Ad Hoc Fried Chicken Recipe – 1st Attempt

Posted by Cheryl Marquez on September 4, 2012
Posted in: Recipes, Uncategorized. Leave a Comment
Fried Chicken, Broccoli & Mashed Potatoes

After a long silence, I’ve decided it’s time to get my thoughts out. While it seems my blog is “all over the place” the focus is on my many passions: food, fashion, fitness, technology, gadgets,  marketing…and of course makeup. You’ll see some stories about my adventures on the weekends, posts about the conferences I’ve been to, recipes my boyfriend and I attempt, the places we eat and our desire to get to a healthier lifestyle. The recipe below is not adapted to be a healthier version of fried chicken, it’s fried chicken made to be as yummy as we could make it.

Over the long weekend, my boyfriend was craving fried chicken from the Ad Hoc restaurant in Yountville, California. Instead of making the long drive and spending a ton of money, we looked for a recipe and found one from Food and Wine, then adapted it.

We bought 8 lbs of thighs and drumsticks, then doubled the brine recipe since we had more chicken than the original. The original proportions for the brine recipe is below, you can adjust it based on the amount of chicken you are frying. For extra yumminess, you should let the chicken sit in the brine at least 8 – 12 hours, overnight if possible. For the record, when I say “we” I mean, my boyfriend made the brine, then battered the chicken and his sister fried the chicken. All I did was zest the lemon and squeeze it into the pot and we call this teamwork. Love him! :)  While I’m far from being a domestic goddess, I did make red velvet cupcakes for dessert (pictures and recipe to come). I’m also great at taking food photos and documenting every step of the recipe, see below. For more food pics, you can follow me on Foodspotting.

The Verdict 
After dinner, we decided it was a good first attempt. The skin was crispy and both the skin and meat was flavorful. We also put it in the oven for about 10 – 15 minutes to make sure the inside of the chicken was cooked without burning the skin. I brought it to work and one of my friends LOVED it! My next mission is to find another recipe so we can perfect this at home. If you make this recipe, let me know how it came out and if you made any modifications in the comments. Enjoy!

Cost: $40.05 versus $52 per person at Ad Hoc

Technology:
Started this post by copying the Food and Wine recipe into Evernote on the iPhone.  Then added checkboxes to the note so when we make the recipe again, so it will be easy for me to check off what we have and what is on our shopping list. I continued to add pictures from within the note on the iPhone. Finally, I made edits on my PC and finished the post from my Mac.

Cheryl’s note Ad Hoc Fried Chicken Recipe feel free to copy this into your own Evernote notebooks.

Step 1:  Lemon Brine

Lemon Brine 
[ ]  1 gallon cold water
[ ]  1 cup plus 2 tsp kosher salt
[ ]  1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons honey
[ ]  12 bay leaves
[ ]  1 head of garlic, smashed but not peeled
[ ]  2 tablespoons black peppercorns
[ ]  3 large rosemary sprigs
[ ]  1 small bunch of thyme
[ ]  1 small bunch of parsley
[ ]  Finely grated zest & juice of 2 lemons
[ ]  Two 3-pound chickens (we bought 8 lbs of thighs and drumsticks or 3 picnic paks instead)

Batter
[ ]  3 cups all-purpose flour
[ ]  2 tablespoons garlic powder
[ ]  2 tablespoons onion powder
[ ]  2 teaspoons cayenne pepper
[ ]  2 cups buttermilk
[ ]  Vegetable oil, for frying (we used peanut oil)
[ ]  Rosemary and thyme sprigs, for garnish

