Bon Appetempt goes All American

The recipe is from Martha's little magazine, Everyday Food (everyday, Martha, really??) And here is her version:

And ours:

Yes, we made the whole menu, starting with...

a 24 hour soak in buttermilk.

Let the dredging begin. Chicken fingers.

Once you've dredged each piece twice, you are done and technically you can eat it.
However, we wanted to see the recipe through, so we decided to cook the chicken:

Apparently rosemary has a great internal clock, so as the recipe states, there is no need for a thermometer - when the rosemary hisses, remove and the oil is ready for the chicken.
At this point our house started smelling like KFC.
Meanwhile, Matt whipped up the parsley, mustard vinegrette...

Before:

After:

Here is the only place where things got weird. We put the half-cooked chicken in the oven to finish it off and within five minutes, started hearing some crazy sounds coming from inside. When Matt opened the door to see what was what, billows of black smoke started pouring out of it to which my reaction was: "Can we get a picture of it for the blog?!" (Sadly, we could not. (Smoke doesn't picture well?))

Anyway, we blame this on our baking sheet which doesn't have any real edge to it, so we think the oil was dripping onto the oven floor and turning into smoke. Despite all this, the chicken came out fine:

What did we learn from this Bon Appetempt? Fried Chicken is relatively easy, just very messy and if your attempting with no dishwasher and DIY tools, the process will require a couple rounds of dishes... The reward is well worth the work, though. The meal was tasty, relaxed, and super fun.