I have the very same problem when I use a Loose/wet batter on whatever food I'm frying. I have tried lowering the food one by one very slowly into the oil, hoping that it would firm up bit. But the batter always seems to drip a little and wrap around the basket grates and makes it impossoble to remove the food without tearing it apart and making a mess. It's so bad, I've taken to using a plain old pot when deep frying foods with a batter coating. Tim

We don't fry often either so when we do it almost always has to be fried shrimp. We love fried caulflower too so that often goes with it and some french fries are always good. We use just flour for our coating. I flavor it heavily with garlic powder, onion powder and some salt. I don't use black or white pepper but a bit of cayenne is good too. I just taste the flour with a damp finger to make sure it has some taste. Put wet ingredients in flour and fry. If you want thicker coatings you can dip in egg wash after the first flouring and then flour again before frying.

A Bit of Nostalgia.......does anyone remember the Chalfont in Cape May, N.J. or the Chalfont-Haddon Hall in Atlantic City ?? Chalfonte's Southern Fried Chicken 1 frying chicken -- (3-pound) quartered Salt 1 cup flour 2 tablespoons paprika Black pepper to taste 2 cups shortening or corn oil (or a 2-inch depth for frying) 1 medium onion -- sliced 1. Soak the chicken in salted water for 1 hour. (Add 1 tablespoon salt to each quart of water.) Drain chicken and pat dry. 2. Meanwhile, in a bag or bowl, mix flour, paprika, salt to taste and pepper. Add the chicken and shake to coat thoroughly. 3. In a large skillet or deep fryer, heat the shortening or oil to 365 to 375 degrees. Place the onion in the hot oil. (Adjust the heat as needed to keep the oil sizzling moderately, but don't let it burn.) 4. Add the chicken to hot oil, again adjusting the heat. Fry for 10 minutes. Turn chicken and fry until tender, crisp and browned, about 10 more minutes. (Test for doneness with a fork, or watch for the breast meat to split along the muscle.) Note: As long as the oil is sizzling, moisture is being forced out of the chicken as steam, preventing the meat from absorbing excess oil. The Chalfonte chicken still sizzles in the pan Today's request takes us back to 1990, when a visit to the Chalfonte in Cape May, N.J., found the chef at that grand Victorian resort hotel holding court in her bright, airy kitchen on a sunny August day. Quick as any teen, Helen Dickerson simul- taneously supervised the dinner preparation, answered a reporter's questions, and kept an ear tuned to her favorite afternoon soaps. At 81, Miss Helen (as she liked to be called) still ruled her kitchen domain, though the heavier cooking chores had been delegated to her two assistants, her daughters Dorothy Burton, then 63, and Lucille Thompson, 61. Miss Helen shared memories of her more than 70 years at the Chalfonte, 45 of them in charge of the kitchen, along with recipes for dishes such as the fried chicken that continues as the star item on the hotel's Sunday dinner menu. It is that recipe, clipped from The Inquirer's Food section but later mislaid, that reader Joe Ochman mentioned first in his recent e-mail to us. Miss Helen's talent for Southern-style cooking brought her national attention. Her recipes were collected into a cookbooklet by the hotel. And the outspoken Miss Helen often stole the show during television appearances with talk-show hosts such as Phil Donahue. Miss Helen died just a few months after our article about her was published. Her daughters, now 75 and 72, inherited their mother's kitchen at the Chalfonte. And hundreds of chickens continue to be fried there on summer Sundays in the aged, oversize cast-iron skillets, each holding a dozen or more chicken quarters at a time. Keys to the recipe's success are the soaking, which keeps the chicken moist, plus the onion flavor and the sizzling temperature of the oil. The onions go into the hot fat first and stay there until the chicken is done, Burton said. Source: "Marilyn Marter Column, Phila Inquirer, April 4, 2001 Yield: "4 servings"

