Chapter 6 The Allen Fried Chicken Recipe

         I love Tiktok.  I know the controversy about it, but Tiktok literally changed my life.  It’s benefit to me does not exist in funny pet videos and new dance trends.  Tiktok is a library for every hack of every single thing imaginable in the known universe.  There is an expert in just about every situation.  It doesn’t matter if their video gets ten views or ten thousand, these incredible people create Hollywood production “How To” videos of whatever they do: faster and better than anybody else in the world.  I currently possess over three hundred videos in thirty-six folders ranging from cleaning, to stretching, to proper ways to do laundry, to computer tricks (I am ashamed to admit, I do have a couple of dance tutorials). From Tiktok, I learned how to hang pictures with ease, memorize scripture, fall asleep within minutes, program my google mini to tell me how hot I am, and to strip videos from Youtube.  But almost half of my collections are recipes. My saved videos consist of several collections of cooking instructions like Italian, DYI condiments, Mexican, and Air Fryer Meals. I am a huge Sopranos aficionado, so when Tiktok taught me how to cook braciole, it became my pride and joy meal. I can make over forty meals so savory, I would rather eat my own food prepared by my hands than from a restaurant. When my brother’s family stayed at my house to evacuate hurricane Milton, they asked me if I wanted something from Carrabba’s.  I refused and made my own Italian Penna with balsamic vinegar sauce for my me and my mother.  I have learned to burn!  I always send pictures to my Dad of some of favorite completed meals and he would laud me with praises over my burgeoning skills.  But one recipe that Tiktok could not help me with was fried chicken.  I watched countless videos of these people doing the same thing over and over with different variations in spices, and mine would always come out inconsistent.  It seemed like witchcraft.  Then, like usual, as my last resort, I asked my Dad for help.

            My Dad started his professional career as a professional chef, inevitably presiding over the restaurant of one of the largest country clubs in Brentwood, TN.  He then started his own catering business.  While coaching our sports teams, he wanted to throw cookouts for our teams and their families.  So, he built, by hand, a brick oven grill.  It was the same grill Kevin Hart bragged about building in his home during a covid special.  After Dad completed it, he would often cook for over fifty people in our backyard.  He catered my outdoor wedding for over two hundred people.  It’s safe to say his skill as culinary expert could compete with even Gordan Ramsey. 

             He toiled over this fried chicken recipe, encountering hundreds of hours and hundreds of successes and failures.  After all that, he gave his recipe to me for free.  Just because I asked and I am his son. It vexes me to think why did I not go to him in the first place but continued to look at more Tiktok videos after each failure.  This has happened with him all throughout my life.  My Dad has been wrong before.  I am sure of it.  Right???? But I can’t recall anything right now.  My head cannot swim past all the times his wisdom proved correct.

            My favorite example of this happened in high-school football.  My sophomore year, I played on a football team, considered by consensus opinion, the best high school team in the history of the state at that time.  Even at six five, I only started on offense.  They didn’t need me to start on defense.  We were loaded everywhere.  The starting linebacker was a pre-season all American.  The quarterback received a scholarship from Vanderbilt.  The offensive guard later played for the Philadelphia Eagles, after an all-conference career at University of Tennessee (He actually played against my brother).  Even though my height, speed, and strength made me a far better player than the defensive tackle starting in front of me, he was a senior and they really did not need me to dominate football games.  We destroyed every team we played until the state championship.  The game went according to plan until about three minutes left in quarter the fourth when the opposing team came within a touchdown of tying the game.  I could feel panic set in our team.  Not one time during the season did we face a team that came this close to beating us.  It was then the coaches put me in the game, forgetting about seniority.  The coaches needed to do anything they could to stop the other team from scoring. 

            At the same time, when I went into the game, I knew the coaches put me there because I gave them the best opportunity to win.  However, I would need to make a choice.  All season long, the coaches told me, as a defensive tackle, to use my body instead of my hands.  They needed me to make myself as big as possible so the linebacker behind me could move in freedom and make the tackles.  My Dad told me to use my hands, which you know….NFL PLAYERS do.  He knew an opposing lineman needed to get into my body to block me.  My coaches won past state championships and coached tons of all-state players for decades.  They knew how to coach a team.  My dad, in the stands, only wanted to coach one person, his son.  I vacillated back and forth between defensive techniques: getting tossed in this tug of war with my Dad and my coaches.  Finally, my Dad said to me, “I am your father.  I will always be here.  They won’t.”  (One of the hundreds of things that turned out to be true from Dad’s lips.  Over seventy men coached me in my career.  Not one of them has called me since I stopped playing for them.  Thirty years after my last sports game, my Dad is still pouring his life into me).

            So, I needed to make a choice.  I chose to do what my Dad told me to do in the fourth quarter of that state championship game.  In front of over ten thousand people, with the game on the line, I recorded two sacks.  We won the state championship, and that game launched my football career. 

            So of course, after following his instructions, the chicken came out perfect and tasted crispy and succulent.  I was so good, I finally understood what soul food meant (doesn’t just feed the body but actually is able to produce emotional joy by consuming it).  It still amazes me that even though my culinary skills could access almost an omniscient system of instructions, my Dad still knew the best way to accomplish my task.  As much as I hated that I could not fry my chicken without his help, I could not deny the reward when obeying his instruction.  I followed his instructions and tasted my food and saw that it was good. 

              I got a paradigm shifting epiphany from something CS Lewis wrote.  The devil did not create pleasure.  The devil cannot create anything.  He can only pervert it. 

