Deep Fried Piedah

Cooking friday night dinners can be a tedious tiring thankless task. But there is one friday night supper that wont be forgotten in a long while.

I was cooking my world famous chicken and beef shnitzel (I call it shnitzNel cos thats how Danny used to say it when he was younger) which involves egging and then crumbing the meat and then shallow frying it in very hot oil. Of course in this process there is invariably a few stray crumbs that come off the meat and float freely in the seering hot oil.

This never posed a problem untill the other night...

There I was, standing infront of the cooker with a pan of bubbling oil cooking merrily when something caught my eye...as I looked up from the pan I saw a fairly large spider pretty much at eye level to me, bungie jumping from the overhead extractor! I dont know if it was my reaction next that did it as I gave a yelp of shock ...as one does...when confronted with a bungie jumping daredevil spider, or perhaps it was a simple scientific explanation of too much heat from the bubbling sea of oil and browning shnitznels below for that fine thread like bungie web, that caused this clearly suicidal beast to swan dive directly into the lava like furnace below him.

"OH MY G-D!!!!" shouted I into the pan...searching amongst the floating burnt crumbed cornflakes hoping to find one special floater, with legs! Praying that it had not landed on one of the pieces of meat that were busily frying but realising that there wasnt a ...dare I say it... "spiders chance in hot oil"...haha...geddit? ..spiders? hot oil?....a little more riske' than a snowballs chance in hell...of me finding that deep fried 8 eyed freak!

And so, we dined, with a whole new perspective on Haute Cuisine. To quote Timon of "The Lion King" ...

"It comes...with a very pleasant...CRUNCH!"