This is soooooooooo wrong on so many levels. Strain your rice??? WTF
I mean, I’m cool if this is the way you like your rice, but a good way to make Mao roll over in his grave.
A rice cooker is very forgiving. Bringing your rice to a boil and then covered on low is decent. Steaming your rice in a nice little clay pot is awesome. But boiling the rice and straining out the excess water is, well, blasphemous or some something wicked. Words just fail me.
I actually learned this method from a South Asian restaurant. It may seem weird to you, but it works a treat.
In fact, looking online, it seems the straining method is normal for Indian styles of rice like Basmati.
Use self-rising flour and don’t over mix. Let the mixture sit in the bowl for a few minutes to activate the baking powder. Fry in a nonstick pan at medium heat without fat, if you want that uniform brownness. I like to fry in a bit of butter. When bubbles appear on the surface, flip them over.
Follow this copycat mcnugget recipe exactly. Always comes out perfectly. Is also wicked good with light or dark meat turkey. Then after you get the hang of judging frying chicken, work on this recipe.
One issue of going by KFC for friend chicken is that it is fried in a pressure fryer, not something you can do at home. As someone else posted, real southern fried chicken is shallow fried more often than not and is easy to fuck up. Personally, I prefer our homemade nuggets. I rarely bother with KFC or the ilk, and I do not like franchise made nuggets, I wait until we make them at home.
Go to your local fast food place, the kind that has the huge container for used oil that a recycler comes and slurps out the used oil for recycle. Ask them if you can add your pitiful little gallon of oil to theirs - they normally do not pay anything, the recycler comes and gets it for free because they sell the recycled oil products. I have never had an issue with being able to dump a paltry gallon of oil in with theirs.
I really wish this were true, because it would mean that more people were actually frying chicken in their kitchens. Unfortunately, that’s really rare these days, and the vast majority of southern fried chicken is pulled from the deep fryers of neighborhood chicken restaurants (if one is lucky enough to have such a thing nearby). Personally, I think the alleged superiority of chicken fried in a skillet is overstated, but either way is fine with me.
If your’re talking roast chicken, I have had good luck with stuffing the cavity with a citrus fruit (lemon or orange) and an onion cut in half, some fresh herbs, too, if you have them. I also lift the skin a little and put some butter under it. Be sure to have a meat thermometer to check for proper doneness, before I got one I tended to overcook because I was paranoid about undercooking.
I oven-fry mine (similar to this), which is pretty much foolproof.