Chicken: Deschutes Brewery, Portland, Oregon

I just finished the last of last night's fried wings from the Portland branch of Deschutes Brewery.

In writing this post, I imagine  clone of myself drifting through Portland, full of bacon but wistfully wishing for a different form of crispy animal fat.  I recommend these wings to said clone as a fine "fried bone-in" dose of chicken.

I skipped the sauce. My clones and I are not interested in using chicken as a foil for other flavors--I want my chicken to taste like chicken and chicken fat, plus salt. So when the menu promised me "Fresh Squeezed IPA, Thai chiles, togarashi spice, honey, fresh lime" on the Fresh Squeezed wings, I decided that those flavors would want to be the star, and I demoted them. I ordered my wings with no sauce whatsoever, and added my own salt.

They were very good. When a dish remains delicious despite my determination to strip the cook of all of his flavoring tools, I'm impressed.

Big drumettes with nice skin covering. None of the two-bone middle part--what DO you call the three pieces of a wing? I'll need to find out. I miss the middle part, but it means that the ripping and tearing that makes me feel like a chicken-focused sibling of the Cookie Monster is largely eliminated.

And good, crunchy but not excessive, coating. I tend to be a dust-with-flour advocate, since battery coatings often "protect" the chicken skin from frying and rendering, and then why did you fry chicken? But this is a thicker crunchier coating that still allows the skin to fry. It makes me think of rice flour, but the menu doesn't make any gluten-free claims.

In addition to being good hot, they're very good as leftovers; they don't get soggy or drop all their fried coating or develop that old-oil flavor or any of the other failings of leftover fried chicken.

So.

That is all.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Chicken: The Flying Pig, Vancouver, BC

In the interest of getting the vital chicken data into the blog, I will now and then be posting really short posts. This is one of them.

The Flying Pig in Vancouver, British Columbia is a nice place, a little crowded, pleasant staff, just fine on all the setting and service issues.

I post because the parmesan breaded chicken cutlet on the lunch menu is a nice, satisfying, comforting dose of chicken, of the boneless skinless crusty-coating white meat category. I recommend it.

I also see that the online menu mentions "bone marrow cheezy bread." How could we have missed that?

Chicken: Homer Street Cafe, Vancouver, BC, and a new direction for the Rambling Chicken

So, in my other blog, I once discussed the maddening situation of being in an unfamiliar city and not knowing where the perfume is. Aiee! But there's something much worse: being in a city where crunchy rendered chicken skin is available for sale, and not knowing it.

Homer Street Cafe in Vancouver, British Columbia, sells crunchy rendered chicken skin. See? Now you know. And now I'll remember where that chicken skin was, because I've blogged about it.

I've been thinking that I should blog about where a person can eat good fried chicken. And  other poultry both fried and unfried. Bacon, too, would be represented. Stuff like that. Wherever I eat. Home or traveling. And I happen to have this blog with a nicely appropriate name for that purpose, that has been napping since (hang on...) 2011. And I own the domain for that blog, because Himself kindly bought it for me in case I ever wanted to use it. Right now the domain points to the Other Blog, but we'll fix that in a few days.

So here I go.

We went to Vancouver, British Columbia, over (United States) Thanksgiving. We've gone to Vancouver for Thanksgiving, off and on, for years. There's good food, not too many people are traveling that way, and we're not making the cooks and waiters work on a holiday, since they already finished their Thanksgiving. We went, among other places, to Homer Street Cafe.

It's nice. Bright. Pretty. A well-appointed room and casual happy customers, so you don't feel that you have to live up to the room. Friendly staff. It exceeds pretty much all of my requirements for setting, service, blah blah. I say "blah blah' because what I care most about is the food.

The food included crunchy rendered chicken skin, so the rest of their menu could be limited to bran muffins and lukewarm water served in soup cans, and I'd still be delighted with them. But the rest of the menu is lovely. We shared the rendered chicken skin and an appetizer of chicken wings and drumsticks, and I had a quarter chicken while Himself had the special of roast suckling pig. The menu has at least a dozen more things that I wanted to try, including the maple butter pork belly.

It's both sad, and life-saving, that I won't be in Vancouver more often.

That is all.

(No image. I failed to photograph the chicken skin, and nothing else seemed right.)