            God created pleasure.  Every pleasure.  Every pleasure that entices us, that intoxicates us, that overpowers us, that kills us.  The bible says he created our inner being which consists of our thoughts, desires, and emotions.  In the beginning, God said “Let there be light” and the sun just appeared.  But with Adam, he molded him from the dust with his very hands and exhaled His spirit into His mouth.  The miracle of the complexity of our bodies and our spirits outshines anything else in all of creation.  He didn’t need to do this.  There exist thousands of functions in our body compromising a labyrinth of collaborations between cells and organs and nerves and electricity and more elements that I can count or pronounce.  We are wonderfully made.  So, how is it that we don’t go to the one who invented pleasure and invented our bodies to experience that pleasure, to instruct us how best to enjoy it? 

            Instead, (both my hands would be raised here but I am typing), we choose the enemy’s deception that ends in destruction and sorrow and death.  We see God as a moral arbiter instead of a father in the stands wanting his kid to make a play to win the championship for his team. 

            That’s how Adam and Eve fell.  God created Adam but God created him incomplete.  He presented every animal in the world to Adam to name but not one of them could become a sufficient help mate for Adam.  So, one night, God put Adam to sleep and pulled from his heart, and mind, and soul the perfect helpmate that went beyond Adam’s imagination.  He gave Adam a woman.  I know Eve made Adam lose his mind because Adam knew eating from that tree disobeyed God.  But he did it anyway. Adam wasn’t fooled.  He chose his wife over his Heavenly Father.  People like to talk about Adam’s stupidity and weakness in obeying his wife, but I once watched a whole season of Sex in the City to impress a woman (so much worse than eating from that tree), so I cannot judge. 

            If God created Adam incomplete, would it not be possible He created Eve incomplete as well?  Would it be possible, considering God does not show favoritism, He would give His daughter a gift rivaling the gift He gave Adam?  We find out after their expulsion from the garden, God planned to make Eve a mother.  Her very name means mother of all mankind.  Considering the greatest prophetic sermon on this earth illuminating the love of God is the love a mother possesses for her child, can you imagine the sure joy Eve would experience when God gave her a baby? Since Eve lived inside of Adam when God presented him unacceptable partners for his helpmate, would it be possible that Eve’s gift lived inside of her when she didn’t follow God’s instructions to fulfill her own incompleteness?  How ironic and tragic if Eve ate from the tree while at the same time being pregnant and not knowing it.  Instead of following God’s instructions, they lost everything while God planned to give them more than they could ask or imagine.   

            I don’t know about anyone else, but this describes the majority of my choices.  So, why don’t we just trust God’s instructions?  I discovered my reasons stem from ignorance.  I was blind to the fact that God wanted to fulfill my most basic desires.  If I am thirsty, and I see a diet coke and nothing else, I will drink it.  If diet-coke becomes my only source of hydration, it will kill me within three months.  But what can I possibly do if I am thirsty and don’t drink anything?  I will die within three days.  But if I could get access to fresh water, I could stay alive for as long as I wanted. 

            That’s what Jesus offered the Samaritan woman at the well.  She was considered sinful and unclean by the Christians of that time because of her Samaritan race. On top of that, even amongst her own people, she was, by today’s vernacular, considered a “hoe”.  She slept with five men already outside the confines of marriage when Jesus met her.  Currently, she was in the midst of hooking up with another dude.  God didn’t scold her or rebuke her.  He spoke to her soul and told her He knew why she pursued relationships with these men.  She was thirsty.  Thirsty for love.  Thirsty for security.  Thirty for pleasure.  Thirty for self-worth.  Yet, these men could not take her thirst away.  What He wanted to give her was living water; living water that would take her thirst away forever.  Right then, she received Jesus as her Lord and Savior and brought her entire town to salvation. 

            Needless to say, after my two sacks in the state championship, I obeyed my Dad for the rest of my football career.  Even the coaches allowed me to do what I wanted.  The next year I was named all-state and went into my senior year as a pre-season All American and the number two high-school prospect in the south before an injury ended my career. 

            Also, after following my dad’s recipe, I replaced my pride and joy meal from braciole to fried chicken.  Every time I prepare it, the Spirit preaches the gospel, reaffirming the secret to obedience.  What God offers me in achieving my desires far outweighs any other option the enemy provides.  If my Heavenly Father’s life recipes can taste as good as my earthly Dad’s fried chicken recipe than acquiescence to God’s word can become a pursuit of pleasure instead of a set of rules to for the sake of morality. 

            I heard a pastor preach that his elders make sure that he never meets with a woman alone.  It’s the Billy Graham rule.  The elders even monitor all his texts and phone calls to protect him from committing some sort of sexual sin which would end the church and his career in disgrace. At the end of his confession, the pastor stated, people probably think it’s weird, but his kids absolutely love those boundaries.  I found it ironic that he did not state his wife loved it.  I am sure his wife would rather hear, from her husband, that her eyes are bottomless and when he looks at her, he feels they reach into his soul.  That he can inhale her aroma when walking around the corner of their house and it captivates his heart before he even sees her.  That he does not feel complete if he is not holding her and the ecstasy he gets from just kissing her makes him hunger for her throughout the day.  That when she cries, he hears a sad ballad that brings tears to his own eyes but when he hears her laugh, he feels the compulsion to dance. I am sure after hearing all that, she would believe him when he said this next:  There could be a million beautiful naked women around him and he would gouge out his eyes before looking at anyone else because he would rather be blind than to do anything that would cause the slightest risk to miss out on a second on the pleasure she gives him as his wife.

            I am sure she would want a husband like that instead of one who won’t cheat on her because he hired a team to spy on him twenty-four hours a day.  That description might seem impossible with us as humans but not with what our Heavenly Father wants to give us. God likes to brag about Himself. He can make all things possible.

 

Taste and see that the Lord is good;

Psalm 34:8