Come On Baby Light My Fryer

Oh boy, we really overdid it with the fried foods this past weekend. I am saturated with saturated fat. We hardly ever eat deep fried food and very rarely make deep fried food at home, but a friend of ours, knowing how much I love kitchen gadgets, gave us a deep fryer on Saturday and well, you know...we just had to try it out.

It's a 3.5 quart Russell Hobbs Cool Steel Fryer with Cool Zone. It has a temperature control dial that varies from 285° to 375°F, a power indicator light and on/off switch plus all kinds of other stuff, but the part I like best is the fry basket with the long handle (pictured above). You can put the food into the basket, lower the basket into the boiling hot oil and when the food is ready you can remove it from the molten hot oil without ever having to get your hands or face near the fryer, a plus for someone like me who can easily injure herself without even trying too hard. Another nice feature of the fryer is that it comes apart easily and is very easy to clean, although with all that oil it's hard to feel like you can ever get the thing clean.

It started out innocently enough, the plan was to get some shrimp and a few bananas and we'd fry them in the new fryer. Tom wanted to try and duplicate a dessert called the "Fat Elvis" a tasty invention that we used to order at a local Tex-Mex place in the city. A batter coated banana deep fried to golden perfection and then served with vanilla (or was it peanut butter flavored) ice cream, chocolate syrup and peanuts, a perfect combination of hot/cold salty/sweet. So Saturday afternoon, I could be found at the scary mega Price Chopper stocking up on oil and supplies for our food frying extravaganza. I was at the store for about 10 minutes when my cell phone rang, it was Tom calling to ask me to see if the oysters looked any good and if yes, to pick some up for deep frying. I had been in the produce aisle and had just placed about 2 pounds of mushrooms in my cart for the deep frying adventure and was eyeballing the potatoes when he called. We spent another 10 minutes discussing what else we could fry and decided against frying cheese, Twinkies, pickles, pretzels and apples but sweet potatoes chips were mighty tasty sounding, so into the cart went two very fat sweet potatoes. In the end it proved to be too much fried food for two people to handle so we never got around to the sweet potato chips, or actually making the "Fat Elvis" although we did fry a banana just to see what it tasted like. We did somehow manage to stuff ourselves with a good amount of:

fried mushrooms

fried oysters

French fries and

breaded shrimp

I'm done, it's out of my system, there will be no more fried foods for me for a loooong while.

~~~~~~~~~~~

House news: In an ironic twist of fate, the mouse that had occupied too much of my thoughts as I plotted his demise ended up getting rid of himself for me. He had somehow slipped into the empty garbage can under the sink, then, because it was slippery and too high, he couldn't get back out so he died. His final zing to me was to let me find him when I went to put a new bag into the can, I nearly had a heart attack, it was the last thing I had expected to see when I pulled the can out from under the sink. Since the mouse was in our house and since we don't live at the house full time, it's hard to say when exactly this happened but judging from the mess inside the can, I would say it took days before he finally went to that deluxe kitchen in the sky. The worst part about this whole mouse incident is that even though I wanted to be rid of the mouse more than anything, I certainly didn't want him to have to suffer in the way that he did. I don't imagine his last few hours were very pleasant and so I went from despising this stupid mouse to feeling very sorry for him. Gawd I’m such a sentimental bleeding heart fool.

Written by Deb on March 1, 2004 01:03 AM