There’s a particular dish that, for me, sums up everything that the Christmas season is all about.

Fried chicken.

It’s an odd choice, no?  Perhaps you expected figgy pudding.  Let me explain.

It was roughly twenty years ago, in the early 90s. After a long day’s work, my friend Andy was greeted at his front door by a complete stranger.  Hi, I’m Holly, she said, peering through her glasses.  I’m gonna call you Daddy.  Her disheveled hair was blond; she wore a dirty, well-worn purple dress.  She was five years old, maybe six.

Andy went inside and learned that Holly really was going to be calling him Daddy – she was joining their family as a foster child.  As stressful or momentous as this may sound to you or me, this didn’t faze him much. It wasn’t the first foster kiddo for him and his wife Paula, and it wouldn’t be their last.

To be precise, Andy and Paula cared for exactly twenty children over the course of their foster parenting career, adopting three of those twenty in the process.  Add the two beautiful daughters they had the, uh, old fashioned way, and you’ve got yourself a bona fide brood.  In fact, Andy and Paula raised so many young children that they literally had a kid in kindergarten twelve years in a row.

Let me repeat that: They were parents of a kindergartner for twelve years in a row.

Given that their house was full of social workers, paperwork, and a mild level of general chaos, Andy knew that a home-cooked dinner wasn’t gonna happen on Holly’s first night with her new family.  So he did the sensible thing – he ran out and picked up some fried chicken from the place just up the street.

Later, at the dinner table, Holly’s eyes were understandably wide.  Reaching into the bucket of chicken, Andy asked whether Holly preferred a drumstick or a thigh; she chose drumstick. A few minutes later, Andy scooped some mashed potatoes onto her plate.  That’s when she said the words Andy would never forget:

You mean I get two things to eat tonight?

Now, I wasn’t there, but I’m willing to bet that every heart in the house melted right then.

Andy had no way to explain that their home was an all-you-can-eat kinda joint – it would have blown her little mind.  Instead, the family did their best to make her feel comfortable, welcome, and safe, the same way they’d done with the others who had sat in her place before.

It took a while for her to adjust, Andy told me.  It was months before she stopped raiding the kitchen garbage can for food.  He and Paula would find remnants and wrappers and scraps in the bedroom, leftovers from her late night scavenges.

Makes you think, doesn’t it?

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By now, we’re all familiar with the Christmas narrative:

And [Mary] brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

In one sense, the story of Christ is a story of rejection.  He was rejected by the political and religious leaders of his day, he was rejected by his neighbors and townspeople, and eventually, he was rejected by his closest friends.

That story of rejection actually began the day he was born: There was no room for them in the inn.

Christ taught his followers to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and welcome strangers.  He preached about caring for the sick and visiting those in prison.  When he left, he commissioned his followers to continue his work, to be his eyes and ears and hands and feet – that is, to be “the body of Christ.”

Sometimes I wonder if I’m truly a part of the body of Christ, if I’m really walking the walk.  It seems like such a tall order.  Is it possible, in this modern age, to do what he asked of us?

Then Christmas rolls around, and I think of this story.  There was room in Andy’s inn — for Holly and nineteen others.

Is there room in the inn of my heart?

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Once, during an awkward icebreaker exercise with a large group, I was asked what I would choose for my last meal.  Sidestepping the morbid nature of such an inquiry, the answer was easy: my mama’s fried chicken with all the fixin’s.

I’m not great at frying food, and I’m even worse at making gravy, but I’m learning.  Here’s a basic recipe.

Buttermilk Fried Chicken
adapted from the Joy of Cooking

3 to 3 1/2 pounds chicken drumsticks or thighs
1 1/2 cups buttermilk
3 teaspoons salt, divided
2 teaspoons black pepper, divided
Sriracha or other hot sauce to taste (optional)
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon ground red (cayenne) pepper, optional (or substitute your favorite Cajun seasoning blend (e.g., Tony Chachere’s)in lieu of the salt and the cayenne)
About 3 cups solid vegetable shortening
Nearby box of baking soda and/or fire extinguisher, just in case (seriously!)

Rinse the chicken pieces and pat them dry. In a large bowl, combine the buttermilk, 1 teaspoon of the salt, 1 teaspoon of the pepper, and Sriracha or hot sauce, if using. Add the chicken to the buttermilk and turn to coat. Let stand for at least 15 minutes, or in the refrigerator for up to 12 hours.

In a large paper grocery bag, combine the flour, the remaining 2 teaspoons salt, the remaining 1 teaspoon black pepper, and cayenne pepper, if using. Shake to mix, then add the chicken pieces to the bag and shake until well coated.

In a large cast iron skillet (12-inch or larger), heat the shortening over medium-high heat to melt it. The goal is to have a 1/2 inch depth of hot melted shortening to fry in, so use more or less as necessary.

Heat the shortening to about 375 degrees, or until a small amount of flour sprinkled into the shortening bubbles furiously. Carefully lay the chicken pieces skin side down into the hot shortening. Cook for until browned on the bottom, about 10 minutes, checking frequently and repositioning if they are coloring unevenly. Lower the heat if they are browning too quickly.

Turn the pieces with tongs and cook an additional 10 minutes or so, until the second side is browned and the meat is cooked through. Remove the chicken to a wire rack set over a baking sheet. Hold in a warm (170 degree) oven if not serving immediately.

This year’s grand prize went to Chef Richard Hawthorne from Grotto Las Vegas, for his “Updated Tiramisu.” Congratulations, Chef Richard!

In my professional life, age has crept up on me.

