Last night we hosted a hot wings challenge night. It was like the Hot Ones show on youtube, where we made a whole bunch of wings of increasing hot-ness to see who could make it through them all. It was a really fun night, but not without it’s challenges.
First off, I assumed the wings should be cooked from frozen. Wrong. So that added an additional time-intensive step into an already busy process. I mean, we needed to make at least 120 wings, plus more for the spectators who just wanted to eat not-so-spicy wings and watch the rest of us kill ourselves.
I bought myself a bubble tea specially for between-wing cooling and it wound up getting knocked off a ledge and shattering. It spilled all over the counter, underneath the bread box and into the clean dishes I had been washing. This was right in the middle of wing making so between the loss of a special drink I was excited for, the giant mess, and happening at a terribly busy time, it triple sucked.
I was a fool and wore my new shorts and a shirt I like lots while making wings, and of course I got stains on them.
I totally forgot about the final bag of wings which we had set out on the back of Liz’s car to defrost in the sun at the start of the evening. This morning while lying in bed, I suddenly remembered that bag of wings and wondered what had become of it. I was worried our dog had found it and eaten an entire 2 kg bag of raw chicken wings. