Many people have asked me for my recipe for hot wings. I don't know why -- I can't cook. But I guess being from Buffalo means carrying an albatross or two, so here it is:
HOW THIS BUFFALOON ENJOYS HOMEMADE WINGS
Start with some chickens, preferably dead ones.
If they have feathers, remove them (the feathers, not the chickens). If they don't, you're already two steps ahead of the game. Meanwhile, heat up some oil in a pot large enough to hold the oil and some chicken parts. (Crisco, Mazola and Peanut work okay; Kendall, Valvoline and Quaker State don't.) Now, go back to where your dead, featherless chickens are and cut or pull the wings off. Keep the wings and throw out the rest of the chickens. You won't need them (the chickens, not the wings -- you will need the wings). Cut each wing into three sections: the "Tip", the "Drumstick" and the "Flat Thing". You can throw out the wing tips (the chicken, not the shoes) because they aren't much good for anything. Only non-Buffaloons eat 'em.
(On second thought, you can throw out the shoes, too -- or give them to Goodwill. Unless you happen to be extremely conservative, in which case you wouldn't consider eating wings in the first place, so why are you reading this?!)
Wipe your hands on your pants. Go into the bedroom and strip all the bedding off the bed except the sheet with the elastic stuff that holds it tightly to the mattress. Toss the rest of the bedding on the floor in the corner. Turn on the radio and/or TV and tune it to your favorite program. Adjust the volume to a comfortable listening level.
Go back into the kitchen (or wherever you prepare your food). The oil should now be heated to around 350 degrees (Although I'm guessing ... my thermometer only goes up to 106). Stand about five feet away from the pot and toss the Drumsticks and Flat Things, one at a time, into the pot. The pot should come alive with the bubbling, boiling, hissing, and screaming of raw, moist, cold poultry parts being plunged into an environment in which their temperature is raised instantly by hundreds of degrees. If this doesn't happen, you probably turned on the wrong burner and your wife's favorite, very expensive, decorative, empty teapot is now irreparably scorched.
Now, get another pot (a smaller one than the one with the oil in it). Remove your wife's scorched teapot from the stove and throw it out (the teapot, not the stove). Put the empty pot (the one without the oil in it) on the burner. Put some butter on it (the pot, not the burner). Melt the butter. Put in Frank's Louisiana Red Hot or Tobasco to make the sauce mild, medium or hot. To make it Nuclear/Geezuz-Kee-Riced, put in some Wild Bill Hickory's Habanero Hot Sauce With A Half-Life (Caution: Not for the weak of heart or stomach!)
By now or after five minutes, whichever is first or second, the wings in the pot with the oil should be golden brown, which we all know is non-sequitur because gold is not brown. They are, in fact, two different colors.
Take the pot (the one with the oil and the wings, not the butter) into the back yard and dump its contents on the lawn. (Unless you can figure out how to get the wings out of the boiling oil without burning yourself and slopping oil all over the kitchen, thereby raising the Wrath of Wife -- again.) Pick up the wings and wipe off the grass clippings. Leave the pot outside to cool. Carry the wings back into the kitchen (or wherever you prepare your food.) Wipe your hands on your pants.
Get a Cool Whip container. The large size works best. If it still has Cool Whip in it, scoop out the Cool Whip and throw it away (the Cool Whip, not the container). Wipe the container clean with your hand, and wipe your hand on your pants. Put the butter sauce and the wings into the Cool Whip container and close the lid tightly. Dance around with the container, pretending you're Michael Jackson (but don't grab your crotch -- you need both hands to hold the lid closed), until the wings are completely covered with the sauce.
Go into the backyard and dump the contents of the Cool Whip container onto the same spot where you dumped the oil. (It should be easy to see -- there won't be any grass there. And you'll know it's sterile, because nothing can live where there's an oil dump.)
Pick up the wings and carry them into the room where you prepare your food.
Get some celery sticks, a roll of paper towels, a jar of Marie's Bleu (sic) Cheese Dressing, a dinner plate (which, if you're like me, is probably used for other meals as well), and some beers.
Put the wings on the dinner/other-meals-too plate. Balance the items (listed in above paragraph) on your arms and hands and walk into the bedroom.
Arrange the items in a neat semi-circle on the mostly bedding-less bed. Sit cross-legged on the bed inside the semi-circle. Perform the following acts:
Gulp a mouthful of beer and swill it around in your mouth to cleanse your palette.
Swallow the beer.
Dip either a drumstick or a flat thing (but not both) into the Marie's Bleu (sic) Cheese Dressing.
Put almost the entire wing into your mouth, leaving just enough outside to get a good grip on it.
Clamp down with your teeth.
Using both hands, pull the wing out of your mouth while maintaining enough jaw (clamping) pressure to strip the meat from the bone(s). You know you've done it right if the bone(s) come(s) out all by it(them)self(ves); i.e. sans meat.
Toss the bone(s) into the corner. You get a point for each wing bone(s) that stay(s) on the bedding; no points for bones that fall to the floor.
Chew.
Savor the combined aural, visual and culinary sensations of the TV/Radio and stuff you cooked.
When the stuff in your mouth is ground to a semi-liquid -- and you're bordering on sensory overload -- swallow.
Pick up a celery stick and throw it on the bedding. We Buffaloons never eat the celery. It's just there to make us feel guilty about the cholesterol we're ingesting.
Wipe your hands on your pants.
Tear off a clean paper towel and wipe it on your pants in the same spot where you just wiped your hands.
Crumple the paper towel into a little ball and toss it on the floor in the corner.
Repeat steps 1 - 14 until the dinner/other-meals-too plate contains nothing but smears of greasy red sauce.
