HOW TO COOK CHICKEN DINNER - 50 EXCITING RECIPES
Review by Barb & Ron Kroll
Fifty Shades of Chicken - a parody in a cookbook
(Clarkson Potter) ISBN 978-0385345224 0385345224
A spoof of Fifty Shades of Grey, this chicken cookbook will make you blush. Its 50 exciting recipes for prepping with wine, trussing, stuffing, jerking, skewering and heating chicken until juices run clear, will have you sweating before the oven is on.
Tantalizing photos illustrate chicken recipes for appetizers, salads, sandwiches and main dishes. Cooking chicken has never been so delicious or so much fun.
Hot chicken
The 160-page cookbook is organized into three chapters. The first deals with whole chickens, while the second covers chicken parts, arranged in a variety of positions. The third chapter, on advanced techniques, uses tools like twine and skewers from the chef's "toy drawer."
Mouthwatering recipes include chicken salads (with green goddess dressing), chicken appetizers (maple-glazed wings wrapped in bacon), chicken sandwiches (submarine sandwich with mozzarella) and chicken dinners (baked chicken with apricot jam, sage and lemon zest).
You will laugh as you learn how to cook chicken dinner while following instructions that read like a risque novel. Who knew that cooking chicken could be an aphrodisiac?
Suggestive recipe ideas
FL Fowler introduces each chapter and recipe with a conversation between himself and the young free-range chicken that he is preparing. Cooking instructions use numerous double entendres.
In the Steaming White Meat chapter, the chef describes vapors rising from the chicken's naked white breasts. In the Sticky Fingers introduction, the chicken says that she can't resist his deft hands dripping brown sugar and bourbon sauce on her with a silver spoon.
Double entendres
Chapters entitled Thighs Spread Wide and Hot Rubbed Hen will leave you craving his chicken recipes and more... Food photos by John Von Pamer are equally suggestive, showing the chef's muscular arms tying up chicken with twine, massaging it with truffle butter and placing it over the spike of a vertical roaster.
The delicious recipes for chicken have hilarious names that make you raise your eyebrows: popped-cherry pullet, spread-eagle chicken and bacon-bound wings.
Seductive cooking
Recipe sidebars are helpful as well as titillating. In one, the author of Fifty Shades of Chicken describes the advantages of trussing chicken with twine. "It closes off the chicken's cavity, so the juices swelling within can't spill out, at least until you are ready for them."
Some of his chicken cooking tips are outright funny. Fowler describes how to make chicken tenders by cutting boneless, skinless breasts into half-inch-wide strips. He notes that pounding is optional, depending on "how much your chicken wants it."
Besides showing you 50 ways to cook chicken, this parody of Fifty Shades of Grey is guaranteed to make you laugh a lot and hungry for more. This humorous cookbook would be a great gift for Valentine's Day, a wedding shower, a birthday present for your significant other, or a joke gift for home cooks who have read E.L. James's books.
Contents
Introduction- The Novice Bird
- Falling to Pieces
- Chicken Parts and Bits
- Birds Gone Wild
- Advanced Techniques
Author
FL Fowler is the writer's pseudonym.