Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Cakes and Shit Part 1

CAKE is a powerful, beautiful, mysterious beast. Like the legendary pokemon, it comes in multiple variations of the same basic form but only after hard work, patience, and a lot of ultra balls. Like the peacock, it offers all that fuss on the outside as a mere prelude to the the tender, juicy meat on the inside. Let us give thanks for CAKE. Amen.

Few things in the world can capture the spirit of all that is good, right and just like the almighty cake. Even when it's in the shape of a dick.

A few people ask me how I decorate cakes. I volunteer a few of my thoughts on the art of cake decoration. First, you must make sure to start with a solid and delicious cake. The successful model can stand bare, moist and sweet even without fine clothes draped over him/her. The flesh must be firm, springy, and a toothpick inserted into the center must come out clean. What am I even talking about?

First you will want to "cover that shit." You don't have to cover the cake completely to sell people on it. This is the Abercrombie and Fitch school of cake decoration. A small dollop of cream cheese frosting dressing the top of a moist red velvet cake is like the string bikini or the fitted speedo. Think about it.

But for those cakes without perfectly sculpted bodies, there are many many options. The first option is like me during finals. I don't care about what I look like as long as I'm naked. This is your basic glaze.

The second is buttercream frosting, which is like dressing up for a formal party. You have to cover everything, be really detail-oriented, and put in a lot of work but you know it's not gonna matter come orgy time.

The third is the chocolate option. Black is slimming and always in style.

The fourth is covering your cake in fruit. Safe and healthy outside, dangerous and wild inside. Like my ex-boyfriend who is now studying to be a priest.

And there we go!

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Finals and Shit

I know this is behind the times, or as some would say, "2008? More like 2000 and late." In fact, this is occurring in 2011.

Finals period eating behavior among college students is similar to that of bears about to go into hibernation. Both bears and students must survive through a period essential to their continued survival, so they eat and eat and swim upstream to spawn.

I am gonna start by making a list of some of the things I ate during finals period last semester and it is not pretty. I'm just starting finals now so it's about to get real bad again. The winners of "WORST foods I Ate Last Semester" contest are:

First prize: Raw ramen noodles seasoned with salt packet I found in my dress pants (who the fuck has time to boil water?)

Second Prize: Ivy room falafel with 3 falafel balls "on the side"

Bronze: mozzarella stick I found in the ADPhi lounge at 4AM

runner-up: 2 candy canes I stole from a christmas tree at a local business

Of course I eat other real food that I buy at a store, like oreos and diet coke. There is something about finals that brings out the worst of our eating habits. Also you totally have to realize how first world problem-y finals stress eating is. Not only do I not have to toil in the fields to satisfy the demands of my feudal lord, I'm all like "ahhh I'm consuming extra caloriessss."

If my mom found out what I eat during these times, she would flip a shit. Normally, she would send me a care package right about now but she dropped the ball this year because she was too busy stressing out about my sister's statewide examinations. I usually go through those care packages fast though, so I still end up eating awful food I find in the library.

Those care packages are fucking great. It's like an explosion of the best and worst parts of advanced industrial societies, namely plastic packaging and obesity (both AWESOME). There are lots of weird Asian snacks, lots of even weirder American snacks and the occasional unlabeled chinese herb mixture designed to enhance brain function.

Aside from the weird herbs, which I keep in a container along with the self-tanner I accidentally won at Sephora, there is candied ginger, packets of powerful antibiotics, no. 2 pencils (to the scan machine can read my bubbles), face masks to rejuvenate my tired face, and Korean stickers of academic encouragement.

Those stickers are great - I stick them in my notebooks. They're like the equivalent of the "great job!" and "You're the best!" things you got in grade school but instead they loosely translate to "conquest!" "the climb to excellence!" and "[untranslatable anti-colonial protest chant!]"


And of course, there is the food. Now I don't know if any of you have any experience with the bizarre yet infinitely delightful snacks dreamt up by the Korean peoples, but this shit is awesome. Screw macroeconomic indicators, international recognition, and a consolidated state apparatus -- if you can produce over five different varieties of chocolate-filled panda cookies, you ARE a developed country.

