Deep fried everything, the unhealthiest "meal" in my life (ever) and the itis.

Sorry that this is late. I started it the day I did it, but am only finishing it now (midterms+work+lack of sleep explain the long gap in between).

So it was Daylight Savings Time Day.

To celebrate, I suppose, the extra hour of the day, I spent two hours (or one hour, depending on how you look at it) learning all about deep-fried food for a school event (part of the Culinary Club). Suffice to say, it was very enlightening and extremely unhealthy, but there's just something about deep-fried food that both repels you and draws you in at the same time.

Deep-fried broccoli: I think that this cancels out the nutritional value of the vegetables, but the broccoli was surprisingly good--it was cooked all the way inside and was nicely encapsulated in its breaded...sphere.

Deep-fried sweet potatoes: Was a bit like eating sweet potato fries (which we also experimented with), but at first the sweet potatoes were a bit raw on the inside. The second batch of this involved par-boiling the sweet potatoes a bit before dipping them into the batter and frying them, which turned out a lot better.

Fried Chicken: Fried the chicken legs and breast pieces in Crisco (shortening) instead of normal vegetable oil, which we used for everything else. Using Crisco made the chicken skin much more crisp, such that its skin had a crackly texture. Of course, the chicken that we made couldn't compare with the chicken I've had in Southern Kitchen (or for that matter, fast food places like KFC and Jollibee)...but it was still good--and I have to say that it was very juicy on the inside and not dry (which is a common problem for a lot of fried chicken I've had in the past).

Deep-fried Snickers bars: Our "dessert" for that afternoon snack, the candy bars were first frozen (recommendation is to freeze them a day beforehand), then dipped in tempura batter (with a lot of sugar added to it) and deep-fried. These were probably my favorite part of the "meal," because they were so unexpectedly delicious, even though I was fully aware of the large amounts of combined fat and sugar I was putting into my system. The caramel-peanut filling oozed out of the Snickers bars when you bit into them, and the fried chocolate outer layer allowe everything to come together to completion.

...Oh, totally forgot.

The after-effects of eating deep-fried food, are called "the itis,"a general feeling of sluggishness, satisfaction, sleepiness and satiation. It was a lot of (unhealthy) food, and a lot of carbs. The entire experience made me come to appreciate what I had previously thought was a pretty crazy part of the American sub-culture of deep-frying (I mean, I still think it's pretty crazy, but can appreciate it more now).