Early in my career, I kept my head down and my mouth shut.  I watched and learned.  I unjammed the copy machine and befriended the guys in the mail room.  Above all, I made sure there was always a cover sheet on my TPS report.

Then – suddenly, it seemed — people started asking for my expertise.

Wait.  I have expertise?  It occurred to me that I’ve been working for fifteen years.  It occurred to me that that’s a long time; maybe I do know a thing or two about a thing or two.

Huh.

Something really interesting happens on the way up the corporate ladder.  You start taking on projects and making decisions, which usually involves working with a few young guns, and it’s difficult to remember that you’re not one of them anymore.  You think back to the managers you worked with back in the day – they were smart, they were put together, they were… old.  You do some mental math, and it strikes you that they must have been in their mid-thirties at the time.  You gasp as realize that you are in your mid-thirties. You’re “that guy” – that old manager.  See how it creeps up?

Okay, fine.  You’re old and you have more responsibility.  That leads to another realization – you suddenly know full well those young’uns are criticizing you at the water cooler.  You see the way they look at you; those pre-pubescent punks think your job is easy.  They think they have all the answers.

Hey!, you want to shout in their direction as you sprint by the water cooler, late for a meeting, this isn’t as easy as it looks! There are budget constraints and politics and too many board members and not enough minions…

You can’t say that, of course.  Didn’t I mention that there aren’t enough minions?

The thing is, they’re probably right, at least on some level.  They likely have some really good ideas – fresh takes on old problems, insights on new ones. Heck, they probably even know what cloud computing is. If you’re smart, you’ll tap into those ideas, sift through them, and put the good ones to work.

But how?  The smart kids – the ones with the first-class ideas – know that their safest course of action is to keep quiet.  Speaking up is risky.

In fact, soliciting ideas within your organization is such a prevalent management issue that The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece about it.  The article, written by Rachel Emma Silverman, discusses methods ranging from the wearisome suggestion box to online idea-submission systems to dedicated ATM-like kiosks situated in high-traffic employee areas.

Those are all well and good, but the best example I’ve seen of a company tapping into the potential of its employees is at Landry’s, Inc.

For those who may not be familiar, the Landry’s empire, headquartered in Houston, is one of the largest in the country.  They operate 35 different concepts, which include over 300 restaurants and entertainment properties, and employ approximately 350 chefs.  They have operations in 31 states.

How do you even begin to manage all that?  How can you possibly keep the ideas fresh?  How do you inspire that many chefs to push the envelope, to keep innovating, to figure out what works best?  More importantly, how do you encourage the best ones to share what they know?

Well, if you’re Landry’s, you appeal to their egos and conduct an invitation-only smackdown.

For seven years, Landry’s has invited its top culinary professionals from across the country to compete head to head in a two-day cooking competition. This year, 36 chefs presented 78 dishes over a two day time period, battling for honors in four categories: appetizer, salad, entrée, and dessert.

The stakes?  Bragging rights, of course, along with the potential for their dish to be featured on menu of a Landry’s restaurant.  And for the first time, this year’s winner for Best Overall Dish won a trip to the annual Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colorado.

That’ll get the ideas brewing.

Here’s how it works: Invitations are extended to the company’s top chefs, which require the chefs to register their entries three weeks ahead of the competition.  On a first come, first served basis, the chefs sign up for the category in which they want to compete.

The management team creates a schedule dictating the exact time that each dish must be completed, at which time it is served to a panel of Landry’s executives for judging.  Each entry is scored on a numerical scale for creativity, presentation, and flavor.

The genius of the whole setup is this: the judging is blind.  The executives have no idea who submitted which dish.  In addition to fairness and objectivity, this levels the playing field.  The young guns have an unbiased shot at making a name for themselves.  The reputations of the old dogs and the current darlings bear no weight.  They have every incentive to swing for the fence.

In other words, go big or go home.

Landry’s invited me to observe this year’s competition behind the scenes, which was quite an adventure for this humble home cook. I hadn’t been in a commercial kitchen since my waitressing days, and even back then, I never witnessed anything close to this magnitude.  I had the opportunity to get to know the chefs, learn about what inspires them, why they do what they do, how they developed their technique.  I loved all the trash talk; I loved how much they wanted to win.

It was inspiring.  It made me want to cook.  It made me want to bring my best, in the kitchen and in life, too.

But perhaps most importantly, it made me want to motivate and inspire those young guns back at the office to go big or go home.

[Note: A slightly modified version of this post was first published as Motivate Your Employees to Go Big or Go Home on Technorati, which is pretty cool.]

An upside to having been around for two years is the ability to reference what has inspired me in the past.  Instead of just having a foggy sense of what I was up to last year and the year before, I can actually go look.  This must be why people keep journals — a discipline I have never mastered.

Two years ago, I wrote about the opening weekend of deer season, which is actually underway at this very moment.  I shared my own experience of deer hunting and the adventure of aging and butchering the venison at home.  Talk about eating locally!  Check it out here if you’re interested.

Last year, I was testing Thanksgiving recipes and stumbled across a sweet potato meringue pie, which isn’t something you see every day.  The recipe came together so easily and beautifully, that it occurred to me that the experience of making pies is vastly different than the process of creating a cake, which I wrote about here.

That’s also when I learned that Matt doesn’t like booze in his dessert, a fact that still baffles me.  Of course, that didn’t divert me from adding rum to the buttercream filling in the @#$%! ribbon cake, or making ice cream flavored with not one but two liquors.  And based on my dear friend Brooke’s request for bread pudding (in the comments on the apple galette post), I see a hard sauce in his future, too.

It’s a tough life he leads, but I think he’ll survive.

I honestly can’t believe we’re rounding third on 2011.  Hope all of you are well.