Put the remaining bottle(s) of beer on the floor.
Using a broad sweeping motion, push the celery, dinner/other-meals-too plate, Marie's Bleu (sic) Cheese Dressing, and paper towels onto the floor.
Pick up a beer and lay back, using the wall or headboard as a pillow.
Drink beer, enjoy the TV/radio and burp as necessary.
Enjoy step 19 while you can, because within a few minutes your wife, husband, son, daughter, mother, father, or conscience will make you get up and clean your bedroom.
"How This Buffaloon Enjoys Chicken Wings" C. 1995 by Rick Johnston (johnston@buffnet.net). Permission is granted to anyone to freely use this, er, stuff ... provided this copyright notice remains intact.
I don't own a microwave, so I guess that makes me a lousy cook. I have to make do with a fire in the yard. I ran out of stuff to burn last winter and had to set my neighbor's garage on fire just to heat up a couple of Brown 'n' Serves.
Heck, it was either the neighbor's garage or the outhouse. (If it was the outhouse, it would have given new meaning to the term Brown 'n' Serve!)
Come on, now. If they weren't dead, that would mean you were pulling the wings off live chickens. That's almost as bad as electrocuting tadpoles with a 9-volt battery ... which I never did, but I understand they go crazy -- and very fast -- for those few seconds before they realize they'll never become frogs.
Old Wingtips. I remember them well. Just watch where you toss 'em! If you're on a school bus and you toss 'em out a window, they could fly through the open window of a passing motorist's car and hit him or her (the motorist, not the car) in the face. Or worse, damage the motorist's car.
Either way, your classmates would laugh their heads off and you -- you would be dragged kicking (barefoot) and screaming by the bus driver back to the principal's office. And you'd be grounded for a month when your mechanic Mom found out.
This is the best picture I've seen on any TV since the old DuMont quit working back in February of 82. But I'll wager it could still be better if we added just a little bit of Reynolds Wrap to the ends of the antennas.
I once tried to lengthen the ends of the antennas by taking the cord off the lamp, stripping the ends, wrapping them around the antenna and plugging the cord into an AC outlet. That was ... let's see ... back in February of 82.
Don't let her kid you! These things sell at Wal-Mart for $1.99. She just got mad because it was her great-grandmother's or something. Who knows why women get so attached to old stuff?
Now, if it was something really important like my fly-casting rod or my bowling ball THAT would be something to get upset about. But a $1.99 teapot?!?!
An oxymoron is a contradiction: Jumbo Shrimp. Military Intelligence. Good Grief. THOSE are oxymorons.
Non-sequiturs are words or phrases that make no sense. Like, er, Golden Brown. So there.
By the way, did you know the world at one time was all in black & white? There were no colors back then. Color was discovered by a Tibetan porter on the north face of K2 in 2279 B.C. during Shirley Maclaine's expedition to be the first woman ever. It seems one of the porters was eaten by a yak and some blood was spilled on the snow. The blood was red. And the rest is history.
No sense writing something silly about Ol' Mikey-Mike. He has enough trouble simply staying on this planet.
Buffalo, New York is only a few miles from the Love Canal -- the one that was so polluted they had to shut it down and evacuate the residents. How do you think it happened?
Turns out the fault didn't lie with Occidental Chemical, or Hooker Chemical, or Hookers ON Chemicals -- it was caused by the residents of that community cooking chicken wings according to my recipe.
But they ain't gonna hold me responsible! Damn lawyers!
Look! They spelled it wrong! Ha ha ha! That's why I put the word "(sic)" on the label. I don't know what it means, but it seems like everytime I see that word, I've just read something that was spelled wrong or it didn't make use of the rules of good grammar or grandpar (sic).
See?
They'd be wrong even if they had spelled "blue" right, because the cheese isn't blue at all. It's actually off-white. Ha ha ha! What a bunch of dopes!
They really make me (sic)!
A lot of people choose to put their wings in a basket. And they choose to include the breasts, thighs, and drumsticks. And put absolutely NO sauce on them.
Restaurants around Buffalo for a long time called this, appropriately, Chicken in the Basket. It was terrible. Now the only place you can find Chicken in the Basket is if you are walking in the woods and happen to meet a young lady wearing a red riding hood.
Come to think of it, what's she doing wearing a riding hood if she's walking? AHA! Another non-sequitur!
When I was a kid, I used to watch a lot of cartoons on the old DuMont. (Of course, back then it was almost new.)
Anyways, whenever the people who drew the cartoons wanted to indicate that a character was inebriated, they drew X's where their eyes had been. I always wondered about this until I read John MacDonald's Travis McGee novels and found that there was a Mexican beer called Two Eckses (2X's).
I think the Mexicans call it Dos Equis, but I don't speak Spanish. For all I know, Dos Equis means "Grandfather Horse" or something.
Anyways again, that's why I put two X's on the label. It's my little tribute to both the old-time animators like Friz Freleng and Walter Lantz and the now-deceased author.
I really love women. I just don't understand them. Why, take a good look at the picture. Look at her look of disapproval. Does it remind you of your mom when you used to misbehave as a kid?
I think it's because women look at us with the same maternal eyes that makes them say things like, "My biological clock is ticking!" and "You're nothing but an overgrown kid!" and "Put away your fly-casting rod and bowling ball and wash your hands before you come to the dinner table!"
On second thought, people talk with their mouths, not their eyes. So the above paragraph is probably yet another non-sequitur.
But people can and do communicate with their eyes. Looks can burn. And cry. And hurt. And love. And admit it, there is nothing more beautiful in this world than the smiling eyes of a woman in love when she looks at you.
