May 13, 2009 By cheryl

A Fried Chicken Habit

I have been on a fried chicken bender.

It began with the ladies-of-the-night Thai chicken wings and continued the next day with bright-red Indian fried chicken for lunch and then a dinner of Indonesian nasi ayam penyet, a dish of rice and gloriously crunchy cumin/coriander/lemongrass-seasoned fried chicken that I’m still hoping will make its way across the ocean to New York City.

By the time I sat down to my next meal and saw the Malay fried chicken wings on the table, I knew it was time to admit: I have a problem.

Everyone has a comfort food and mine, somehow, is fried chicken.

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May 8, 2009 By cheryl

A View From The Road: Spam Fries in Singapore

Best. Discovery. Ever.

“Luncheon Meat Fries” at Wild Oats in Singapore — an amazing bar food that consists of Spam sliced into thin strips and then deep fried.

Surely, this must be the reason God invented pigs.

April 27, 2009 By cheryl

A Fashion Critic's Bacon-Fat Cookies

High-end fashion and bacon fat.

I couldn’t think of two things more disparate and yet, flipping through the pages of the New York Times a few years ago, there it was: Fashion critic Cathy Horyn‘s paean to a recipe for Swedish ginger cookies made with bacon grease that she has “cherished for years.”

My first reaction: Be still my beating heart, both figuratively and, quite possibly, literally. The cookie seemed like an insane, artery-clogging idea. The first ingredient listed, after all, was “3/4 cup bacon fat, cooled (from 1 1/2 to 2 pounds Oscar Mayer bacon).”

Two pounds of bacon? Cathy was officially my new hero.

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