honey barbecue chicken wings
I feel like I’ve fallen so behind in blogging about items cooked, that I’m a bit at a loss where to start. Do I go back to the last picture NOT blogged about and start in chronological order or do I reverse the order and go back in time? I certainly spend a lot of time thinking about cooking and looking up and concocting recipes, but when it comes to photo editing, discarding, uploading, tagging, naming, describing, and last, but certainly not least, trying to write up a vignette interesting enough for you to read through and not fast forward to the pictures and the recipe – I feel that I fall so far behind, it all takes up so much time, that I’m just barely getting to it all between the cooking and the cleaning and the job. And sometimes food related incidents occur when there’s NO cooking involved whatsoever. Or rather, cooking happens as an afterthought, a side note.
Take, for example, our most recent acquisition of the FoodSaver. We (meaning KS) first got wind of it while in Salem, Massachusetts while visiting friends and my parents. We ogled the shrink-wrapped buffalo wings as if it were the world’s 8th wonder before we devoured them in silence. And when KS claimed he would buy it, I mused and dismissed it as a conversation starter. It wasn’t until we were putting the item into our cart at the ever-so-claustrophobic BedBath&Beyond, that I realized we don’t just talk about buying kitchen appliances together – we actually do buy them. And you know it’s serious when a couple purchases communal kitchen appliances. KitchenAid hand mixer. FoodSaver. Wutshof knives.
So back at home, KS was off last week. And periodically, I’d ring him from work and say hello. And he’d tell me things like “Honey, I shrink wrapped the butter.”
“But wasn’t it already in a card board box?”
“Yeah, but I needed to practice on something.”
”So you picked butter?”
”Uh-huh, and it’s awesome! I’m looking for something else to practice on.”
It was nice to see him put his vacation time to such good use. And now, you should just look at him, he’s a FoodSaver pro!
So when we were thinking about other items to seal, we thought of making spicy baked buffalo wings, and marinade them overnight. This would be a prime opportunity to vacuum seal our wings for 24 hours and let them hang out in a spicy sauce sans oxygen. I’m not sure, if this is actually more effective than letting things sit in a plain Ziploc bag, but after we took the wings out and roasted them, the results was undeniably finger-licking good. We ate our wings in silence, and chased them with an English ale. It was perfection beyond words and we had an electrical contraption to thank for it. So you see, cooking this time came as a peripheral, as an afterthought. But in the end, it all worked out, so perhaps it’s for the best that way, sometimes.
Ingredients:
1 lb of chicken wings
1/3 cup Sriracha sauce
2/3 cups barbeque sauce
1/3 cup honey
2 tbs ginger, finely chopped
4 tsp garlic, finely chopped
salt/pepper depending on preferences
Wash and pat dry the wings. Place them in a bag that you can either vacuum seal or close (like a Ziploc bag). Add the sauces, honey, ginger and garlic, mix it all inside, and either vacuum-seal the bag or close it and place in the refrigerator for 24 hours.
The next day, preheat the oven to 375F, and when ready, place the wings, in a glass baking dish in the oven for about 45 minutes. Test for doneness, as oven cooking times/temperatures vary widely, and if you see no pink near the joints (when you cut into a wing or two) pull the wings out and let sit for a few minutes to cool off.
Eat and enjoy. A pound should feed two people, but if you’re a true wing lover, you may find yourself wanting more after you share them with another person.
Deborah Dowd
After you get over the experimental phase with your foodsaver, you will find it a great help in saving and keeping food, particularly cheese and frozen foods. I included mine in my post about things in my kitchen I couldn’t do without. We use ours to make our Costco- purchased meats into manageable amounts, vacuum seal my husband’s summer catch of the day. It is particularly helpful when we go camping since we can seal our foods and freeze then they keep in the cooler for the day or two until we cook them. We even vacuum-seal our matches to keep them from getting wet in the wilderness!