Spices for the brine and the batter

  1. In a very large pot, combine 1 quart of the water with 1 cup of the salt and the honey, bay leaves, garlic, peppercorns, rosemary, thyme and parsley. Add the lemon zest and juice and the lemon halves and bring to a simmer over moderate heat, stirring until the salt is dissolved. Let cool completely, then stir in the remaining 3 quarts of cold water. Add the chickens, being sure they’re completely submerged, and refrigerate overnight.
  2. Drain the chicken and pat dry. Scrape off any herbs or peppercorns stuck to the skin and cut each bird into 8 pieces, keeping the breast meat on the bone. Since we bought thighs an drumsticks, we didn’t have to chop the bird into pieces. 
  3. In a large bowl, combine the flour, garlic powder, onion powder, cayenne and the remaining 2 teaspoons of salt. Put the buttermilk in a large, shallow bowl. Working with a few pieces at a time, dip the chicken in the buttermilk, then dredge in the flour mixture, pressing so it adheres all over. Transfer the chicken to a baking sheet lined with wax paper. 
  4. In a very large, deep skillet, heat 1 inch of vegetable oil to 330°. Fry the chicken in 2 or 3 batches over moderate heat, turning once, until golden and crunchy and an instant-read thermometer inserted in the thickest part of each piece registers 160°, about 20 minutes. Transfer the chicken to paper towels to drain, and keep warm in a low oven while you fry the remaining chicken pieces. Transfer the fried chicken to a platter, garnish with the herb sprigs and serve hot or at room temperature.
Step 2:  Pat the chicken dry
Step 3a: Dredge the chicken in buttermilk











Step 4: Fry in 330 degrees
Ad Hoc Fried Chicken – 1st Attempt
Recipe Source:  http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/lemon-brined-fried-chicken

Learn How to Do SEO from Rand Fishkin

Posted by Cheryl Marquez on December 1, 2011
Posted in: Marketing. Tagged: , , , . 3 comments

I went to my first Hackers + Founders event hosted by Microsoft to learn about how to do SEO from Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz. As the co-founder of a startup, you have to take advantages of opportunities to learn low-cost or free ways to gain traction. In regular English, that means getting more users to use your product or buy your product from you. I’ve embedded a compilation of my tweets during the SEO talk using Storify.

Hackers + Founders attendees on the mailing list will get to use SEOmoz for free for 60 days…free fits in our startup budget! It’s always nice to be able to try out tools before shelling out a ton of cash for them. For a bootstrapped startup, cash is king. I’m hoping to measure marketing efforts for Hand Things Down.

Here are the highlights of what he covered in the talk:

  • Inbound vs Interruption Marketing
  • Use Social Media and Email Marketing to complement each other
  • 10 SEO Tactics to Gain Traction for your Startup

View the slidedeck on SEO for Startups.

Constantly on the Move

Posted by Cheryl Marquez on October 24, 2011
Posted in: Uncategorized. 9 comments

How many people can say they are really great at beginnings and endings? Am I the only one holding up my hand? I realize there is a lot that happens in the middle of life, after you hit a few milestones, you settle down somewhere, make friends, have kids, and occasionally go on vacation to break the routine. You’re in the middle of it, yet some people long for the past while others are charging heads down into the future. Where do you fit?

I was thinking about this because I’m about to “move” for the fourth time in less than a year and each move was to a different state more or less for business. Who puts their entire life in chaos for work? The fourth move is in the same city yet the turmoil of moving is the same.

Timeline:
Nov 2010 – March 2011: Seattle, WA for Founder Institute

April 2011 – September 2011: Phoenixish, AZ

October 2011 – Nov 2011: San Jose, CA

November 2011 – June 2012: Silicon Valley, CA (will know after we get accepted into a place…need to move in 7 days, no pressure!)

Lessons Learned

  • Moving is easier than finding a new place to live.

  • Using social media to make friends in a new city helps with finding fun activities and common interests.

  • Cherish true friends, they will keep in touch even after you’ve left.

  • No matter how many times you move, saying goodbye doesn’t get easier.

As I sit here, I’m thinking of how I want my life to look, wondering where to settle down and spend time in the middle instead of constantly transitioning. When you look at your life, does it look the way you want it to look? Who is there with you? What are you doing?

What Will Your Facebook Timeline Say About Your Life?

Posted by Cheryl Marquez on September 27, 2011
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a Comment


Last week, Facebook announced the Timeline which allows you to view your social history. As it rolls out, you’ll see what you posted or commented on by month or year. You can look fondly at the playful online banter between you and a crush, the evolution of your relationships, where you went and who you were with on the roller coaster that is your life. What if you were an anthropologist and you were looking at 21st century society? You could find evidence of how we lived through Facebook or Twitter timelines through checkins, blog posts, pictures, and comments to reveal personality or sentiment of the day.

