Cooking Adventure: Savory Chicken Wings

Seriously, you guys.

You guys, seriously. Seriously.

These are the best chicken wings you'll ever have.

 Eat them and know nirvana.

These are not hot wings. We have stepped beyond that realm. These are savory, juicy, wonderful chicken wings with meat that comes right off the bone

A word of warning: all the measurements are approximate. There's no 1 cup of this or 2 tablespoons of that. I'm very sorry. I'll try to be as clear as possible. It's not hard at all and the end product is well worth it.

Ingredients:

2 packs of party wings

About 1 bottle Kikkoman soy sauce

About 2 plastic lemons of lemon juice

garlic salt

"Party wings" are chicken wings that are already cut up.

I did not have the plastic lemons.

This is made in the broiler. Firstly, get out your broiler pan and discard the slotted bit on the top.

How long until the slotted bits of broiler pans have the same rights as all kitchenware?

Cover the broiler pan in aluminum foil. If you don't have the wide variety, overlap two sheets of foil and pinch to form a seal at the seam. You do not want any of the soy sauce or lemon juice slipping through. Your wings will be dry and flavorless and scrubbing off baked-on soy sauce is next to impossible.

Make sure the foil goes all the way up the sides.

Lay out the 2 packs of party wings skin-side up on the foil.

Drumette. Left: skin side. Right: gross side.

Wingette. Left: thick skin side. Right: thin skin side.

34 wings.

Working in a zig-zag pattern, quickly pour soy sauce over the length every wing, working your way across the rows. Do the same with the lemon. Finally, sprinkle garlic salt over the whole thing, making sure to hit every wing.

I demand copious amounts of garlic salt!

Then flip it all over and do it again! You'll wind up with loads of soy sauce and lemon juice on the bottom of the pan. This is what you want. I suppose you could just dump in a whole bottle of soy sauce and two entire plastic lemons of juice and call it a day. This is just how I roll.

I roll in...sauce?

Stick it in the broiler on the lowest possible rack.

Linoleum: for the modern kitchen.

Set the broiler to BROIL and set a timer for 13 minutes. If you have the type of broiler settings that allow low, medium and high settings, set it to medium and set a timer for 15 minutes. When the timer goes off, flip all the wings over so they're skin-side up again and set the timer for 11 minutes. If you have the other kind of broiler, set the timer for 13 minutes.

To avoid turning your hands into crispy critters, take the pan out of the broiler (close the broiler! You might think you won't step on it, but you will) and set it on the stovetop to flip the wings. Careful not to spill the juice!

As soon as the timer goes off the second time, take the wings out of the broiler.

Gaze upon your creation.

GAZE UPON IT.

Then eat it. Eat it all.

The juice leftover in the pan has its own delicious uses. It's tasty on white rice. It's also the world's unhealthiest dressing and tastes very good on romaine lettuce.

These wings are savory, never dry and a confirmed crowd-pleaser. They're still tasty when cold, so any leftovers that make it to the fridge will still be good the next day.

Happy cooking!

Cooking Adventure: Shooter's Sandwich

This is a blog about food and fancy. I'm sure "food" needs no defining, but "fancy" is a favorite word of mine.

fancy (verb)
1. to have a fancy for; like
2. to form a conception of; imagine
3. to visualize or interpret

Since "food" comes first in the title, I'm starting this blog with a post about food: the shooter's sandwich.

Your arteries aren't prepared for this.

This is an Edwardian (1901-1910) snack taken on hunting trips. Considering the weight of this thing when it was done, "snack" is a misnomer.

Ingredients:

1 round loaf of bread (crusty bread is best, but even a soft whole wheat loaf will do as long as you don't mind some grease soaking through the crust)
2 cups diced mushrooms
1 cup diced shallots
3/4 cup butter
2 rib eye steaks
Salt
Pepper

I got a fairly large loaf of wheat bread from a local bakery, so I ended up using about 3 cups of mushrooms and 3 rib eye steaks. Yes, three steaks in a sandwich.

For anyone unfamiliar with shallots (I had to Google it), it's an onion. A really small, hard-to-cut onion. They're milder and sweeter, but if you want something that's easy to cut and cheaper, just get a sweet onion.

The overrated shallot.

Firstly, dice the mushrooms and shallots. I used 2 boxes of mushrooms and about 8 shallots.

You will learn to hate mushrooms.

Shallot carnage.

Melt 3/4 cup of butter in a large pan. Finally, this recipe gets good!

Holy heart disease, Batman!

When the butter is melted, add the mushrooms and shallots. Stir to get them nice and coated in all that...delicious...butter...

Every time you say "butter", a baby panda is born

Cook until the whole mix is reduced and most of the liquid is gone. This can take a half hour to forty minutes, so feel free to wander off and do other things, returning every 10 minutes to give it a stir. I played Minecraft.

If you have a cast-iron skillet, use that for cooking the steaks. If you only have one large pan like I do, dump the mushroom mixture into a bowl and keep it warm somewhere.

Things get epic: get your rib eyes.

Gaze upon its majesty.

I trimmed the edge fat off the steaks, but kept the rest. Put the steaks in your searing-hot pan. At this point you can salt and pepper them as much as you want. Cook them to whatever doneness you want. Medium is great for this kind of sandwich, but I cooked mine all the way through and it turned out alright.

Note: if the steaks are of different thicknesses, you have two options. 1: Carefully monitor each steak for doneness. 2: Even them out by smashing the thicker ones thinner. If you don't have a meat tenderizer, you can cover the steaks with plastic wrap and roll over them with a rolling pin. Or press them down with a cutting board.

Meat-evener.

Get the loaf of bread and cut a bit off the top. Rip out the insides and do whatever you want with them.

Cooking is violent.

At this point, you can smear condiments around the inside of the hollowed-out loaf if you want. I left it dry.

Don't let the steaks rest. Jam the first one in so it lays as flat as possible on the bottom. If you have a large loaf like mine, cut bits off your extraneous steak and use them to fill in the gaps. Spoon in the mushroom mixture and spread it out evenly, all the way to the edges of the bread. Put the second rib eye on top of everything and fill in the gaps. Put the bread lid on top.

First steak layer.

Mushroom, mushrooms.

Second steak layer.

Bread lid.

Wrap the whole thing in greaseproof paper. The internet says wax paper is greaseproof. The internet lies. Parchment paper is supposed to be greaseproof. If you stick a paper towel or two (or five) under the wrapped sandwich, it doesn't matter if grease soaks through. If you don't have paper, plastic wrap should do fine.

If you do use paper, wrap it up in butcher's string like this. Or any string you have lying around.

Stick a cutting board (or any other flat, sturdy object) on top of the sandwich and weight it down. Really weigh it down.

No, seriously.

Smashed sandwich.

Now the bad news.

Let it sit, under the weight, in a cool place for six. Whole. Hours.

Let me explain. The sandwich needs to be smashed together to keep it from falling apart when you cut into it. The cohesion is helped along as the sandwich cools.

A "cool place" can either be a cool room or, if the idea of meat at room temperature gives you the jibblies, put it in the fridge. It'll probably be harder to weigh it down in a smaller space.

If you're desperate to eat this glorious sandwich, I found that mine had been pretty well smashed at about an hour and a half later. I went crazy with the weights and had it in a cool room.

And how did it taste?

If you burst into tears of joy, I understand.

This was the best sandwich I'd ever had in my entire life. Save for one.

This is an incredibly heavy, rich, flavorful sandwich. It weighed three pounds. I cut out slices like a cake, but only managed to eat one.

Happy cooking!