Here are a few of my favorite things:
1. Yam-Yam, which is a cone-like thing that has one side of trans-fatty cream goodness (in strawberry or chocolate) and another side of breadsticks. Amaaaazing!
2. Choco-pie-Marshmallow wrapped in cake wrapped in chocolate. They drop this shit into North Korea to teach them about the triumphs of capitalism. Pretty convincing to me!
3. I don't know what they're called, but they're just popped rice lightly seasoned with sugar. They're like, 10 calories each and go great with butter.

And then my mom always packs the classics:
1. Goldfish - because that advertising campaign that had the jingle that said "and my mom says they're okay!" really worked on my mom! Thank you, Pepperidge Farm corporation!!
2. Wheat thins - they're a health food. Especially when you eat the whole box in one sitting.
3. Nilla wafers
4. Beef jerky - these come in varieties. One variety comes in "sesame chicken" flavor. WTF?

And there we go. A brief overview of my finals eating habits. I hope all of you are feeding your bodies well during this stressful time. Just relax, take a bite out of that sandwich you found under your bed, and remember that the feudal lords don't have card access to the Rock.

Friday, December 31, 2010

Cookies and Shit

Out of sheer laziness and a lack of desire to synthesize even a short wikipedia page about it, I believe that the word “cookie” is probably European in origin maybe and describes any relatively flat mixture of carbohydrates that is eaten by people and animals. As someone who passionately believes that as long as the most basic of constitutive elements are present, you can call any food item anything, what cookies are as defined by the experts means very little to me.

For example, what is the difference between jam and jelly? Maybe the difference matters for marketing purposes, but everyone knows that the true difference is that one cannot jelly one’s penis down someone’s throat.

This is important, obviously, (to me) because I have participated in very heated arguments about what it is that defines a cookie. Does a cookie have to be sweet? Contain butter? Be edible?! What is edible? What are tortillas? I hope to explore these questions and more in this blog post as I outline my special, personal relationship with cookies. Or not because most of this shit is stream-of-consciousness nonsense I write when I’m not hungry, which is almost never.

Cookies are a near and dear thing for me because like the holy grail or some strains of Buddhism, it matters not the goal that lies at the end, but the journey you make in getting blah blah blah. In my search to bake or find or extort the perfect cookie, I have consumed more oats and chocolate and butter and probably lots of bugs than is healthy.

My mom and I sometimes make cookies, but we usually leave that process up to the good folks at whatever company makes oreos and the momofuku milk bar on 13th street and 2nd ave. But knowing how much butter and sugar and parts of bugs probably go into cookies, we try and make our own, healthy versions but we have since conceded to the fact that butter and sugar are pretty fucking important.

We tried to make our own kind of radical cookie, which contains wheat germ, pudding, and a quarter of the butter the recipe calls for. Then we sat around in the kitchen eating the dried buffalo turd-shaped abominations that came out of the oven and talked about politics or why Americans are fat. My mother has many theories about both and sometimes they combine in interesting ways.

“I heard 33% of Americans are obese! What about when the next war happens with China? Have you ever shot at a fat person? So easy!”

I had this conversation over break. Apart from thinking that war with China is inevitable, my mom used to tease the fat kid at her school and throw stuff at him (like rocks). The kids called him “fatso” which sounds hilarious in Korean (Ttung-Ttung). I like to imagine the kids made “you’re so fat…” jokes like “ur so fat that the next geopolitical crisis in Northeast Asia will concern territorial claims over you” but they were probably too hungry to form such large sentences.

While this teasing may have been a product of some form of deeply rooted socio-economic angst (if you were fat, you were probably not toiling in the fields) it’s still pretty horrible. Also hilarious. As my mom likes to say, morality is ambiguous in the developing world. Lol mom.

