I'm in a bit of a daze this morning. It's not that I was up late watching the Superbowl or anything. Actually, @mrsbozz and I both went right to bed after watching the halftime show. Of course we did spend a little bit of time on Facebook checking to see how many of the people we follow complained about the Bad Bunny performance.
I made a comment on someone's page this morning, that if you didn't like the show, it's easy to just move on with your life. If you didn't like the show and you feel you need to complain about it on Facebook, that says a whole lot more about you than I think you realize.
So yeah, there was a big football game this weekend, and although my wife and I didn't do anything special for it, I did decide to do a bit of grilling on Saturday.
As I said, I'm in a bit of a daze. Somehow, the unions that negotiate our work calendar were able to score the Monday after the Superbowl off. Unfortunately, I am considered an administrator, so I still have to work. On top of that, there is a board meeting tonight that doesn't start until 6 PM, so there is a good chance I will be here at least 12 hours today.
To finish things off, I accidentally set my alarm for 4:45 PM this morning instead of 4:45 AM, so I woke up around 5:13 AM and realized I was already getting a late start to my day. Luckily, it was only about half an hour. I saw sleeping so hard, it could have been a lot worse!
Given it was Superbowl weekend, I decided to grab some chicken wings at the butcher when we stopped there on Friday night. I was a bit worried that they would be out of wings, but they still had a bunch and as you can see in the opening photo they were large full wings that hadn't been separated yet.
I saw someone on one of my grilling pages make some breaded grilled wings earlier in the week, so I thought I would give it a shot. The cool thing about chicken wings is they are so inexpensive that if you screw them up, you don't have to feel too bad about them. Plus, as long as they are fully cooked, even if they suck, you are still eating chicken wings and what could be wrong with that!
Like I said, wings are fairly cheap, these ones only cost me about $1.69 per pound, so I went ahead and got two pounds of wings and got to work seasoning them up with a half cup of flour, some corn starch, baking powder, and then the two seasonings you see in the photo above. One of them I picked up at our local warehouse store, and the other one I got in a auction basket that I won last Spring.
A few months ago I picked up these food safe nitrile gloves and they have been pretty amazing when working with chicken or any of my other BBQ stuff. It's not that I don't like getting my hands dirty, but this just makes everything so much easier. I can simply peel them off when I am done and throw them away.
It was sitting right around zero degree Fahrenheit when I fired up the grill. As you can see it was so cold out that the snow and ice wasn't even melting even though the sun was out. It was pretty brisk. I set things up and then put the chicken wings on.
After about half an hour I checked on the wings and I realized that I had made a few mistakes with my preparation. I realize now I probably should have separated the drum from the flat. I also think I was too liberal with the flour mixture, as you can see, there are some areas of the wings where it didn't fully absorb in to the skin and it stayed kind of powdery.
I also didn't account for the fat and skin to burn through the flour mixture the way it did. I think half an hour might have been too long to wait to check on them before flipping the wings. The good news is, these are things I can easily change if I decide to try this method again.
In the end, they still turned out with amazing flavor. The burnt tips of the wings didn't really bug me too much because you don't typically eat that part anyway. The skin along with the flour mixture ended up quite crisp, and even though I didn't deep fry them, it still had that audible crunch when you bit into them.
Until I perfect this method, I still prefer my grilled wings without breading. This was a fun experiment though, and like I said, losing $3 to $4 isn't that big of a deal. Everything was still edible, so it's not like it was a total loss.
This was actually only my first grilling session of the day, but for the second one you will have to check back for another post!
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