Ralph's Fried Chicken

Ralph's Fried Chicken is quite amazing. I discovered it going into Ralph's grocery store late one night on Ventura near the 101 entrance in Studio City, CA. You see they mark down items after a certain time. Don't know when it is, but it happens. Especially later in the evening when fresh food has been prepared in their own kitchen and it must be sold or trashed in the dumpster cause otherwise it's day old and that won't fly here in the land of the fresh. SO I really like fried chicken but as you know unless you have had your head buried in the sand, cholesterol lives in the white floured mix and in the oil they use to fry it in. But alas, there is hope, not for Ralph's friend chicken necessarily but for chicken in general in terms of cooking oil. There is now Palm Oil.

I am only familiar with this because I was hired to shoot video of their illustrious booth at the Natural Products Expo West for two years running. There are many type of oil to use for cooking as you well might know.

There's peanut oil, and corn oil, vegetable oil which is largely corn oil, but might be mixed with canola oil or  cottonseed oil; flax seed oil, olive oil, and a few I left out for selfish reasons. But Palm is the best cause of several reasons I won't get into here only because I doubt they use it with the fried chicken. So I will focus here on the chicken the way it was fried, probably in canola oil or vegetable oil.

Now I fry my chicken in canola oil mostly cause I cannot find palm oil. But I have a recipe I will share with you sometime of the mix I use before I fry it. Sure I could just call up the Palm Oil people but that would be too easy. And they probably would charge me a very high outlandish price for their precious oil. But we won't go there. The point I'm making is that the chicken is the bomb whatever oil they are using. But there is a trick to ordering the chicken.

Now as I've stated you can most likely get a dollar off from their regular price of $5.99 to $4.99 when it gets later on in the evening. I've seen this happen, I am a witness to this. But here is the receipt for the regular price in case you think I am making this all up. But I really do love my fried chicken at all costs and am on a quest to find even better yet. That's later.

SO what we have is the deal of the century. If you go to those silly competitors like KFC or Popeyes, although if you live in the Midwest I believe you can still get Brown's chicken which is the top of the line, really large juicy pieces of chicky, maybe cause they grow it better in the Midwest, I don't know. But you get scammed if you go into one of the former to get your chicken feast, there are always deals supposedly but hey this is the most for the least. And KFC and Popeyes' chicken is beaten over the head and kept in small cages. They use the smallest chickens they can buy by the pound and that's not at all cool.

So what it is: 8 pieces, so you are in essence buying a WHOLE chicken, fried to perfection in their little back room dunkers. And the price for 8 pieces is just $5.99 or $4.99 if you get the closeout last call deals later on.

So it's a no brainer, just go get the chicken there and you're saving money so buy a few sides to go with it. Since you might not want to make potatoes or warm a can of corn. Corn I like cause it's a great form of roughage, although any veggie could complement the chicky. So get some potato salad or cole slaw and be done with it. Or mac and cheese would work also.

So you go to the counter, make sure you go BEFORE THEY CLOSE, likish more towards 7:30 but not much later, don't know when they close exactly. So order the 8 pieces from the FRESH pile of chicken cause it's always hotter, fresher and you can tell the girl or the guy which pieces you want and you select the LARGEST pieces you can find and you got a winner. Here's the paperwork:

So always pick the pieces out for yourself from behind the glass cause it's the same price! Who would've thought that? Don't bother me I'm eating my chicken. Ate some black beans with it. Later

Fuddruckers for My Birthday

Randy De Troit here, had a birthday recently and wouldn't you know it, I got hungry. So I signed up for a bunch of restaurant sites and lo and behold, most were not giving much away. But a few threw down, so here we go. Fuddruckers: had never been there but glad I went. They must have the best and most exotic meat on the burger front.  They have an Elk Burger, yes made with real elk; Buffalo Burger, yep directly from the plains of the United States; Salmon Filet Burger, is that a real burger? It's not meat but it's fish, OK it's a burger. Hell I'd eat it for sure, but no, didn't try that one this time. Got a simple beef one patty without cheese cause I saw the cheese spigot near the garnishes and just toppled mounds of cheese from there on my free birthday burger as I found fresh lettuce, tomato and pickles there also.

It was a groove thing here. Like the style of the restaurant, was in the Sherman Oaks Galleria which is a little hard to get to if you want free parking. I like free, and it's only your birthday one day a year, that's a long time to wait, so I didn't want to pay for parking if I was getting my burger for free.

So found free street parking only cause I had a handicap sign at a meter, but hey that counts. So they called their food Fudd's Exotics, free-range, grass and grain-fed game burgers are antibiotic and hormone free. And a build your own burger which I always like my freedom when it comes to food. Hey. I'm right too.

So I found also a Wild Boar Burger and an Ostrich Burger which might be kind of a stretch for me as I don't like the looks of wild boars when I see them in movies do you? And I've seen Ostrichs on farms on trips I went on and they have become some of my very best friends. So there you have it. I would surely go back there again. Only ordered water then filled it up with clear soda, that's the only way to order a drink anymore, the drinks are not cost effective anymore, it's mostly water anyway really.

So I smeared my burger with all kinds of ketchup, sweet onions, lettuce, pickles, and relish and it's was all that, couldn't exactly pick it all up in my hands. Some of the garnishes fell out but it all landed in the right spot eventually. So hey let's get together and make it to Fuddruckers. It's the bomb.