Fried chicken. All I wanted to do is to make some fried chicken. But I wanted it to taste good, to be just a little bit better than usual, so I pulled out the brand new Cook’s Illustrated title, “The Best Chicken Recipes,” ($35, Cooks Illustrated.)

I thumbed through the book and found a recipe that insisted it was one BEST way to prepare the chicken. First, you need to ”brine” the chicken in buttermilk mixed with hot sauce, bay leaves and salt. Done. Then you dry it for 2 hours. Sort of done.

Then you dust dust up the chicken, drag it through beaten egg and redust it. My grandma never did it that way and her chicken was perfect. Double-dust seems like overkill, so I dust it once and drop it into the hot pan. When I reach in to flip my chicken, the toasty outside peels off. What? I flip more carefully, then re-flour and fry the naked pieces. Hopeful, I put the batch in containers for our picnic the next day.

Twelve hours later, I open the container to discover a mass of chicken wrapped in mush. We ate it anyway, but I’m still mad at that chicken. How could something so simple be so difficult? Was the flour-egg-flour routine SO critical? If anyone out there has a recipe for great fried chicken that you don’t have to muck up your fingers to make, I’d love to hear about it.