Guilty Pleasures: KFC Buckets

Finger lickin' good?

When trying to figure out what we should have for dinner whilst we watched the final Leader’s debate (I’m so Rock and Roll it hurts)  my friends were gobsmacked that I had never “done” a bucket.

It’s not that I’m above eating grim food. Far from it. There’s been the drunk and woozy kebabs, the greasy hungover Dominos, the chicken kievs drowned in mayo… and even though I try and avoid fast-food, whenever I sneak a bite of my boyfriend’s cheese-burgers, I have to admit they do taste good. Terrible, disgusting…  but tasty. Horrendously tasty.

But buckets, buckets, those mythical buckets – packed with deep-fried delights, the Colonel’s secret blend of 11 herbs and spices, giant bottles of pop, sides of coleslaw, beans and who’d have known: gravy?! – for all these years, I had avoided the allure of the bucket.

And so it came to pass, we ordered two buckets: a boneless and variety box, and there were highs and lows. The detractors were that we were faced with more soggy chips than we could ever possibly hope to eat. The popcorn chicken tasted so synthetic it is hard to imagine it had any naturally occurring produce in it at all and my hands were so greasy from – like an animal – ripping flesh off the bones that I was literally unable to hold things without them slipping out of my grasp. And I was under the impression, mistaken clearly, that all buckets come with that dessert of my (retro) dreams: the Viennetta? No? Why ever not?

But the highs, oh the highs. The bucket itself was so huge, so gaudy, so exciting. The secret blend of herbs and spices makes the chicken taste unbelievably good: hot, spicy, sweet, salty and crisp, the white flesh beneath it is succulent and juicy. The very act of eating endless wings and legs makes you feel like you’re in some kind of warped medieval banquet, tossing the bones aside and calling for more mead (or in my case, chilled rose, natch) and really how fun is it to eat something utterly filthy, without any redeeming health or nutritional benefits, once in a while.

This may have been the most guilty of my guilty pleasures yet. Is there anything out there more disgustingly filthy than a bucket? I truly doubt it.