Chips 'n' Dogs

My daughter and I enjoy cooking together every week or so. This week, she wanted to make barbecue chips and corn dogs at home, because these are not foods one typically thinks of making at home. It was more like a challenge meal rather than something extraordinary.

Chips are straight-forward. Take a big potato, slice it paper thin using a mandolin, dry them thoroughly with paper towels, then deep fry them. The barbecue flavoring was a powder mixture of paprika, chili powder, cumin, onion powder, salt, garlic powder, brown sugar and black pepper.

The corn dogs were a bit more work, but they came out better (in my opinion) than the chips.

We employed an off-label use of Jiffy corn muffin mix.

1 pkg. "JIFFY" Corn Muffin Mix
2/3 cup flour
1 egg
1 cup milk
1 tsp. dry mustard
1/2 tsp. paprika
1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper
1 to 1-1/2 lbs hot dogs

I'm not sure the paprika and cayenne were necessary (especially when paired with the chips).

The resulting batter was very thick. We dried the hot dogs well, then dipped them into the batter using a wooden skewer. The batter went into a drinking glass to make dunking the dogs easier. I threaded the dogs deeply with the skewer so I wouldn't lose them in the batter.

Before moving them to the fryer, I used a fork to work the dogs almost off the skewer. Otherwise, they were too secure and would take a lot of force to remove - not something I wanted to risk over a pot of hot oil.

They fried up very quickly. The surface of the batter would look cooked in about thirty seconds, but I'd leave them in for another minute or so to make sure the batter was cooked all the way through and to heat the dog.

Certainly not the healthiest meal we could have made, but it worked out.