Dinner Mission: Fried Chicken, Status: Fail

Within a family, there are roles that we happen into.  No matter how hard we try, we may never be able to remove ourselves from those roles.  For example, in my family, I was the awful cook.  There were a few kitchen mishaps when I was younger (a particular episode involving a meringue pie comes to mind as being especially bad) that have led to years of ridicule and hilarity about my inability to cook.  My sister is the bad driver, and my brother, well....hmm...we used to dress him in girl clothes!

Ten years later I still receive jabs about my cooking skills, despite having worked hard to make the kitchen safe from my wrath.  For some reason, perfecting fried chicken has eluded me.  There are so many people who make such good fried chicken that it is a challenge anyway, but my problem is usually not the taste, it is a whole host of other problems.  And, tonight was no exception:

She thought the whole ordeal was very amusing

Not only did I completely destroy lots of perfectly good chicken, I also made a giant mess of our kitchen.  The breading was good (we may have tasted some of the non-burned pieces, and will probably both be sick with botulism, or whatever you it is that you get from uncooked chicken...), but burned and the chicken remained uncooked inside.  Was the oil too hot??

So, the chicken got tossed and we ate the rest of the dinner without it.  Luckily, we also had on hand leftover brats, so were able to quickly cook those.

To top off the whole night, I broke a dinner plate trying to clean up.  Drat.

I am open to suggestions, kitchen experts!