Homemade Foam Fried Chicken

There is nothing that crushes my ego more than when I make a failed attempt at cooking.  I make a great Taco Flambeau, which is taco meat, lettuce, tomatos and flaming taco shells that were left in the oven too long.  Tonight I attempted to make fried chicken.  I decided to take some pictures and show my step by step amateur cooking process so I could put it on the blog.  So, here it goes:  First, I looked up fried chicken recipe.  I saw Alton Brown's recipe online and decided I hit the jackpot because Alton is JB's favorite celebrity chef.  The recipe called for vegetable shortening.  I didn't know what that was so I googled it, because you can google anything.  Who knew Crisco is vegetable shortening.  Why don't they just say Crisco?  Anyway, I put the Crisco in the pan and started the seasoning.  Luckily I realized I was holding garlic salt instead of garlic powder.  I'm not sure if it mattered, but it seems that my biggest mistakes happen when I don't follow the recipe exactly.  I didn't have any buttermilk to dip the chicken in, so I looked up substitutes.  It said I could use 1 cup of milk with 1 tsp of vinegar in place of buttermilk.  I was supposed to let the chicken sit in the 'buttermilk' for 12 - 24 hours, but I needed to make dinner now, so each piece got about 30 seconds.  I let the crisco heat up, dipped the chicken and viola!  Nothing.  I thought it would make a loud frying sound.  I used a thermometer to make sure I had the correct temperature, but I'm not sure it was working.  The other odd thing was that the oil began to foam a little bit.  The more pieces I added the foamier it got.  I knew this might be hard to imagine, so I added the 'chicken in foam' picture.  I let it cook in the foam until it was 180+ degrees.  They looked pretty good, but they didn't taste right.  I think it might have been the foam, but with me, it could have been anything. 

I will probably try cooking again down the road when I forget how awful it is.  Until then my homemade food is food that made it home.