A Homemade Recipe For You, Miley Cyrus: Chocolate Chicken With Butter

First, the recipe:

Chocolate Chicken

Ingredients:

Two boneless chicken breasts, cut thin

1 tsp. unsweetened or semisweet cocoa powder

1/2 tsp salt

1/4 tsp. paprika

a dash of cayenne pepper or chili flakes

Chocolate, a key ingredient in Chocolate Chicken.

lemon juice (enough to make mix “goopy”)

some cilantro or basil, chopped

melted butter (you choose the amount)

optional: cumin or garlic powder

whiskey for flambeing

Instructions:

Mix above ingredients together (except whiskey if flambeing).

Wash chicken and coat thoroughly with mix.

Let sit for awhile  while you figure out what to serve with it, or have a cocktail (optional, but if flambeing, don’t use up all your whiskey).

Cook chicken — grill it, fry it, bake it, saute it, stir-fry it, flambe it, whatever you like, but do make sure to apply sufficient heat that it isn’t raw and you get sick from it. I don’t want that to happen.

And that’s it! Eat and enjoy!

Where and Why I Got this Recipe

My thanks for this recipe (which I’ve slightly modified; for example, I added butter, for reasons explained below) go to a Princess Buttercup, who posted it at food.com and says she found it on the Net and apparently hadn’t tried it yet — though three reviewers gave it an average of four out of five stars, so it should be pretty good. The optional cumin, garlic powder and whiskey for flambeing were all ideas tossed in by the reviewers, who seemed to think the recipe needed a little more pizzazz to reach five stars.

I confess I haven’t tried it, either, but the point of this post isn’t to introduce you to a tasty new dish. It’s to use the words “chocolate,” “chicken,” “butter,” “recipe,” “homemade,” “Miley Cyrus” and “you” all in one headline.

According to a guest post at OkDork by Garrett Moon, founder of a website called CoSchedule, a data analysis showed that highly shared posts on major social media often contained those words (“chocolate,” “chicken,” etc.).

A platter of tasty grilled chicken. Can chocolate and butter be far behind?

In fact, “chicken,” “chocolate,” “recipe” and “butter” were the top four words used on highly shared headlines on Pinterest, and the same four words showed up in the top ten on Google+. “Recipe” and “homemade” are big on Facebook and Pinterest, while “chicken” nabs a top ten spot on LinkedIn. (I haven’t quite figured that one out.)

While the word “you” doesn’t appear on those lists, it does show up a lot in highly shared headlines — three times as often as heads that used “I” and “me.” The moral of that story is that you care more about you than you care about me, which is as it should be.

A Social Media Test

So this is a test.

How about it, Facebook friends? Twitter followers? Google+ buddies? LinkedIn networkers? Pinteresters?

Are you moved to share this post by the alluring headline, perhaps dreaming of chocolate chicken (with butter) for dinner tonight and thinking all your social media friends, followers, etc., might share the love?

I hope so! Let’s go viral!

The Obligatory Travel Angle

Of course, this being a travel blog, it needs a travel angle, so I could mention that chocolate chicken is really not that weird an idea — think Mexican mole sauce, from Mexico, a fine travel destination.

And have you heard about the hot new Los Angeles eatery ChocoChicken, which serves chocolate-flavored fried chicken? It’s from Adam Fleischman, the same fellow who created the Umami Burger chain. Fleischman says he hopes that someday ChocoChicken joints will cover the U.S., another fine travel destination.

By the way, the above Chocolate Chicken recipe is not to be confused with Fleischman’s secret ChocoChicken recipe, which may taste better but is, well, secret.

But does the ChocoChicken recipe contain butter? And is it homemade? Only you can make Chocolate Chicken (with butter) a household name — one share, post, tweet, or pin at a time.

Answer to Last week’s Travel Quiz:

Not counting the already common names of Georgia, Jordan, and Israel, which country’s name was given to more baby girls in the U.S. than any other’s last year?

A) Malaysia

B) India

C) America

D) Kenya

The answer is A, Malaysia