Social Anthropology studies how contemporary human beings behave in social groups. Has Facebook made it easier for anthropologists to draw conclusions about modern society through the Timeline?

I thought it fascinating that you could highlight particular events and for non-scrapbookers an easy way to get a time capsule of each year on Facebook. I would buy a hardcover copy of my timeline or a combination of family/friends as gifts (business opportunity…who’s in?). The good times, the drama, the healing and sometimes reconnecting. On the one hand, it could aggregate a lot of great memories if you only share happy times. For some, it could lead to drama and heartbreak as you view your significant other’s flighty behavior. Note: To avoid this, don’t friend anyone you are dating, keep a portion of your life private. Otherwise, what will you talk about if you’re busy stalking each other on-line?

As an “oversharer” on multiple networks, including various blogs, you could see where I’ve traveled, eaten, worked, seen my naked thoughts as I chat publicly and form a pretty decent dossier without any effort. What picture would your timeline create of you? Will it be an accurate reflection of your real life emotions and experience? Will it be a more glamourous version of your life? Would you be happy with what you see? Is there anything you would change? Would you spend time deleting stuff from your profile to create the right persona?

For a short time, you were able to view who has unfriended you by looking at your friends in a particular year and seeing who has the Add Friend button. This “bug” has since been removed. Would you check to see which friends you’ve lost over the years? Would you want to reconnect with some of them?
I wonder how startups like Glos.si or Momento will evolve as products because of the Timeline announcement. I like the idea of that these two aggregate from various networks. I also wonder what social anthropologists will conclude if they use all of what we share freely on the web. Let me know your thoughts in the comments. 

One Night in Havana

Posted by Cheryl Marquez on September 25, 2011
Posted in: Uncategorized. 1 comment

Do you know what it feels like to PLAN to go a club, realize you haven’t been in forever and have no idea what to wear or how to be? Let’s take this scenario and make it more retarded by being on a business trip and not having “club clothes” packed. I know what to wear if I’m going to Vegas. It’s a cocktail dress, fab heels/boots – whichever is fine as long as they are sky high and of course bring your A+ game. Ladies, this is your “A” game, sprinkled with hair and body glitter. Men, this is your best outfit, haircut, fresh shave with a heaping helping of swag…did I spell that right? 
What if you’re in Seattle? I spent 4 months in Seattle earlier this year but I went to maybe one dance club the entire time to meet up with my friend White Pacman from the bay area. He picked some club that played 80′s + 90′s music and the people dressed kinda drab, to be expected since it’s soggy about 85% of the time. I thought that can’t possibly be all Seattle has to offer, it’s got to have some sort of vibrant nightlife.
I was excited to go to Capitol Hill on Friday night because I’m told that’s where the nightlife is. I went to Havana with my biz partner and my DJ friend. It was sort of surreal, the girls are dressed in club gear (short dresses and high heels) and guys looked sloppy. Maybe irons are outlawed because they might get electrocuted from the dampness. What a let down! Poor girls, this is your selection? How will they ever mate? I even went outside to check out the scenery thinking maybe the hot guys haven’t been admitted yet…nope more of the same. I really went outside because I was burning up in the club, they had one fan and it was impossible to dance in that sort of heat. The best place in the club was sitting and chatting with the bouncer because he was elevated near a door that was open to let the cool outside air in. Plus it’s always good to be friends with the bouncers. 
When I came back, I saw one cute guy who was with the tall, blond chick my DJ friend was hitting on. He was tall, had dark hair, looked like he worked out and kept fit just not to juice head status. I later find out Mr. Hottie was a reserve Seattle Sounder (ummm what?) So that means he’s a player for the soccer team. Well no wonder he’s on reserve, if he was a starter he wouldn’t be out at the club the night before a match…just saying.
That concluded my night at Havana. A few years ago, I would have been dying to go out every weekend, now not so much. I had fun dancing and watching my friends interact with the locals. I just didn’t want anyone trying to talk me, I couldn’t hear anything but the beat and I can only do so much smiling and nodding…I’m getting OLD!

Passion: What would you do even if no one was paying you?

