & artichokes

Having just made the most delicious fried chicken OF MY LIFE, I feel compelled to share immediately! First of all, anyone who wants to complain that ‘this is too hard/too much work/I don’t have the right [insert utensils/mod cons]’, it’s important that you know that we made this dinner in the RockVan, a 1977 GMC motorhome, deep in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Fancy Gap, Virginia.

So go for it – you won’t be sorry.

Ingredients

1 free-range chicken, jointed (we were fortunate to have a Polyface chicken)

buttermilk

bread crumbs (making your own from a nice loaf of sourdough is best, but after drying slices on the dash while driving, then mangling them with our secondhand hand blender, Stuart reckons we’ll buy some next time for RockVan ease…)

cinnamon

cayenne

turmeric

salt & pepper

onion

garlic

flour

vegetable oil

Method

Soak the chicken pieces in buttermilk for a few hours (out of the fridge so it will fry evenly when the time comes).

Turn the onion and garlic into a paste – you can do it with a mortar and pestle, but in this case, I cannot see why not to use the hand blender, which is all we have in the RockVan anyway. Set aside in a bowl.

Blend your bread crumbs until fine-ish, then add all the dried spices – salt & pepper to taste, but I would encourage you to be liberal with both.

Pull pieces of chicken from the buttermilk, dredge very lightly in flour, then in the garlic/onion paste, then in the spiced bread crumbs. You can either shallow fry (with enough oil to virtually half cover the pieces) or deep fry.

Pop in the oven for 10-20 minutes – totally depends on the size of your pieces, heat of your oven, etc.

Having served ours with artichokes tonight, I reckon I never need anything else for dinner. This is very happymaking food.

Y’all come back now. 😉