I’m writing a play about hot chicken. Saying that aloud it sounds funny, but anyone who’s been paying attention knows this is something I’ve had on my mind. I’d rather be writing a gripping, thoughtful Baltimore crime drama, but that’s a subject I’m less familiar with. (Perhaps it is my drowsy-typing, but I first spelled Baltimore “Balitomore,” and then “Balitimore.” And crime, “crim.”) But as of all of you understand, when considering hot chicken, I can produce reams of snappy insight.
The trouble with writing is that one often has to reread one’s own work. Wading through a self-made linguistic swamp is bad enough, but when the monologues are awash in adjectives like “golden-brown” and “crispy,” and the dialogue mostly concerns smoking hot oil and dumptrucks of cayenne pepper, it sets my stomach off. This is dangerous. It’s hard enough to write this blog while I’m hungry (indeed, that’s why it’s been quiet lately—I’ve been hungry all the time), but to produce a thing as long and theoretically not-sucky as a full play, a full stomach is necessary.
To combat those cravings, I broke out my Wesson oil, infrared thermometer and the fancy fried food drying basket I bought myself for Christmas. (It ensures a crispy crunchy crisp!) But I was frankly too fucking tired to fry chicken. It’s not just the mess and not just the forty some odd minutes standing around getting splattered by hot oil—it’s the concentration. I simply didn’t have it in me to spend all day figuring out what went wrong last time and how I was going to do it right this time. I didn’t want to dump a whole bottle of Tabasco into a bowl and pray that the meat would get the message. I didn’t want to stress; I wanted to eat.
So I fried catfish. You ever fry catfish? It’s easy. Little egg, little corn meal, and about six minutes in the pan. And then you’re eating catfish! I had leftover evil-spice-rub from my last chickening, which I dug out of the fridge to slather over the whitefish. It was hot enough that I got the hiccoughs, the fish was good, and if it hadn’t been, it wouldn’t have mattered.
But the wonderful thing about fried fish, man, is leftovers. And no bones. A left over fish filet, with zero bones in it, is halfway to a sandwich. So yesterday afternoon, in the spirit of laziness, I rummaged in my fridge for things that look like they could go into my no-bones fish sandwich.
Cheese? Fresh out. Lettuce? Nothing. Tomatoes? Nope.
I found mayo, the evil-spice-rub, and a red onion. Piled it on rye toast, which is not exactly po’ boy grade, and chawed through it while catching up on Caprica (a show which, I’m happy to report, took its third episode as an opportunity to stop being lame). The combination of sweet onion and spicy rub cut through the fishy-fishiness that usually makes fried fish sandwiches impossible to finish. It didn’t taste fishy—it was just good.
An evening of catfish-frying was just that, an evening. Not a whole day. Cooking took a half hour, yielding useful leftovers and no mess. Afterwards I was not full to sleepiness. In every way it was a simpler, cleaner, more sensible process than killing myself to cook hot chicken.
But I’m not writing a play about catfish.