Anyway, she also likes to complain about how much butter goes into everything. She screamed when I put a whole stick of softened butter into the mashed potatoes I made for thanksgiving and told everyone at the table to avoid them. So cookies are something we generally avoid making together because the politics of butter in my family borders on the fanatical.

I have since searched elsewhere for cookies and the Lord hath provided (mostly at ADPhi and Music Department events). I like M&M cookies because studies show that rainbows make things taste like they are heterogeneous when it’s actually all the same shitty gelatinous sugar matrix (I’m looking at you, Skittles). I also like the concept of garbage cookies, or cookies made of random crap, loosely held together by butter and sugar. Of course, the nature of butter and sugar makes it so that you could probably throw real garbage in there and it’ll probably taste passable as long as you don’t burn it.

But my favorite kind is the kind you eat when there’s nothing else to eat except in that tin you got for Christmas four months ago and it’s 3AM. You are studying for a final so you go to town on the motherfuckers while getting crumbs all over your keyboard. THE BEST! Really, it’s the worst, but that moment where you find that tin hidden underneath your unwashed unmentionables is true magic, like goddamn Christmas or plate tectonics.

So returning to the question I posed earlier, what is a cookie? Also, what makes a good cookie? Science is inconclusive, so let’s leave it alone. If someone ever tells you that they have the answer, he/she is a false Messiah so throw rocks at it.

Do you want the recipe for the worst cookies my mom and I ever made?

Wheat Germ (The rest of the bag you bought 70% off at the health foods/Chinese medicine store)

Splenda (Because sweetener-induced cancer is still preferable to obesity)

Butter (a quarter of what you would usually use. Eyeball this amount)

Vanilla Pudding Mix (How long as that been under the sink?)

1 teaspoon of Kosher salt

Mix the butter and splenda together or something. Add the dry ingredients and mix as long as it takes for the main character on Dae Jang Gum, the wildly popular Korean serial drama, to sort out the morally ambiguous dilemma facing her in this particular episode, and then spoon out in turd-sized chunks onto a baking sheet that you forgot to grease. Put it in the oven at a high heat and then take it out and tell your dad that the reason the house smells so bad is because you were playing with fire over the sink. Eat two or so with your mom and throw the rest out.

I’m sure vegan cookie recipes exist out there, but in our defense, we had bought a shitload of wheatgerm before realizing it actually tastes like the dirt you scrape off of a root vegetable so we were trying to get rid of it. And I was too lazy to connect to the internet and my mom doesn’t know how.

Anyways, the point is that they were still fucking cookies.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Rice and Shit

Billions of people across the world agree, rice is good shit. A short post on rice and why it's great.

What makes rice great?
1. If you're lazy as balls like my dad and just want carbs, just eat rice with sauce. Once we had a "guys night" when my mom went to Maryland and we watched Korean War movies and ate rice with sauce on it and maybe downloaded a trial version of Starcraft.

2. It keeps in all temperatures. This is useful when you live on a mountain or some shit like Tibetans(?)

3. If you're in the mood for a thousand of something, rice hits the spot. Sometimes I'm in the mood for a thousand ice creams, but there are lots of metaphysical and logistical problems with such untamed desire.

Rice also comes in many forms, like a final video game boss or racism. It's an incredibly versatile food:

1. Rice Balls
Rice balls are great because they're portable, quick, and can hide unpleasant surprises for your enemies. My mom tells a great story about the time my dad forgot to pick her up from work so she put bananas and mayo in a rice ball she packed for him.

me: so what happened?
mom: he threw up! HAHAHAHA

Always check yourself and your rice balls before you bite into them. Apparently during the Edo Period, a powerful shogun was assassinated via poisonous riceball prepared by a beautiful geisha-ninja. I also apparently just made this up lol.

2. Congee
There's a great place in Flushing, NY where you sit down and the Chinese waitresses very angrily ask you what you want and then less than five minutes later, a steaming bowl of savory and meaty congee is presented to you. Why are they so angry?!

