prince's plus.

back to nashville.

i don't know what to say about the hot chicken. but it was hot. and we ordered a whole hot chicken, a nashvillian specialty: medium hot, which is pretty damn hot. of course we went to prince's for this madness. you order, then you scour the place (the size of my apartment, which no one would call big) for a table covered by a plastic tablecloth, and then you wait. for us, it was an hour, and totally worth it (though this is the likely end of my attempts to consume animals on vacation).

 you eat it with white bread and pickles. not half-sours or anything special, just pickles.

so let's imagine how the recipe goes.
1. marinate chicken in oil with lots of cayenne.
2. make a dredge with lots of cayenne.
3. spread cayenne on the chicken?
4. deep-fry the chicken in oil with cayenne.

yeah. that kind of hot. and we did not order the hottest, as we wanted to be able to taste the chicken and just have our lips burn off.

we stopped into the patterson house later in the evening--lovely and beautiful and full of cocktails with spherical ice. i am not certain if this is shira's most favorite bar ever, or meat. it's really a toss-up.

our morning came with a crazy bloody mary bar, where i proceeded to put like 12 different hot sauces into my drink, along with a variety of pickled goodness.

 a lubricated morning for certain.

and is any trip to nashville complete without an overpriced yet super trip to the country music hall of fame? no. especially when it includes a poster-size photograph of dolly parton as the statue of liberty.

 

if we had more time, dollywood would have been on the itinerary. in my future indeed. 

here's how it goes.

1. my arugula has the teeniest little buds growing.
2. i know a lot about the slaughter of chickens in north carolina.
3. i have tried 3 different grilled cheese sandwiches in the last 24 hours.
4. there's a food truck rodeo tomorrow in durham with 30 trucks. i didn't even know we had that many!
5. i really love whiskey. the bar. and the liquor.
6. if you haven't heard, i also love america. there's a list of reasons that is WAY longer than this one.

the love-hate continuum.

soon, maybe this week, i am going to explain my underwhelming adventure to the other ashley's fried chicken joint, beasley's. for now, let's just say i was less-than-impressed. and will likely not return. and that i do not usually do restaurant reviews.

chicken.

yesterday, jack and i were walking around my neighborhood and discovered what i think is a slaughterhouse, on classon. just blocks from my apartment. there are drawings of chickens on the sign and it says "live poultry" on the outside. when you are right in front of it, one can see into the garage and view cages and cages of chicken stacked one on top of another. probably 10 chickens to a cage. they could not move, much less walk. it was the opposite of what i had hoped for their lives.

food democracy had an informative essay on this such thing last week. everything on that website makes my stomach hurt but i read it anyhow. the article was about the resistance that animals are given extreme amounts of antibiotics so that they will be unable to catch any of the "superbugs," not because they are sick. it's pretty gross. and the numbers of animals that are "grown" this way is astronomical: 97% of poultry comes from these kinds of factory farms, pumped full of drugs i wouldn't want in my body. and it's harder to treat food-borne illness because of the antibiotic-resistant strains and the fact that we are becoming resistant to the drugs overall. oh. my. goodness.

and! the nytimes reports that "poultry is the number one source of outbreaks." do not eat the chicken. really, kids. it's scary out there.

but maybe it's because so few of us have ever seen a chicken. thanks, arrested.

dominican republic, part ii.

this is when i eat the chicken.
we took the longest walk to go to la casita de juana. we attempted it once before, but the streets are not lit, and we didn't want to venture into foreign neighborhoods after dark. it was a little scary. even the bars were seemingly not open.

so, we left the beach early and embarked on our food adventure, easily finding it the second time around. we ordered the dish we had read about: fried yuca with anise seeds. i am not a fan of licorice but this was a chewy, tasty treat. the anise tasted a lot like caraway, which i love.
keith ate some sort of fish soup. i have no idea what kind of fish. the woman in charge, presumably juana, told us about the fish, but it was unfamiliar, something local to the region.
i knew there might be a moment in this vacation where i might have to put my vegetarian ways aside. dominican food is not very conducive to vegetarian eating; it's pretty privileged. i am trying to be a better traveler and eat more local foods, and that means trying things that are outside my food realm.

we asked juana for the best item on the menu. she told us it would be the dominican chicken. that was the prevailing answer everywhere we went, and so i decided that this was my moment. i hadn't eaten chicken since i was 14, but i decided to go for it. there was nothing vegetarian on the menu anyhow, besides the yuca.

it was served on the bone with rice and pinto beans (which i am convinced were also not vegetarian, as i think there was pork in them). i ate it. and liked it. keith thinks that dominican chicken is a lot like filipino food. maybe there is something similar in places colonized by the spanish?
i over-thought the experience later and almost got sick as i thought about eating flesh. but i think it was worth it to eat the local food. really. i do.