Fried whole butterflied chicken

Time flies when you have fun but time really does not fly when you are doing a kitchen remodel! It took us a good 6 weeks to be back to normal but now I can finally enjoy my gourmet kitchen and don’t have to worry about remodeling for a while. My next recipe hopefully will be one where I make use of all of my 3 ovens – yes I packed 3 ovens into a tiny kitchen, a speed cooking oven (like the ones you find in Subway or other places who need to heat and bake food super fast), an electrical convection oven with French doors (no leaning over the oven door and poking me into the stomach, not being able to reach the far end of the oven – or maybe my arms are just too short…) and the Porsche of all stoves and ovens – a gas Wolf! So stay tuned what I will fabricate with all 3 ovens in use! For now though I will share with you this chicken recipe we cooked a couple of times while we were without an Indoor kitchen. The seasoning and cooking method make this dish really enjoyable. This recipe is from Almazankitchen.com, a really cool webside for outdoor cooking, check it out! I usually double the ingredients for the paste as I like to drench the chicken in this delicious spicy paste, I also throw in some potatoes into the hot oil. If you want to skip all the stuff that happened since we started the kitchen remodel jump straight down to the recipe, otherwise enjoy a collection of photos from the last 8 weeks

July is a big business month for me as we have our big partner conference in Las Vegas, so another trip to LV in 110 degrees was on the schedule. Thankfully most business activities are happening indoors and I skipped the Bruno Mars concert on the 120 degree Speedway – but after 3 days of artificial air and ring ding ding 24×7 you do start to feel like you are in a post apocalyptic bunker…at least that’s how it feels to me. But if you have to be in a bunker then at least have some fun with your colleagues and an ice cream cart on the show floor!

After Las Vegas a little bit of vacation time was on the calendar and this year we decided to spend a few days on Lake Chelan, enjoying boating, fishing and cruising the lake.

We even made it to Stehekin which is a very tiny secluded town at the very end of Lake Chelan and saw some amazing off the grid houses that made us wish we could retire right now right here.

The Sudore’s visited us for a couple of days and so the boys could go fishing and the ladies could check out town.

Once back from Chelan it was time to face the kitchen remodel again: take a look how the kitchen transformed from 80’s outdated to welcome to the 21st century! Some of my first dishes made in the kitchen were an apple pie and a pear clafoutis made from our own homegrown apples and pears – always makes a city girl happy to grow, harvest and turn my own produce into something nourishing and tasty!Speaking of tasty, Mike and Sam caught a few more Dungeness crab before the season closed and so the crab fest was on, an entire humongous crab plate drenched in butter just for me :-), surf and turf the next day and crab tacos the day after…there is never such a thing as too much Dungeness crab. While I was harvesting our own Concord grapes on land, turning them into our yearly Grape Jelly stash and grape juice, Mike continued harvesting the ocean and brought home delicious Silver and Coho Salmon.

Since this is a food blog, I guess I don’t have to feel guilty that everything in this post is revolving around food, even our 12th year anniversary was celebrated with food at the Melting Pot, who can say no to 3 types of fondue (cheese, meat/lobster and chocolate fondue)? Happy Anniversary mein Schatz for sticking it out with me for 12 (+2) more years!

Now that Football and rainy season has started, I have high hopes that I will get time to come up with a fabulous recipe for the next blog entry, in the meantime enjoy this chicken recipe!

Fried whole butterflied chicken (from Almazan Kitchen)

Ingredients:

1 whole free-range chicken (ask the butcher to remove the backbone and butterfly it for you)
1 bigger piece of horseradish,
1 small piece of ginger,
1 – 2 green chilis
5-6 garlic cloves
5-6 baby onions
4-5 mid size potatoes
1 tsp. sweet curry
1 tsp. paprika
1 tsp. salt
1 lime