3. Rice cake
Rice cake is the best fucking kind of cake, even though I pretend to love all cakes equally. To make them, you grind up rice, add hot water, mix, and BAM! None of that cream the butter preheat the oven 350 degrees bullshit. Making rice cakes with my mom was always fun, because those sessions were often much less confrontational because it's actually kind of a stressful process.

We like to press edible flowers into our rice cakes, so that when they cook, they get somewhat engulfed by the glutenous mass but are still visible through the translucent dough. Sometimes we don't use edible flowers and use petals from the flowers of hospital rooms of dead people (my mom is a nurse). I don't eat these. My mom's argument is that dead people can't enjoy flowers, which is true, but like other things she says, misses the point.

4. Noodles
Rice can be turned into noodles. I have yet to see this magical process at work, but I expect it involves a great deal of shamanistic ritual and animist woop-de-wooping.

I love making rice balls with my mom. Mostly because then I can actually see what goes in them. Sometimes what my mom likes to call "surprises" are actually absolutely horrifying and extremely strange.

me: Mom, WHAT THE HELL IS IN THIS?
mom: JOLLY RANCHER SURPRISE!!!!!

Anyways, here is a quick recipe for rice balls and some really great fillings and toppings you can put on them.

Ingredients:
Cooked steamed rice
Rice Vinegar
Dried Seaweed (nori)

utensils:
bowl
rice cooker
fan
wooden spoon/rice paddle

So take out the hot steamed rice from the rice cooker. To get the best rice for this, use a little less water than you normally would so the rice comes out a little drier. Then quickly pour the rice vinegar over the rice and mix with the paddle very quickly in chopping motions, stirring constantly.

It helps to have a helper with a fan nearby, fanning the rice as you mix and turn it. This will help the rice cool much faster and help you get even coverage over the rice.

Set aside a bowl of water and put in some salt. Or, if you have sesame oil, put that aside. Cover your hands with some of this water or oil and then get ready for shit to go down.

When the rice is sufficiently cooled, take a handful of it and form it into any shape you want. The traditional shape is a triangle, but balls and cylinders also work. Set them aside. If at this point, you want to put in the filling, it is a good time to do so.

Cut out strips of seaweed with scissors or a knife and wrap them around the rice balls as you see fit. Then you can cover them with sesame seeds, or seaweed flakes, or whatever you want. I sometimes like to roll them in hot chili powder!

Take time to experiment! Remember, it's not rocket science-it's a fucking ball of rice.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

Turkey and Shit

Thanksgiving is fast approaching and along with it comes a few extra pounds and so much fucking gravy. Nothing upsets me more than the sounds of sloshing (which lots of Thanksgiving food does) but there is really a quiet elegance to consuming that much food in such a short amount of time.

Thanksgiving at my house is very different than your standard white-bread TV Thanksgiving because we came to a consensus as a family that Thanksgiving food is "fucking gay" (my words) and "Unimaginative and antiquated" (my little sister's words). So we do Thanksgiving OUR WAY.

You could probably shit up some rhetoric about how we have "made Thanksgiving reflective of our immigrant experience, blending our unique cultural heritage with a time-honored American tradition," but honestly I think it's all about finding an excuse to bust out our deep-fryer.

Here's a breakdown of the staple dishes we eat at Thanksgiving. Hopefully I'll have pictures up next weekend of the gastronomic massacre.

1. not turkey

When I was a kid (6 years old), the Rim family hadn't celebrated Thanksgiving yet. When it came up in school, I just thought it was some Catholic thing like Easter because my early education was administered by a legion of stern Asian nuns. However, once I found out that American society had dedicated an ENTIRE FUCKING DAY to overeating, I wanted in bad.

I wanted turkey. Did you ever do that lame ass thing where you drew around your hand and turned it into a turkey? I did. Many times. I wanted it. I wanted to eat it. It's a common theme in my life. If I want it, I probably also want it in my mouth. ZING! lol

Anyway, I asked my mom to make a turkey. She made everything else, so why hadn't she ever made turkey? How come we never did things like other American families?

"Chicken is better," she said. And my dad nodded in agreement.

