Wingin’ It

This week I went out of my comfort zone by staying in and attempting a home cooked meal.  I have always loved baking and can bake pretty much anything I want, but I absolutely hate cooking.  One of the things I hate about it is that it takes so much effort that it's not even satisfying to eat.  I guess you could say the same thing about baking, but I usually bake for fun not for actual meals. A lot of foods I don’t fully trust myself to cook anyway and I don’t think anything I try to cook will turn out like the recipe.  I usually stick to cooking pasta, frozen foods, or anything else instant and self-explanatory for a college student.  I figured I should (1) stop spending so much money on eating out and one-use food products (like instant meals) and (2) actually learn how to cook for my future self and family, so no better time to learn than now.

I decided that I was going to attempt to make chicken wings.  The main reason for this is because I almost always avoid cooking meat out of fear of not cooking it long enough and eating raw meat.  Also because my boyfriend Will, who you might remember from my first blog '“Flying Solo”, was visiting me this time and I wanted to find something we would both eat, so I'm not making an entire meal for myself that I’ll never be able to finish. 

First step was to gather all the ingredients.  Surprisingly enough, it didn’t require too many and I actually already had most of the ingredients I needed in my dorm room.  This is especially shocking because I am always low on food here and never know what to buy…a true college student who’s too lazy to cook and doesn’t know how to shop for herself. The only ingredients I needed to buy were the chicken and hot sauce.  The instructions also said you need a wire rack to cook the chicken on and a large bowl to mix the chicken with the sauce in.  We don’t have either of those in our room (which is expected for the wire rack but you’d think we would at least have a mixing bowl) so I figured I would buy that too if I found one at the store. 

We first stopped at one of my favorite stores, Lidl!  I can’t tell you exactly why I love Lidl so much but I do, however, the bread/pastry section right at the front certainly helps.  Here we found both the chicken wings and hot sauce so we pretty much had everything we needed in one trip.  I also had to browse the Halloween section a bit and found some spooky French fries and granola bars just for fun!

Next, we stopped at Dollar Tree to see if they would have a mixing bowl and possibly a wire rack, because they have random stuff like that sometimes, just not this time.  After a quick lap around the store, I didn’t see any wire racks or anything close to it.  I did see various bowls but none of them seemed like what I envisioned and felt like I wouldn’t use it much after this one recipe, so there was no point in buying it.

Afterwards, we stopped at ShopRite for one last effort at finding the random cooking tools.  Again, a strange place to look for what we needed, but they have random stuff and it was nearby so I figured why not try.  Well unfortunately that failed us too and we didn’t find exactly what we needed.  I found some things that were kind of similar, but not enough that it was worth buying so I figured they weren’t that important anyway and I could make it work with what I had at the apartment. 

Now it was time to really start.  The recipe I followed came from the website, Tastes Better From Scratch for their Crispy Baked Chicken Wings.  I almost always need a recipe to follow no matter what I’m doing because I truly will never understand how people eyeball measurements and adjust things based on taste.  This recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of baking powder, 3/4 teaspoons of salt, 1/2 teaspoon of pepper, and 1 teaspoon each of paprika and garlic powder for the chicken seasoning and 1/3 cup of hot sauce, 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar, and 1 tablespoon of water for the sauce.  The first thing I did was open the package of chicken and, much to my surprise, turns out I bought whole chicken wings.  I guess I really didn’t look at the package at all and I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was really thrown off.  So I gave myself a bonus step in this recipe and now had to cut my own chicken wings. 

Not only was I not expecting to have to cut my own chicken wings, I was also not expecting how disgusted I would be from it.  After looking up a tutorial on how and where to make the cuts, I got the biggest knife we have to be able to cut through the bones at two different points on all six wings.  Seriously, both Will and I were cringing and gagging at every cut we did.  The crunch of the bones was probably the worst part, but the blood wasn’t very appetizing either. 

After suffering through cutting all the wings, we now had six wings and six drumsticks.  The first step was to pat them all dry.  Again, pretty disturbing, but still better than cutting them.  Everything after this was pretty easy.  We just had to mix the spices together and coat each chicken wing with it.  We preheated the oven to 425 degrees F and started to arrange the wings on the tray.  This is where the wire rack was supposed to come in, but I decided to just wing it (no pun intended) and hope for the best without one.  

Once preheated, we put the wings in the oven and really just had to wait from there.  The recipe said to flip them every 20 minutes until they’re brown and that total cooking times could vary.  I HATE when you just have to watch and use your best judgment for things like that because like I said before, I’m not good at eyeballing so I have no idea when they’re actually done.  Regardless, I set my timer for 20 minutes until the first flip and started on the sauce. 

The measurements weren't totally making sense to me for the sauce.  It was almost all brown sugar with a little bit of hot sauce.  I still followed the recipe anyway, but I didn’t have high hopes for it. All I had to do was put the ingredients in a pot and mix them together over heat until the sugar dissolved. 

After flipping the chicken wings and cooking for 20 more minutes, I figured they were done.  What I would usually do in the past is overcook any chicken so I know for sure that it's not raw, but then it’s horribly dry and disgusting. I assumed that 20 minutes on each side was enough to evenly cook the wings because they weren’t that big so I took them out and let them cool before coating them.  The recipe made WAY too much sauce so I just coated a few in a little bowl (because we still don’t own a big mixing bowl) using just a little bit.  I plated them with ranch for me and no dipping sauce for Will because he eats everything plain.  I also left two extras which we coated in just the hot sauce (since I wasn’t feeling too confident in the recipe’s sauce) and sat down to eat. 

The wings actually tasted really good!  I mean I hated the sauce because, as I suspected, it was super sweet and not really spicy at all, but the first few were delicious before the sweetness became overpowering.  They came out much better than I ever expected.  I especially liked the one wing with just the plain hot sauce.  In my opinion it tasted so much better than the rest of them.  Unlike most things I tend to cook, they tasted just how I would expect them to at a restaurant: not overcooked and more importantly, not raw!

When I first started cooking, I really had no idea what I was getting myself into.  Once I realized I had to cut the wings myself, I was almost ready to give up, determine this adventure a failure, and conclude that I still hate cooking and always will. While I still like baking better, cooking was actually much easier than I expected.  Hopefully future recipes I try turn out just as simple as this one.  I at least have one recipe now that I’m confident in!  I mean, I do have a whole bottle of hot sauce that I have to use now.

I’m just gonna buy the precut wings next time…