Posted by Cheryl Marquez on September 16, 2011
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a Comment

Passion seems to be the theme of the week. It’s a question I’ve asked myself and have been examining recently. When my friend sent me a Facebook message asking me how I manage being a mom and an entrepreneur I thought it was time to write a blogpost. It’s ironic she asked me how I do it all because I often have too much going on and have been thinking about what I need to drop. In reality, I don’t have motivation and passion for everything, I just power through that to get to the stuff I love to do. I certainly make an effort to publicize only the positive aspects of my life because no one wants to hear when you lose your drive or question direction. I reserve that discussion for my closest confidants whose insights I trust to build my decisions around. More often than not, I’m debating these things as I lie awake at night trying to relax and fall asleep. To read about the bumps in the startup road along with the lessons learned, check out the Cache Crew blog where I’m writing and video blogging about the business.

Part of being discontent is losing sight of what your passion is in life. I think it changes over time and it’s important to assess where you are regularly to make sure your life is headed in the direction you were charting or even if that is still the direction you want to go. Personally, family and relationship is important to me and my actions never reflected that value because both have taken a backseat to traveling for my career. I realized that this aspect of my life really needs to be at the forefront of my decisions or my personal life will continue to suffer and be non-existent. Living and breathing work isn’t sustainable as you get older. I would rather build something with someone and have my family at my side than to build an empire alone. My struggle is finding out how to do this or make the changes in perspective so that it does become the priority.

Here are some questions to think about: 

  • Do you know what excites you?
  • What would you do even if no one was paying you to do it? Is there something that people are always asking you to do that you love and can monetize?
  • What do you constantly research, read, or watch?
  • What do you like about what you are doing? Can you do more of that?
  • Is there a growth path that you can take within your company that excites you?
  • What do you dislike and can you delegate some of this to someone else?

If you determine you want to take the leap for something new, are you prepared?

  • How much do you need to live on?
  • Does your savings support making that leap now?
  • If it doesn’t, how long do you need to make sure you have a financial cushion of a couple years to build the dream?
  • Is there something small you can spin up to test if that’s what you want to do?

What are your answers to these questions? How to you balance family and ambition? Is there a way to have it all without losing your mind? Put in the comments I would really love to have discussion on this.

Constant Change Can Turn Your World Upside Down

Posted by Cheryl Marquez on September 5, 2011
Posted in: Uncategorized. Leave a Comment

Doing a headstand to clear my mind
Over the last few weeks, I had to decide whether or not pursue contract opportunities outside of Arizona. While I’ve always been one to embrace change, I was falling into a happy rhythm of how my life in the desert was unfolding. I struggled with the idea of moving while maintaining focus on applying for three different startup pitch competitions and balancing a new found social life. My motto has always been work hard, play harder. With the demands of a startup, the play part of life has diminished to practically nothing. Meeting all of the application deadlines, preparing executive summaries, and slide decks pretty much had me deserting social functions to work on these deliverables until midnight or 1 am nearly every day. This is not a complaint because with all this hard work led to solid messaging and direction for the company, plus I love what I’m doing!

Indecision Causes Turmoil
When I was weighing my options, calculating my finances, and assessing how I felt about moving, I was a complete mess! Working on anything related to Hand Things Down was easy because I knew exactly what I needed to do and when it needed to be done. Deciding on whether or not I was ready to leave the kids behind and not seeing certain things develop naturally made me sad. I was settling into the idea of not moving until after Jelli graduated, then I realized I’ve got to pick up a contract so I can provide her with a really cool senior year. Who would I talk to about making this decision? Old friends I haven’t talked to in forever? Can I burden new friends with helping me weigh out whether or not I should make a drastic change in my life? An ex-boyfriend who knows me? In the end, I ended up withdrawing into myself to weigh the pros and cons.

I literally felt like my world was turning upside down and I needed to make a move because the indecision was killing me! I don’t function well in a holding pattern, I would rather know a direction so I can put the pieces in place to make something happen or if the situation calls for it, walk away. 

The Decision
In the end, I chose to pick up a 9 month contract in California. I’ve literally moved every few months for some sort of opportunity and the move has always made be grow as a person and an entrepreneur. While the external circumstances were the same in the sense that it was unforeseen and so much needed to happen in a short span of time, this time just felt more difficult emotionally.