She said this with the cold, judgmental face reserved for the underperforming children of her peers and women who showed too much boob. But I later found out that they had eaten Turkey many times at her friend Ganel's house, a large and extremely friendly Black woman who worked with my mom and later taught me the basics of tax evasion. They absolutely hated the turkey. But they liked the "The Black stuff," which I thought was terribly racist until I found out they were referring to black-eyed peas.

So, on Thanksgiving day, I was greeted by a large plate of fried chicken. I cried. I know, I know "shut up you stupid brat." I grudgingly ate the chicken, which was delicious, but tasted like defeat. I realized later in life, many turkeys later in various contexts, that my mother was right all along. Turkey is fucking gross. NEEDS MORE HAM!

And then we started going to my uncle's house for Thanksgiving, where he'd scare us by saying that he shot the turkey himself. It turned out to be true. Koreans don't fuck around about the harsh realities of life. That turkey isn't that bad. I guess when there's still a bit of fear left in the animal, it tastes that much better.

2. Kalbi - Korean-style short ribs! A post is coming up soon about this delicious, delicious stuff.

3. Fried Sweet Potatoes - Check this out: you take sweet potatoes, cook them in a frying pan with loads of brown sugar and them BAM you had things that look like turds but taste like Jesus.

4. Sushi Rolls! Except not with fish-with vegetables. And if you argue that sushi needs to have fish to actually be sushi, then suck my dick. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushi <---Here, educate yourself.

Other stuff too. Here's what the menu this year looks like: Fried Chicken, Fried Sweet Potato, Sushi Rolls, Kalbi, Potato Croquettes, Kimchi, Lots of fried rice and regular rice, sweet potato cake, sweet iced rice drink, glass noodles with veggies, pickled radish, half-moon rice cakes, stuffing, and NO GRAVY. JIZZ.

So here's a recipe for NOT TURKEY:

Ingredients:
Not a turkey
Fried Chicken

Directions
1. Do not make a turkey
2. Make fried chicken

Thursday, November 11, 2010

Dumplings and Shit

There is just something so elegant about random shit packed into a ball of carbs. It exists in absolutely every advanced culture:

Italian: Ravioli, stuffed-crust pizza
Mexican: Empanada, taco
Indian: Samosas
Russian: Pirozhki
French: not an advanced culture
Asian: Dumplings
American: EVERYTHING

It's really so simple! Take something, cook it, and then put it in something made of some sort of carb. Name one thing that wouldn't taste good wrapped in dough and fried and I'll tell you you're wrong and we'll try and make it together! But don't try and be cute and say "poop" or "AIDS" 'cause I'll fucking cut you.

Dumplings, the Asian version of the pig in a blanket, are up there along with diet coke and fried chicken as undisputed favorite things for me to eat. New York has TONS of Asians, so I was popping this shit all the time. But, nothing will taste better to me than my mom's dumplings.

Imagine biting into something crispy yet very tender. It starts off with that wonderful taste of seared dough and then immediately the juices from the meat filling explode onto your tongue. The ginger and the garlic flavors and smells immediately hit you and soon you feel the textures of the meat and the chopped cabbage and glass noodles. In a few more bites, that shit is GONE. Pair that with a bowl of steaming ramen and you're set for a New York January during winter break.

But beyond eating them, making dumplings is a process and a joy in itself. You make the filling and you have the little pre-packaged dough wrappers and suddenly you're fucking Michelangelo. When I would make them with my mom, sometimes I would try and get creative and deviate from the standard crescent moon design. My mom always encouraged my creativity, and would point to the misshapen ones to our guests after they were cooked and proudly tell them that I helped make them. But BILLIONS OF ASIANS AGREE: the crescent moon shape works!

I'll never forget the last time I made dumplings with my mom (We call them "mandu" in Korean). She always complimented me the way I folded the tops of them, like pleats in a dress. I think because we both have above-average spacial reasoning skills (it's true. Watch me pack sweaters into a box one day if you have nothing else to do), I was always able to place the right amount of mixture into the dough so that it didn't spill out but just enough that you got some nice juicy pork when you bit into it.

