As is every second day of a holiday where there's practically nowhere you can go with a kid (though it did not rain this morning, so we got out to the playground), today was tiring, but I made it harder on myself by deciding to fry chicken legs because there were a dozen for $5 at Wegman's.
Here is what's hard about frying chicken:
1. Huge amount of oil spatter, no matter what you do.
2. Hard (for me) to maintain the right oil temperature, even with a cooking thermometer. I looked away for five minutes, and it was smoking.
3. Huge amount of smoke. Whatever "savings" I got from the chicken leg pricing was lost and then some by having to open all the windows in cold weather.
4. You have to wash your hands a dozen times. You're handling raw chicken when washing it. (Unless you do some awkward tong thing.) You're handling it when you dredge it in batter. God help you if your kitchen garbage is full when you throw away the packaging. Now, you have to get it in the garbage bag, then go wash your hands before you take out the garbage so you're not touching all the doorknobs with chicken germ hands.
5. Even if you're not reusing the oil, in order to dump it, you have to get it into some kind of container. That is messy as hell.
6. You have to use a jillion paper towels. Both to pat the chicken parts dry after washing and to soak up the grease after they're done.
7. Jabbing the chicken with the meat thermometer to make sure it's hot enough inside to kill all the germs releases a lot of juices. Also, sometimes you stab all the way through it and don't actually measure it. But the time you get it into the right place, the chicken is overdone.
The reasons this was an especially poor way to direct my cooking energy are: A) Katt doesn't eat meat on the bone and B) the guy is unlikely to like new foods. I hoped that because he likes kalbi, which is meat on the bone, that he'd like the chicken legs. He ate two bites, which was fair.
But yeah, now I gotta eat like eight more overdone fried chicken legs.