Ms. Cowboy's Fried Chicken

Well, here it is.  The long awaited (didn't know you were missing out, did you?) how-to of Ms. Cowboy's Fried Chicken.  Why should you care?  Well, this is, after all THE dish that won the heart of Cowboy Cody.  Sealed the deal.

And now I'm going to tell you the secret.  But it's really not that much of a secret.  I know several other people who fry chicken like this.  But we'll pretend, anyway.

The recipe I used is adapted from my most favorite and worn-out copy of Texas Home Cooking.  I'm not much on actually measuring things out, so keep that in mind depending on how big your bird is.  I usually fry up a 4-4.5 pound bird.

The first thing you need is buttermilk.  When I have it, of course I use the buttermilk left over from making butter from my raw Jersey milk.  Mmm.  Butter.

Of course, if you don't have real buttermilk, you can cheat a little by adding a bit of lemon juice to the milk to sour it.

Ok, here's the secret to the best fried chicken.

Yep.  Tabasco.  Shake a good amount of tabasco in the buttermilk.  This adds a good scald and helps the chicken turn out nice and crispy.

After you've cut up your chicken, you want the pieces to sit in the buttermilk mixture for at least 2.5 hours prior to cooking.  It can set up to 12 hours if need be.  Just place the pieces in the buttermilk, cover and refrigerate until about 20 minutes or so before you plan to fry 'em up.  Once in a while, I only fry up the white meat pieces and save the rest of the chicken for Rainy Day Chicken & Dumplin's.


While the chicken pieces are coming to room temperature, mix up your flour mixture.  This will be around 1-2 cups of flour, a generous amount of seasoned salt, an even more generous amount of fresh ground black pepper and a spoonful of baking powder.

You can mix the ingredients in a pie pan, as I've done here, or the real Texas way to do it is to mix these ingredients in a brown paper bag.  Then you get to shake the stuffin's out of that chicken!

Here's another important thing for me when it comes to frying chicken.  I never use anything but my deep cast iron skillet.  Nothing makes a good fried chicken better than good, used cast iron.  Another thing I just won't do without for fried chicken is my own rendered lard from our pastured pigs.  Now, I know not everyone has access to real lard, so a good thing to use, though I hate to admit it publicly, is Crisco.  Lots of folks out there will tell you that you can't fry chicken unless you use Crisco, but I disagree.  I love my lard.


You'll need enough in the skillet to fry the chicken on one side, not deep fry it.  You don't want it to drown, or it will just soak up all that excess oil.

Melt your lard/shortening over high heat until it starts to bubble on top.

A good way to check if your lard/oil is hot enough is to sprinkle a bit of flour into the skillet.  If it bubbles up like it's frying, it's ready to use.  At this point, lower your heat just slightly.

Now for the fun part.
If you're using the whole chicken, start with your dark pieces.  Take them one at a time out of the buttermilk marinade and place in your flour mixture.  Shake the bag, if using, or dredge them covering all sides well.

Once coated thoroughly, gently place in the hot oil in your skillet.  Repeat until all pieces are snug in your skillet, continuing with the dark pieces and ending with the light meat pieces.

If you choose to use the pie pan method, you end up with a ginormous amount of batter on your fingers.  Lovely, isn't it?

Reduce your heat to medium, cover the skillet and fry the chicken exactly 17 minutes.

Reduce the heat slightly again, remove the lid, and carefully turn the pieces over gently using tongs.  Fry uncovered for another 17 minutes.

Remove the pieces with tongs and drain on another brown paper sack, paper towels or a kitchen towel.  The chicken should be a beautiful deep, rich brown.  Serve with smashed 'taters and gravy.

Now, go get your cowboy.

The Dancing Rooster

Chickens are really funny creatures.  Around here, we have such an enjoyable time just sitting back and watching the critters and their habits and natural actions.

A while back, I happened to catch one of our roosters, a Barred Rock, doing a little jig on the "balance beam", the railroad tie bordering my herb garden, which has turned into a ginormous dust box for the chickens.  

He gave quite a stirring performance.

Moving this way and that.

Flapping his wings just so and strutting his stuff.

And then a little shimmy, shimmy shake going on!

With a final strut of his stuff in front of his girls, 

he turned to take a bow, thanking his flock for their appreciation.