We always use the time sitting on the cold kitchen floor to talk about things. Ever since I went to college, conversations with my mom have gotten longer and longer because even silences are meaningful when you see people every day. She always asks what I'm learning, and I'll tell her some convoluted academic bull shit and she'll just say "mmhmm" and tell me to "learn more and do things better."

Anyway, these conversations are always great, except sometimes they can get confrontational.

An example:
Me: I love making mandu with you. Do you remember when I used to-
Mom: HAS JESUS LEFT YOUR LIFE?!?!?!

That scared the shit out of me because it came out of fucking nowhere. I swear, we were probably talking about proper eye care because it was around the time I got my new glasses. Beyond being time to catch up with me, it's time for my mom to tell me to do a variety of things that fall into three broad categories:

1. Make babies immediately with a wide-hipped Korean woman
2. Pray to Jesus to help me get a perfect score on the MCAT
3. Try alternative medicine because sticking needles in my thigh will fix my weight problem

Anyways, eventually we'll be done and I'll weave my way carefully around these questions ("All the wide-hipped Korean girls I know are Catholic," "Mom, if Jesus gave EVERY Korean kid a perfect score on the MCAT, then how would the white kids feel?" and "The last acupuncturist I saw molested me.") We'll put our several dozen dumplings in the steamer and watch a Korean soap together and then we'll eat the ugly ones and then feed them to my dad, who FLIPS A SHIT whenever we make dumplings.

So here's roughly how I remember how to make dumplings, the Jung Ok Rim way:

Ingredients:

Veggies
A cabbage
A few carrots
Onion
Chives (what the fuck are chives? I think that's what they're called. They're scallion-like. Maybe they're actually scallions)
Other veggies I've seen my mom use are carrots and mashed potato!

Real ingredients
A meat of your choice

Other shit
glass noodles
sugar
salt
soy sauce
sesame oil
honey
ground garlic and ginger

Instructions:
Chop up the veggies all fine and niceee. Toss them all together and set aside. I shouldn't have to explain this part all that hard.

TAKE THE GROUND MEAT and then add in a bit of salt, sugar, soy sauce, sesame oil, honey, and ground ginger and garlic. It should smell wonderful! If it doesn't, then you're doing something really wrong. Anyway, mix this up very well (use your hands! Like my mom says, using utensils is for pussies) and then combine this with the vegetables. If you want, then cook up some glass noodles in hot water, chop them up, and combine too!

THEN, this is the fun part. Make sure you have a clean workspace and sprinkle some flour or potato starch on a tray that you will use to place your dumplings after you've made them. Take a package of dumpling wrappers and open it. You can make these on your own, but why do that when it's cheaper to buy the packets yourself?

Take a small spoonful of your mixture and put it in the middle of the wrapper. Take some water dip your finger in it and wet the circumference of the wrapper. Then, press the sides together as if you were folding it in half, and WHA-BLAMO! You just made a dumpling!

Now, if you want to get all fancy and shit like me and my mom then you can pleat the tops. They are purely cosmetic but maybe they seal the filling better. Once you have a lot of these, get your steamer ready! If you don't have a steamer on hand, it's easy! Just get a frying pan, put on some sesame oil and then fry them for about 2-3 minutes. Then, pour a little bit of water into your pan and then cover. You'll get wonderfully steamed dumplings on one side and they'll also be fried on the other. Best of both worlds!

Enjoy with your favorite dipping sauce. Here's a favorite of mine. It's something I made up!

Soy sauce
Sesame oil (a little bit)
Siracha sauce
Sesame seeds
Honey

(Honestly, like i've said before, anything tastes good wrapped in dough and fried, so try whatever you want)

There you have it! My culture's incarnation of the pig in a blanket! These are perfect when you have a bunch of people who are coming over and only have half the day to prepare something for them that will disappear in a matter of minutes.

