I'm not even pretending to be healthy here...

Hello, my darling little lovelies. This post will be somewhat of a different format this evening. You see, I stuffed up. Nothing terrible, I promise! You see, I accidentally invented last night, and I didn't have my camera handy to take photos for you! I am so sorry. Truly, because in this case, you would have jumped through the screen to get at what I am about to tell you about.

JP and I have a very good friend here named M. You see, M is from French-speaking Canada, and works for the consulate here in Sydney. Well, he did until today. You see, he got transfered to Colombia recently (Can you say hello vacation?! Cause I sure can...) and as a farewell, I wanted to cook him dinner. He mentioned to me once that he had never had real at-home fried anything, to which I naturally reacted with abhorrence. Naturally. So, my grand plan: make M a fried feast to die for. I pulled out all the stops; Deep Fried Chicken from this post, buttered potatoes, green beans, and to top it all off, Beer Battered Onion Rings.

This is where I started to invent. You see, I had everything I needed except the chicken for this. I had onions, flour, garlic, beans, potatoes... everything. I even had some buttermilk for some strange reason. So on my way home from work, I swung through my most reliable grocer and grabbed some chicken to fry up. Off home I went, super excited about making this dinner. I just knew it was going to be epic. Well, I got home, started cutting up the onions, grabbed some flour and added an egg. I went to the fridge, and....

NO BEER!!!!!


I looked at the clock, and saw that it would be cutting it close, but I could just make it to the bottle shop before it closed. Then I remembered I had already put the oil on the stove. And trust me, the thought of leaving 3 liters of hot oil on my stove top while I ran to the store just didn't sit well with me. I needed to go to Plan B. The only problem was, I had never made Beer Battered Onion Rings before, so there really was no Plan B. I was just gonna look up the recipe online and go from there. Enter Inventive Craig, stage right.

I didn't really even think to hard about what I did. I just kind of threw everything together and hoped for the best. And, trust me, best is what I got. The Onion Rings were super crispy and light, and the batter I came up with was divine! M couldn't stop eating them. In fact, neither could JP or I.

Really it was a stroke of cooking genius. I already mentioned that I had started with the batter when I made the terrible discovery. I briefly contemplated using whiskey, but then thought better of it, as any spirits here tend to cost roughly the equivalent of a small house in Manhattan. I dug through my fridge and saw the buttermilk. And Tabasco. And it was like a little halo of light, with that 'idea music' you get in the movies. I poured about half the bottle of Tabasco and most of the buttermilk into the batter, added some salt and pepper, and mixed it up to a consistency of wall paper paste. A bit thinner, actually. I really was going on a hope and a prayer here. Well, really, just the one time I had seen Paula Deen make Onion Rings on tv, and vaguely remembered what the consistency looked like that I was going for.

Turns out, I am a cooking genius. Make these tonight. And for thanks, I will be accepting donations of the cash variety. Plane tickets to Colombia are expensive, you know...


xoxo Craig