Heaven Sent Chicken - A Cornucopia of Mediocrity

Tonight I tried the "husband's side" of the Ezell's Chicken "divorce" - Heaven Sent Chicken.  For those of you who don't know this story, Seattle's iconic, Oprah-loving fried chicken establishment was once owned and operated by Ezell Stephens, his wife Faye Rudd, and his brother-in-law Lewis Rudd. They opened their first store in the 80's and have since been crazy-successful.  

In 2010 Ezell was fired from the company's board of directors for opening unauthorized stores and sharing the secret recipe (uh oh!), while also losing the company buckets of cash.  At some point Ezell and Faye divorced, and Ezell went off and opened the 'Heaven Sent' chain, while Faye and Lewis kept the 'Ezell' chain. 

History lesson over, now on to the food!  I ordered a fried chicken thigh, fried okra, a roll, a cornbread muffin, peach cobbler, and bread pudding.

Now let me tell you, I was mad jonesing for fried okra.  Growing up in Texas it was a regular on the school lunch menu, and a great love for fried okra has been with me ever since. There are places like Bayou on Bay in Bellingham that make an excellent fried okra. A friend recommended Heaven Sent, so I rushed over and bought a large serving.

They made me a fresh, fried okra. Oh man!

So I popped a hot okra in my mouth... And my response was "huh..."  I ate about half the serving, and my opinion didn't improve. The okra was a little rubbery, and a bit flavorless. The fry dough was too hard, and stuck like tough pads on my teeth.

I was so disappointed. 

I ate the hot roll next. It was airy, so soft, and great flavor. The only issue was that the flavor was very light. But overall, not too bad. I didn't have any butter or anything, which I think was the right choice, as otherwise it would have been a flavor of all butter, no roll. 

Next was the peach cobbler, served in a pre-packaged plastic container. It was slightly warm, but very tasty. It was a little heavy on the cinnamon, but the peaches were well cooked, still a bit firm, and the crust was still crunchy. 

As for the bread pudding, it was very unappetizing. It was in brick form, from it's pre-packaged plastic container, and didn't exude any distinctive flavor. There weren't many raisins (a boon to some) and was wet, as opposed to being moist.  I wasn't able to get beyond two bites. Bleh. 

Let's get to the chicken. It looked well fried and crispy. I pulled off the fried skin to get to the meat. It was juicy, and wasn't half bad. The skin was crispy, not too oily, but no real spice or flavor. 

I think I'll stick with my KFC.  There, I know what I'm getting, and I know what I love. 

Holiday Baking

Greetings, Delicious America!

It's been a while since my last post, and what better way to renew the blog than with holiday baking!  For the renewal of this blog, my dear friend Veronica and I will be co-hosting many of the entries.

Last week we had our annual holiday baking extravaganza. In one day, we try to make a couple dozen different kinds of cookies. We have our favorites, and we try new recipes, and overall have a fun, exhausting day.

This year we made five different kinds of cookies, a tray of baklava, and Veronica made four dozen of her incredible cinnamon rolls.

The cookies we made are: snowballs (also known as Russian tea cakes), rocky road bars, hello Dolly's, rugelach, and ginger cookies. The rugelach recipe came from Food Network's website, the snowballs is a family recipe, and the rest came from the fantastic "The Ultimate Cookie Book" by Catherine Atkinson.

Overall the baking went really well. The day started with putting together the dough for the rugelach, as that needed to cool in the fridge for at least an hour before rolling. When it came time to roll the dough, we used a small marble slab, which made rolling the dough much smoother and easier.  We focused on the more time consuming items first. Veronica started in on her first batch of cinnamon rolls, and Bekah started chopping up walnuts and pecans for the rugelach, baklava, snowballs, and hello Dolly's. 

When it came time to make the baklava, we didn't have enough chocolate chips. We did, though, have plenty of powdered sugar and unsweetened cocoa powder. Veronica, nonchalantly used a double-boiler to make her truffle chocolate, which was so incredibly smooth and decadent. It smoothed out nicely on the filo dough, and after the baklava had set, it piped well for a decorative top.

Our 'runt' of the baking day turned out to be the ginger cookies. We had bought some candied ginger for the top of the cookie, but, it turned out, no powdered ginger for the baking. Veronica used mace as a substitute, as it is in the same 'flavor family'. The cookie came out very crunchy and, well, a bit hard. This was one of the new recipes, so we didn't know what to expect. Our resident ginger-lover, Bekah's boyfriend, Neil, gave us our 'official' review, and unfortunately he felt that the cookies definately needed more ginger. We may try this recipe again in the future, but we'll definately need to have some proper ginger powder on hand!