PS My acupuncturist did not actually molest me

Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Chicks, not Chickens

I fucking love chicken fingers. Here's a good example of how they affect my life. One beautiful Friday morning in front of the dining hall where they serve chicken fingers every Friday, I encountered an enthusiastic girl I sang with in chorus.

Girl: Hi, Joe!

Joe: Hi, (girl)!

Girl: I am SO EXCITED

Joe: ME TOO. I'VE BEEN WAITING ALL WEEK!!!

Girl: I KNOW!

Joe: What dipping sauces do you usually get?

Girl: wut.


Apparently there was a chorus concert that day or some shit. Anyways, here are a few reasons why chicken fingers are the best:


1. No Bones. Things with bones are fucking stupid!! Like dinosaurs!


fuck reading! I want me some chicken fingers!


2. They make vegetables taste good: I'm serious! Have you ever eaten lettuce? it's gross! But pair some lettuce with a chicken finger, and it's like it isn't even there!


3. Diversity: They come in all shapes, sizes, and colors! You have them gently fried or very crispy, long and thin to circular like chicken nuggets. Yay, diversity!

chicken fingers are color-blind


Here is how I usually make chicken fingers and a sauce I usually make with it. I just needed to express my love for the chicken finger.


Ingredients:

-Boneless chicken breasts, cut into strips OR you can just get chicken tenders pre-cut for you

-1/4 cup of milk

-1/4 cup of flour

-1 tablespoon cornstarch

-1/2 cup of cornflakes

-1/2 cup of panko bread crumbs (these are japanese style-bread crumbs and they're really flaky and nice)

-1 Egg

-Salt and pepper and whatever seasonings you want (I usually like 7 flavor chili powder) One other seasoning is probably best.


Preheat that shit to 400 degrees (I found that 375 is good for softer insides but you sacrifice the crunch on the surface. Your call, bros), or heat up some oil on high. Caution: hot oil is dangerous lol


First take the cornflakes and crush the shit out of them with your hands or a hammer or whatever. The easiest way I've found is to put them in a ziploc bag and sit on them, letting my weight crush them. Submiss them to your liking but if you're going to fry, then make sure the crumbs are very fine.


Take your chicken and cut them up into strips. The more even they are, the less you have to worry about being salmonella'd by a particularly big chunk that didn't get enough love. Season them with salt and pepper. You can marinate them for an hour in whatever marinade you like (My basic Asian marinade is really just white sugar, honey, soy sauce, sesame oil, and ground ginger) but these are fucking chicken fingers not thanksgiving dinner.


Crack the egg and beat it until it becomes that nice orange beaten color. Add the milk. This is your adhesive.Then sift the flour and cornstarch together. Starch is amazing. Also, take your crushed up cornflakes and then mix them in with the panko bread crumbs. Keep a clean workspace!

Then take a chicken finger, roll it around in the flour/cornstarch until they are lightly covered and then dip it in the egg and milk mixture. Quickly transfer to your crumb mixture (it is easiest to have this on a tray or something) and then cover them in delicious crumbs. Repeat with all the chickens.


Now, you can FRY or BAKE! Bake is at 400 degrees for crispiness, 375 for chicken juiciness. There is actually a big trade-off between these two types so choose wisely. 10-12 minutes for 400 degrees, a 17-20 minutes for 375.


Or you can FRY, which is really the best and should be the only option. Heat up a pan of oil (if you don't feel comfortable deep-frying, that's okay. Just have enough oil that you can cook half of the finger at a time. Heat it until a bit of breadcrumb dropped into it will start sizzling in that beautiful frying way. And then Add in 3-4 chicken fingers at a time (crowding the pan will reduce the heat) and then cook in there until GOLDEN BROWN. I usually estimate estimated time of completion at this point, but always by the time you get that nice brown color all round then they're definitely done.


Put them on a plate with a paper towel to let them drain.


Here is my favorite sauce to go along with this stuff:

1 Tbsp of BBQ Sauce

1 Tbsp of Ketchup

1 Tbsp of Soy Sauce

1/2 Tbsp of sugar

1/2 tbsp honey

Warning: The sauce is Asian