It's FRYday. Get it?

Our substitute, Chef Glen, is a Polack from the South Side of Chicago (it takes one to know one), and the first thing he said when he walked into the classroom this morning was, "How 'bout dem Bears?" Like Chef Joseph, he peppers his lecture with stories, but he calls us "sports fans," as in, "Listen up, sports fans," and he's a bit rougher around the edges. More like my dad, in fact: "If you burn yourself on that boiling oil, I'm gonna be really mad."

But nobody got burned, and there was lots of high fiving and celebrating going on in the skills kitchen — we all rocked with our foods today, and it was Good Stuff. Three kinds of batter for deep frying: tempura (for shrimp and veggies — Aaron and I used mushrooms, eggplant, and green onion), beer batter (for fish, and we made fries as well), and flour/egg/panko, for chicken strips and onions. We also had to make a soy dipping sauce, tartar sauce, starting with the mayonnaise, and cocktail sauce (fortunately, we didn't have to start from scratch on the ketchup!) The important things about frying are temperature regulation (I definitely need a clip-on thermometer for the pot, before I try this at home) and a deep pot of oil, so the food can bounce around.

When preparing the chicken, the Chef advised us to use the "wet hand/dry hand" technique, where you use one hand to take the chicken out of the buttermilk, the other one to dredge it in seasoned flour, the wet hand to dip it in and out of the beaten egg, and the dry hand again to coat the chicken in panko crumbs. I prefer the "one messy, one clean" hand method that I learned from a cooking show. I want to say it was Jacques Pepin but it seems more likely that it was Rachael Ray — who advised getting just one hand messy with both wet and dry ingredients. That way you have a free clean hand, just in case the phone rings.