Who doesn’t like drumsticks? Vegetarians, I suppose. But this is not a recipe for them. Book 1, Group 2 (Main Courses), Subgroup 6 (Poultry & Game) gives us 6-22: Crispy Chicken Drumsticks. This was cooked in tandem with 4-21: Herb-Roasted Potatoes.
Drumsticks were on sale, so drumsticks you will get. I think this is one of the ones I was making before I went out of town a few weeks ago, but I’ve been a bit behind, so the details have escaped me a bit. Not that it matters to you, anyway. 🙂
This one has a bit of a story behind it–I made it once before when I was about 12-13 years old. My family was having a dinner party, and my friend (daughter of a family friend who was in town) and I were tasked with cooking the whole dinner for about 10-12 people. This was one of the dishes I remember making for that, and I also remember being upset that I got splattered with oil a lot when making it that time. Happened this time too. 🙁
Ingredients. It called for 8 drumsticks, but the value pack we bought had about 12-13 in it, so I upped the rest of the breading stuff accordingly. I also had summer squash (the yellow things), but not zucchini–virtually the same though. Also subbed Italian breadcrumbs for plain ones.
Easiest way to do this is inside of a gallon-sized Ziploc bag.
Bag o’ breaded chicken legs.
Starting the oil for frying. You can see my PopChart lab print reflected in the pan. 🙂
Cooking the chicken–and getting splattered. 🙁 I could have used a deeper pan or a splatter guard (which I did when I wasn’t taking pictures), but without an actual fryer, something’s bound to come out eventually.
Veggies cooking after the chicken’s finished. You can see the chicken cooling on the rack behind the veggies. I actually ended up cooking the chicken a bit longer in the oven after it came off the stove to make sure that it was cooked all the way through.
I already had the oven going at 450ºF degrees for 4-21: Herb-Roasted Potatoes, so I stuck the chicken in for a few minutes with them just to make sure. I also did it so that they wouldn’t spend extra time on the stove getting overcooked on the outside and still be raw on the inside, which can happen with pan-frying meat with bones in it.
Obviously, you would never want to cook chicken at 450ºF degrees as a practice, but since they were already hot, and it was only for a few minutes (5-7), it was okay. Otherwise, you run the obvious risk of drying the chicken out, which is easy to do.
Final product–chicken drumstick and veggies. We ate these with 4-21: Herb-Roasted Potatoes the first night, and several other things over the course of a few days–there were a lot of drumsticks.
Grade: A-