Parmesan Chicken Drumsticks (AKA: Love Chicken)

WARNING: These are insanely yummy. You might want to double, or triple the recipe. The Ranger can easily inhale about 15 of these things in one sitting. At one point I actually started buying turkey drumsticks to help him fill his belly, but due to the deliciousness of the crispy outer coating, he prefers chicken drumsticks instead.

Ingredients

• 10 drumsticks with skin removed 
• 1 ½ cups shredded Parmesan cheese 
• 1 tbsp parsley 
• 1 tbsp oregano, thyme, and rosemary 
• Kosher salt and freshly ground pepper 
• Extra virgin olive oil

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
2. Combine salt, pepper, parmesan cheese, and herbs in a small bowl and mix well.
3. Lightly coat drumsticks with extra virgin olive oil.
4. Coat drumsticks in parmesan-herb mixture, placing them on a baking sheet with foil or in a casserole dish. You will need something with a lip or sides on it so the oils do not drip. Cover with foil.
5. Bake on middle rack for approximately 30-40 minutes.(more or less depending on the size of the drumsticks.) 
6. Remove foil after the first 20 minutes. Check to make sure they are cooked thoroughly, and serve hot.

The Story Behind This Dish

This dish is one of our favorites. When I first moved in with my husband, I wanted to impress him with my culinary abilities.  He, being the Ranger stud he is, had no concept of baking anything, much less anything resembling a baking pan to bake anything with.  So I took a regular cookie sheet of his (used for making chicken nuggets, and drying out various pieces of Ranger uniforms and equipment), and made a walled structure with it using aluminum foil to keep the juices contained.

I got to making the chicken, and threw it in the oven, and after a short time, we realized there was a small amount of smoke trickling out from the oven vent.  The Ranger opened the oven door, and saw that some of the juices from this delicious meal had escaped my makeshift baking pan, and were burning on the floor of the oven.  The chicken was almost done, and we didn’t want it ruined from the smoke, so we pulled it out, and in doing so we dumped the remainder of the juice into the hot oven.

So we didn’t have a self-cleaning oven, but The Ranger saw that the oven went to a good 550 degrees.  So he thought we could just crank up the oven, and let it cook the scorched stuff out.  He cranked up the oven, and within about 15 minutes, the smoke in the kitchen was so thick that we could hardly see each other, the smoke alarm started wailing, and all we could think to do was open the doors and windows.  The Ranger, who right out of high school did a year as a professional firefighter, wanted to see what was going on inside the oven.  There is a good reason that a self-cleaning oven locks while it is self-cleaning….

He opened the door of the oven, and it belched thick, orange flames out, cleanly removing all hair from the backs of his hands, and singing his eyebrows.  Add the smell of burning hair to the conundrum. He closed the oven door, and realized how foolish he was, and eventually the fire burned out, and the smoke stopped pouring out of the oven, and cleared from our tiny apartment.  We enjoyed cold chicken that night (and The Ranger enjoyed cleaning soot out of the bowels of the oven for 4 hours the following day), but this has become his very most favorite meal, and now every time I make this dish for him, he feels very loved, so we call it “Love Chicken.” I am happy to report that since the Love Chicken fire, we have only had one other small fire in our kitchen. That’s a story for another day. Hope you enjoy.

Jennifer.

*Image by Mark H. Anbinder, used under the Flickr Creative Commons license.