One final flap showing them who's boss.

 Cocky little thing.

Ms. Pyromaniac

I may or may not be a pyromaniac.  Ok, probably not so severe, but fire and I have had our relationship come and go through the years.

Like the time I caught my boyfriend's kitchen on fire.  When doing the dishes.  While eating a PopTart.

Taylor and I were driving home from farmers' market one evening a couple of summers ago and came across a tractor on fire in a field.  We called 911 and made sure the farmer was safe.  

And there's the time several years ago when Cowboy Cody called to tell me he was stranded on the side of the road after our Dodge Ram farm truck burned up while driving down the highway.

Or the time we were in the middle of our Cowboy Gathering, our biggest event of the year at the ranch, where I'm the cook for the week of 3 meals a day for several hungry cowboys and cowgirls.  This one particular day, Cowboy Cody had started a fire in our huge concrete smoker, lovingly dubbed The Crematorium.  I was to watch the pig and lamb smoking in The Crematorium for the evening's meal while preparing the noon meal and whatever else I was doing.

I had to run up to the house, about a 1/2 mile away, for some things from the kitchen, and told my mom, who helps me for the week, I'd be back right quick.  When I came out of our house, which sits on the hill above The Barn, where our dining hall, kitchen and storefront are, sitting in a huge bottom ground area, I thought the whole valley was on fire!  It felt like the whole Ponderosa was going up in flames, just like the map burns across the credits of the show.  Well, it was only the lid of The Crematorium, which was mistakenly made of plywood instead of metal.  It's since been replaced.  But the pork and lamb were protected by none other than Reynold's Wrap Aluminum Foil and were absolutely delicious.

And we shouldn't even mention the time I was mowing the paths through our Hay Bale Maze made of big, round haybales when we hosted a Corn Maze & Pumpkin Patch for school aged kids and there was this one winding path that I couldn't drive forward into and turn around.  I had to back in, while mowing, and drive out.  No problem.  I've been on a lawn mower all my life.  You just stop when you back into a big haybale.  No big deal.  Unless the exhaust on the lawn mower catches a big, round, bundle of dry grasses on fire.  And it's connected to about 400 more big, round, bundles of dry grass.  Then it's big.  VERY big.

Life's full of surprises.

This one happened just tonight.

Many of you know that we finally got a wood stove for our cozy little home this fall.  We love it and are using it like crazy.  We even got a coal bucket for Christmas from my mom.  You know, the old-fashioned kind, shaped like an egg with a little handle on the back for dumping.

When we empty ashes out of the wood stove, we set the bucket on the porch until the ashes have cooled enough to dump them out back, in my old raised garden spot behind the house.

Well, today we had all been gone and when Taylor and I got home, there were only coals and ashes left in the wood stove, so I thought it a perfect time to clean the ashes out of the stove.  I put on my coat, headed to the front porch, got the bucket of old ashes and took them to the garden and dumped them.  I then proceeded back inside where I filled the bucket with hot ashes and put the bucket on the porch.  I then built the most beautiful fire in the now ash free wood stove.  We promptly warmed up and continued with our chores, unloading the truck from our trek into town, preparing to fix dinner, deciding what movie to watch and arguing playfully about what time the chickens would be in their coop.  All the while it was nearing dark and Taylor headed out to lock up the chickens.

That's when Taylor ran back inside and said, in a fairly calm manner, "Mom, did you know your garden's on fire?"

Holy smokes!  No pun intended, but, "Where in the world did that come from?" is what I was thinking!  And, how?  I threw on my chore boots, grabbed my coat and headed outside.  After I grabbed my camera.  Priorities, you know.

Taylor, bless her heart, grabbed the water hose, which was mostly frozen, only releasing a small trickle of a stream, then ran in the house and got a pitcher of water, leaving me standing with the hose and the trickling stream.  She then ran to get a bucket, we only have about 487 sitting somewhere around the house and milk barn, and wouldn't you know she got the ONE with a crack in the bottom.  So, by the time she got back to the burning coals, she was as wet as the puddle my trickle was making.

Oh, that sounded bad.

I'll just leave it alone.

Anyhoo, we proceeded to put out our burning embers, after of course, taking a couple of photos.  These are moments to blog about, after all.