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Geeking Science: Fried Chicken

Erin Penn

In March I mentioned if you ever wanted to buy me food, sushi or fried chicken would be best. I should specify good fried chicken, with the meat on the bone. Pieces parts mashed into a “tender” or a “nugget” is not fried chicken. And I am not talking the Tabasco-sauce flavored Bojangles or the overhyped, overspiced Kentucky Fried Chicken. Supermarket versions are dried-out failures dreaming of being true fried chicken but ended up in a nightmare of heat lamps. Church’s and Bush’s are tolerable to very good depending on the day, cook, and my desperation.

If you are in Charlotte, the peanut-oil cooked Price’s Chicken Coop is the best.

I could wax poetic about fried chicken, or you can just listen to Queen’s One Vision – “One flesh, one bone, one true religion.” Hmmm. Fried Chicken.

So why does Price beat out KFC and Bo-time? The perfect crunch.

The perfect cook too. The wonderful nutty, buttery, taste of fat-chained polymers after deep frying. Price’s has it down to a mass-produced science. Price’s fortunately for my waistline is 45 minutes away, awkward to get to, has no parking, and is not a eat-in restaurant.

Inverse Science did an excellent write up about the chemistry of creating Fried Chicken and the biology of why we like eating fried chicken on June 20, 2017: The Noisy Science of Why Crispy Fried Chicken is Delicious. Watch it and geek about science and food at the same time!

Author Spotlight: Darin Kennedy

Erin Penn

Amazon Cover

Dr. Darin Kennedy just had a new book come out from Falstaff for the first series he wrote. During his year-long deployment to Iraq in 2003 as an United States Army physician, he created the contemporary chess-based fantasy Pawn’s Gambit.  This became a “trunk” book as he went on to hone his writing craft once home in between his day job being a family doctor. 

He worked with short stories, publishing over twenty of them, including ones about April Sullivan: Necromancer for Hire which he has collected into a single book. And he wrote the amazing Fugue & Fable series, which I have talked about before, focused on orchestral music and a detective with some paranormal abilities.

But back to Pawn’s Gambit, the first of a series. If you read Mussorgsky Riddle before Gambit, you can see his growth as a writer. Even so, his love of the game of chess comes through on every page as well as influence of the superhero comics from his youth.

So many different interests, with a focus on the fantastic. Pick up something from the good Doctor – from Chess to Ballet, something is sure to delight.

Flash: Climate Companions

Erin Penn

Image provided by FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Ice strolled down the little used road looking for a place to rest. Behind it, frost tinged the trees while meandering, touching a leaf there, a twig here. Snow followed close behind, just a dusting, but enough to bring fog outside for a dim day.

Lynnsie rocked on her porch watching the approach. Behind the four friends, ice, frost, snow, and fog, nasty weather patterns were ganging up to chase their kinder winter cousins down, changing the gray canopy to black, except where lighting streaked a temporary bleached curl of clouds.

The road to her place was long, and she didn’t have much in the way of neighbors. Nature and weather chatted with her and kept her company most days, helping her drink lemonade during the summer and hot tea during the winter.

Today, though, she waited for what the storms would bring. With still a few hours until the tempest blew in, all agitated from being shoved up to Canada by the jet stream and dragged back to the moist south once good and cold from the polar shield, she enjoyed the quiet of the winter children playing.

Ice stopped at the bench by her front steps, coating them and the sidewalk with a slippery layer. Shy frost quickly nipped at her nose in affection before running back to its stronger cousins. Snow stayed at the edges of the lawn, not liking the warm spring in her backyard, while fog raced past everyone, giving her an insubstantial wave, to jump into the natural spa.

(words 255; first published 6/17/2018)

Editing Rant: Choose a System

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of pinkomelet at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Bopping along editing a science fiction piece. Good, good. Lovely choice of the metric system. Then I read “the whole nine yards”, buildings are referred to in square footage, etc.

Know the measuring system you are using. While a rare holdout and phrase may occur, such as “stones” as a weight unit in the English “pound” system, these holdouts are rare for a reason. Especially thousands of years in the science-fiction future or in alternate universes of fantasy. Switching systems throws people out of the world you are creating.

Measuring systems are part of the worldbuilding. Don’t crumble the foundations before even starting.