Mexican Lime and Garlic Marinated Fried Chicken - With Fixin's!

I've talked about this Mexican fried chicken to The Colonel quite a bit, and told him I would make it fairly soon after officially arriving to move in with him. We decided upon Saturday night for its debut in Phoenix. He informs me that he has been "jonesing" about it for days. I was unfamiliar with this term and asked if the origin was based upon the old saying about keeping up with the Joneses. No. Turns out it's a drug phrase. I learn only the best things in life from The Colonel. There's also another apparent inconceivable gap in my cultural education. I did not recognize the "Kit Kat Bar" theme song.

The recipe itself made it into my repertoire years ago when I was very young and freshly married at the tender age of 19, and I brought to the marriage a copy of Betty Crocker's International Cookbook, circa 1982. Oops, just dated myself. There were a few very good recipes in there although few were authentic. But the lime and garlic chicken was a big hit, and I've made it from time to time. I don't do it frequently because fried chicken makes a heck of a mess to clean.



The remains of the dish

But my baby is jonesing for it, so let's destroy the kitchen and spend some time on Sunday cleaning up the oily damage. I was also smart enough to pack corn flour into one of the boxes that traveled with me on the third trip. Also, The Colonel deserves a celebratory dinner, having spent four hours and ten minutes today assembling a dresser that arrived in one big, 125 pound cardboard box Friday.

I made this with the full "fixin's" of Drunken Beans and Emeril Lagasse's Jicama Slaw. Both recipes have been previously posted, and links are below.

We're drinking Negro Modelos with it.

Mangia!

Mexican Lime and Garlic Marinated Fried Chicken


Ta Da!

Based  on an adaptation of an Epicurious recipe called South American Fried Chicken and my recollections of the Betty Crocker recipe.
    

1 frying chicken, weighing no more than 3 pounds, cut up for frying Chinese-style, or 8 chicken thighs, chopped in half crosswise (I also cut up the back where little chicken oysters lie, but you could skip this part and just freeze them for stock)

1/2 cup freshly squeezed lime juice

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 tablespoon Tajin seasoning, or chile powder

Salt and freshly milled black pepper

1 cup corn flour (very fine cornmeal — not cornstarch)

lard or peanut or vegetable oil, for frying

hot sauce

2 limes, cut into wedges

 

Wash the chicken and pat dry. Put the pieces into a large nonreactive glass or stainless steel bowl and pour the lime juice over them. Sprinkle with the minced garlic, a large pinch of salt, several liberal grindings of black pepper and the Tajin. Toss until the seasoning is uniformly distributed and set aside to marinate for at least 1 hour, refrigerated. (Or cover and marinate overnight in the refrigerator; remove from the refrigerator 30 minutes before you are ready to cook the chicken.)

           

Place the corn flour in a paper or large plastic ziplock bag. Shake to coat the inside. Fit a wire cooling rack over a cookie sheet and place it in the center of the oven. Preheat the oven to 150°F (or Warm setting). Fill a deep cast-iron skillet, Dutch oven, or deep-fat fryer with enough lard or oil to come halfway up the sides, at least 2 inches deep. Over medium-high heat, bring the fat to 375°F (hot but not smoking).

When the fat is hot, lift the chicken pieces a few at a time from their marinade, allowing the excess to flow back into the bowl. Drop them into the bag of corn flour, close the top, and shake until the chicken is well coated. Lift them out of the corn flour, shake off the excess, and slip them into the fat. Repeat until the pan is full without crowding. Fry, maintaining a temperature of 365°F, turning once, until the chicken is a rich golden brown and cooked through, 8 to 10 minutes, depending on type an size of pieces (on the 6 minute end are wings, drumsticks and back pieces; the thighs and breast pieces go the distance).
           
Lift the chicken from the fat, drain well, and transfer to the wire rack in the oven while you fry the remaining chicken. Serve hot, with hot sauce and lime wedges passed separately.

Drunken Beans:

http://chimangiabenevivechronicles.blogspot.com/2013/09/drunken-beans.html

Emeril's Jicama Slaw:

Straightforward per recipe, except I switched out sugar for honey because my Honey took me by a farmer's market off the Piestewa Highway*.

http://chimangiabenevivechronicles.blogspot.com/2013/09/emeril-lagasses-jicama-slaw.html

*Piestewa is what Squaw Mountain is called now. I am having trouble with it because I remember it as Squaw Mountain, but the Navajo and the Hopi nations went after the naming rights.

Per Wikipedia:

Since at least 1910, the name Squaw Peak had been used in reference to the mountain. Other historic names included Squaw Tit Mountain, Phoenix Mountain and Vainom Do'ag, the Pima name for the mountain.^[7] As the term "squaw" is considered derogatory by some, numerous efforts to change the name of the mountain were made through the years. State Representative Jack Jackson, himself a Navajo, submitted a bill to change the name annually beginning in 1992, which generated repeated and often raw debates in Arizona. In 1997, the local youth group of the American Indian Movement, which filed a petition with the State Board on Geographic and Historic Names in 1997 to change the name to Iron Mountain, the English translation of the mountain's native Pima name. The board researched the issue for nearly a year before ruling in July 1998 that too much doubt existed as to whether the name Vainom Do'ag actually referred to the mountain in question or another nearby peak and the petition was rejected, although the board left the door open to alternative possible name-changes.<sup>[8]

Who is this "Piestawa"?</sup>

Specialist Lori Ann Piestewa (/paɪˈɛstəwɑː/ py-ESS-tə-wah;^[3] December 14, 1979 – March 23, 2003) was a U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps soldier killed during the same Iraqi Army attack in which fellow soldiers Shoshana Johnson and Jessica Lynch sustained injuries. A member of the Hopi tribe, Piestewa was the first Native American woman in history to die in combat while serving with the U.S. military and the first woman in the U.S. armed forces killed in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.^[2] Arizona's Piestewa Peak is named in her honor.