Today I’m settled on one thing: I’m making Taiwanese-style fried chicken.
The piece in the New York Times on this dish having its “moment” locked me in, because I’ve actually never had it and now I really want it. There’s a couple of places in Philly that make it but I’ve never been to them.
I think I’m going to use the recipe from the New York Times Cooking app, which seems to have some of the essential features as described in the overall profile. I may fiddle with it some. For one, I have a whole chicken in the fridge to break down and I’m trying to decide whether I want to do something as challenging as boning the entire chicken and frying it in quarters, lightly pounded, or whether I should just stick with popcorn chicken and bone it in a less demanding way.
The question is, what else to make alongside it? I don’t really have a cookbook that would help with more ambitious kinds of night-market foods, Taiwanese or otherwise, and most of them would require a trip to H-Mart today, which I’m not keen to do. What I think I’m going to do is leaf through several of my Chinese cookbooks, primarily Carolyn Phillips’ All Under Heaven, Fuschia Dunlop’s Every Grain of Rice, Eileen Yin-Fei Lo’s Mastering the Art of Chinese Cooking and my newly acquired Lopez-Alt book The Wok, and then take stock of what I have to work with in the fridge. This is likely something that will showcase some of the issues with these cookbooks, though I like them all quite a bit—none of them are very friendly to the use I’m contemplating here, which is looking for something to make based on available ingredients and as an accompaniment to an already-decided-upon main dish. We’ll see how well I (and they) do when I report back in after the meal.
Image credit: "Taiwanese Fried Chicken with Basil" by Taekwonweirdo is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
Wish I could try the experiment!