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Colonel Tigh's Chicken

General Tso has his delicious chicken, and Colonel Sanders has his. I thought Colonel Tigh should have his own delicious chicken, too.

Given that he's a drunk, and that the actor who plays him is Canadian, I figured the two main non-chicken ingredients should be alcohol, probably Canadian whiskey, and maple syrup. So, a little Googling turned up this recipe for "Maple Bourbon Barbecued Chicken". An excellent starting point!

4 chicken breasts (boneless or bone-in. doesn't matter)

Marinade:
1/2 cup bourbon Canadian whiskey
1/4 cup maple syrup
1 heaping tbsp whole grain mustard
1-2 cloves garlic (minced, smashed, etc.)
1 tsp each salt and pepper

And because Col Tigh is a little exotic, and a lot angry, I added the following:

A pinch of ground cumin
A pinch of ground cinnamon
A pinch of cayenne pepper

Really, just a pinch of each. 1/4 teaspoon, tops.

Because I didn't have any Canadian whiskey handy, I used Jim Beam. But authentic Col. Tigh chicken should always use Canadian whiskey; the Canadian whiskey and the spices are what separates it from all other maple/whiskey chicken dishes. Also I used real Canadian maple syrup. I have no idea what you'd get if you used Aunt Jemima; cancer, probably.

Mix the marinade ingredients, pour em in a big bowl. Marinate the chicken for at least 2 hours (though overnight would be best).

Cooking the chicken is a little tricky. The original recipe says this is BBQ chicken; but if you just throw it on the grill and walk away, that sugar-filled marinade will burn up in no time at all, leaving you with poulet de carbone. And that's not good eats. So, I did the cooking in two stages. First, I preheated the oven to 400deg. Then I took out my handy grill-pan and grilled the chicken just enough to get some decent grill marks - trying hard to keep them from getting too black. After that, into a baking dish with a small splash of the marinade on top of the chicken, and into the oven for 20 minutes (these were boneless breasts - will take longer for bone-in).

It was delicious - a touch of sweetness, a little spice, a tiny bit of heat. Somehow it came out tasting a little like coconut, of all things. Yum.

The original recipe says you can do this with pork, too. Maybe I'll try.

Don't Make Me A Star Pirate

Know what I wish? I wish that once a serialized TV show has run through a full season, the studios would release the DVDs of that season, immediately - or at least quickly enough to give the people who've been watching the show on DVD a chance to catch-up in time for the next season. HBO timed their Sopranos DVD releases correctly; they came out in the middle of the (long) gaps between seasons - you could easily catch up before the next season started. On the other hand, SciFi did it wrong with Battlestar Galactica; they released the season 3 DVDs in April 08, at the same time they started showing season 4 on TV. You can't catch up.

See, when you can catch up, and do, you're much more likely to watch the next season as it's being shown on TV. It's why we spent the extra $10/mo to get HBO when the last two or three seasons of the Sopranos came out - we were all caught-up, the new shows were starting, and because we could watch them along with everyone else, we did. That's much nicer than trying to avoid spoilers for six months (as if we could've avoided spoilers for the Sopranos finale). But on the flip side, SciFi's stupid scheduling is why I just spent two days downloading the 4th season of Battlestar Galactica from LimeWire.

Good For You

The Raleigh News And Observer reports:

L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he'd ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms.

Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.

When a superior ordered the lab to follow the directive, Eason decided to retire rather than pay tribute to Helms. After several hours' delay, one of Eason's employees hung the flags at half-staff.

...

He told his staff that he did not think it was appropriate to honor Helms because of his "doctrine of negativity, hate, and prejudice" and his opposition to civil rights bills and the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Give that man a medal.