Lost party

Sorry this is a week late, but with traveling and also trying out blogging via mobile, I have not been good about posting food adventures.  Anyway, this feast above was made for our Lost-themed party, to celebrate/mourn the ending of a great, great show, one of the best on television ever!  I wasn't so pleased with the finale, but thanks Lost for 6 good years of entertainment!  I'll talk about the food first and then leave you with some thoughts on the finale -- priorities, people.

Many others have created awesome Dharma templates for labels, so we grabbed a few and resized them to fit some of our ingredients -- the beer was already made for the most part, but S worked on the pineapple soda.  We also decided to make Mr. Cluck's chicken, in honor of Hurley being one of our favorite characters.  I tried a new recipe, based on a standard one you can find online for "oven fried chicken" (trying to be healthy, here), but brought my magic chicken know-how to it.  Here's the recipe:

3 lbs organic free range chicken (I like drums the best but you can mix the parts if you want)
6 TBSP cornstarch (this is approximate, don't worry about being exact)
3 C cornflakes, crushed in a ziploc bag
2 eggs, beaten
2 T kosher flake salt
2 t granulated garlic
2 t granulated onion
2 t Penzey's fox point (another day I will post about my love for Penzey's, I get all my spices there)
1 t smoked paprika

Preheat oven to 350.  Add salt, garlic, onion, fox point, and paprika to crushed cornflakes in bag, shake to disperse.  Set up workstation in following order: chicken, cornstarch on a plate, egg in wide shallow bowl, cornflake mix bag, baking sheet covered in a silpat.  Proceed to dip chicken into cornstarch, then egg, then cornflake mix, and place on baking sheet.  (Aside: I use cornstarch to help render the fat/make the skin crispy.  You could do skinless and skip the cornstarch to make it even healthier).  Put dipped chicken into oven, bake for 45 minutes. 

The chicken turned out extremely well, the cornflake mix was delicious.  It was kind of a pain to make but worth it -- just as good as fried chicken... well, not as delicious as Thomas Keller's fried chicken with rosemary and lemon, but still really good.  (I have the Ad Hoc cookbook and will try to make TK's chicken someday this year, I promise!)

We tried to make coconut rum ice cream, but the alcohol and hot day made the ice cream experiment fail.  So, we made pina coladas with the mixture instead!  Nom!

Ok, now that the food is covered, I will post some of my thoughts on Lost.  While the finale was entertaining and emotionally satisfying because of the incredible characters on the show, as someone who is not particularly spiritual, the ending went in a direction that was ultimately intellectually unsatisfying.  One could argue that because the ending was an amalgam of the Aeneid and Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories that it was literary, but they went beyond metaphysics to mystics, IMHO.  The confusing and minor role that the Others played in all of Season 6 was only one instance of a larger problem with the whole last bit of the series -- the earlier mysteries that so consumed us were not addressed, creating an odd dynamic in which each new twist and turn relating to Sideways world and the introduction of new characters acted as distractions, rather than weaving together the tapestry of the show's multiple storylines into a coherent whole.  If Darlton could have done this, the finale could have been the greatest finale in the history of television.  There is a reason that JK Rowling's work on Harry Potter is so beloved; she ends her books with a huge aha payoff for her readers, in which the multiple storylines do come together, kind of like that moment when you, after staring at a 3D optical illusion, suddenly see what you are supposed to see.

Regardless of how it ended, I was happy to be able to celebrate and take part in a national media event, complete with themed food.  I can't think of another television series that is likely to cause me to want to participate in this way, but hopefully something will come down the pike eventually.  Until next time, namaste!

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