I'm the Best - Buffalo Wings

So I've been on a bit of a buffalo wing craze lately. It started with the Olympics and the habit I developed of going to sports bars in Greenwich Village with J after work to watch Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt do their thing. I tell you, there's nothing like ordering nachos, fried calamari or fried cheese curds, and buffalo wings while watching finely chiseled Olympian bodies with your jaw slack for getting hit on. But I must say that the brand of men doing the hitting on were a particular new level of clumsy and awkward.

Friday night I convinced W to let me come over and finally watch the closing ceremony of the Olympics, which he had DVRed for me. We ordered from Atomic Wings, and got a double order of wings, waffles fries with cheese sauce and nachos. The nachos blew, the waffle fries awesome and sinful, the wings decent but I had to order only hot because W can't take the heat.

Saturday, it poured and poured, so S brilliantly invited a bunch of over for drinking, eating and Taboo. I heard M and M were making banana pudding and empanadas, so I needed to scrounge up something to bring. Of course, I settled on wings.

I love reading this blog called The Pioneer Woman, and she has a recipe for wings on her website that I used. Her pictures are much better than mine.

First I dumped the canola oil in a pan.

In the meantime, I dumped the chicken into a collander and rubbed them dry with a paper towel. As soon as the oil got hot enough, I started frying the wings. I don't understand the compulsion to wash chicken first. It's not necessary. Those suckers are going into hot 360 degree oil. What vermin do you think is going to survive that bath? Besides, the USDA says it's fine, "It is not necessary to wash raw chicken. Any bacteria which might be present are destroyed by cooking." You know the USDA is paranoid about making sure you don't konk out from salmonella. (Well, relatively paranoid. Let's not get into how they've helped us get to a state where animals were raised in such horrific conditions that our own health is at risk. These wings came from Whole Foods, which means that while the chickens still probably didn't have a life out foraging on Old MacDonald's farm, theirs was a marginally better one than the chicken turned into a McNugget.) Besides, why do you need the USDA to tell you that the chicken germs will die in the vat of blistering oil and washing is pointless?

While the chicken was frying, I prepared the sauce. First I melted two sticks of butter.

Whole Foods didn't have Frank's Hot Sauce, so I had to settle on using a combination of Bone Suckin' Sauce and Whole Foods generic brand organic hot sauce.

I poured in both bottles of the hot sauce and added Tabasco to taste.

When the wings were done frying, I put them on a paper-towel lined sheet, and then rolled them into the butter-hot sauce mixture. My wings took about 10 minutes. I'm so glad I cross-referenced buffalo wing recipes and Paula Deen's said the wings should take about that long. Judging from her pictures, I think Pioneer Woman may have crowded her pan a bit and lowered the cooking temperature, or maybe her oil wasn't hot enough (She says she doesn't measure the temperature.) because it took her 24 minutes to finish frying a batch of her wings. That seems way way too long. Mine would have been burnt to a crisp.

While making the wings, I put together a blue cheese dressing by taking the lead from another recipe. I say taking the lead because I just combined the parts of various recipes that I liked. Basically, it's just 6 oz. of crumbled blue cheese, about a half cup of mayonnaise, maybe a cup of sour cream, a hearty teaspoon of dijon mustard, and a little milk to loosen up the sauce a bit.

As the wings were frying, I started walking around the kitchen literally patting myself and saying, "I'm the best." Later, when K (who graciously took the photos) and I were on the subway platform, I talked into the tunnel and told it the train better come soon because, "I'm the best."