Dcarch, two out of three. Simplified: Fish have to have scales and can't be bottom feeders (no to catfish). Shellfish are not kosher, ever. I figure if I were meant to keep kosher I wouldn't have been made allergic to swimmy fish. To the best of my knowledge, all healthy beef on the hoof is potentially kosher (literally, fit to eat). It's the butchering that makes it kosher. Some of the highlights: A highly trained and certified kosher butcher says the proper blessings acknowledging taking a life and kills the beast with a special extremely sharp blade in one clean cut. I think it's to the jugular. In ancient times this was the most humane way they had. There has been some recent controversy about whether this is the most humane way now, and what it would take to change it. There are other conditions as well, such as the calf may not be slaughtered in front of it mother. If it's not a single clean cut, it's not a kosher death and the carcass cannot be made fit to eat by Jews. It can be sold to other people, however, rather than wasted. First they inspect the lungs for disease. If are no marks or scars at all, if the lungs are completely smooth, the meat can be sold as "glatt kosher" (Ashkenazi "smooth kosher"), which is prized by some. It's not any more kosher than the ones with minor blemishes that are not signs of disease. It's just a more special special super duper, if it costs more (scarcer) it must be better. The blood must also be drained. Then the carcass has to be cut up correctly, if the rear half is to be used, rather than sold off, the sciatic nerve (I think that's the one) has to be removed in a certain way. Few kosher butchers even learn how to do this. It's a mess and ends up with the meat so cut up it's not very attractive. With neighbors valuing the rear half, it doesn't make economic sense to bother. Then the meat has to be salted to draw out the rest of the blood. Housewives used to do this. Nowadays, the packers do it for value added. "Kosher Salt" is a misnomer as it is the salt used to draw the blood from the meat. Rightly, it should be called "kashering salt". All clean, unadulterated, pure salt is kosher by nature and doesn't require a rabbinic imprimature. When you see one, it's usually to say that the processing plant and packaging equipment were clean and appropriate. Salt, the mineral, is kosher by nature. So kosher salt is kosher, but so is all pure salt. In most things Jewish, the practice of an entire community over time has sway. The birds that are kosher (and also have to be correctly slaughtered and prepped) are the ones that a community has been eating from way back. I read that a couple of graduate students in Jerusalem went around to the different communities from around the world and compiled lists. The rules for meat and fish are more standardized, but there will always be different rulings in different places about minutiae. Before halal meat was widely available, muslims would buy from the kosher butchers. That's true. As I heard it, they also require blessings to be said on the taking of a life, and these are similar enough to be acceptable where their own people are not available. I don't know where the differences are in how the animal is handled after that, but muslims are more likely to accept kosher than Jews are to accept halal. If there's no other food, one is allowed to eat whatever one can find and do the best one can to keep it as kosher as possible. So, in that case, I'd think the halal butcher would be a better bet than the ConAgra case at the discount food store, but I don't know what the rabbis would say other than you have to eat to sustain yourself. I also don't know how the halal rules work for other meats and vegetables (yes, while by nature vegetables are fit to eat, you do have to inspect them for certain bugs, and have a care about "hot" veg and questionable cutlery). I do think they have similar fish rules. Way back when, in post-revolution Iran, sturgeons were out. They're smooth skinned. But there were the embargoes, and things were tough. The ayatollahs met and discussed the caviar trade which was so lucrative but forbidden. They inspected the sturgeons. Carefully. And found a sufficient number of scales that it would be okay for them to trade in caviar. (I don't know if they also ate the fish, sold the fish, or whatever.) I seem to remember that they had to have at least seven scales. Re the number of Jews who keep kosher, most Jews are not practicing, period. Like your average American who identifies as "Christian", but whose practice is a Christmas tree and an Easter egg hunt, with the occasional church event for a rite of passage. Among those are are actively engaged in Jewish religious participation, a much higher percentage keep kosher. A lot of it depends on location. There is a tradition, still practiced by some, of only accepting milk and dairy products that have been overseen by Jews the whole way. This is so they don't get adulterated, like the Chinese milk scandal where people were putting melamine in the milk because it would register when tested as having more protein. Even very strictly practicing American Jews believe that the USDA does a good enough job, along with American cultural values, to create confidence that the milk supply is unadulterated. Some still prefer to pay more for "Jewish milk". Similarly, for all the public scandals about this or that outbreak, the American food supply is reliably fine. It's not necessary to keep kosher to be sure of food that won't kill you. So American Jews keep kosher, or have abbreviated practices of kosher origin (e.g., don't combine meat and milk, but don't worry about the provenance of either), as a matter of religious conscience, solidarity with their heritage, or habit, rather than a belief that it's important for temporal reasons. This is all very condensed and simplified. Thousands of years old ritual and practice creates thousands and thousands of pages of discussion and ruling and codification and reinterpretation. If someone wants to learn to keep kosher, the rabbis send them to learn from a friend who keeps kosher, because learning it from the Law would take a lifetime of study.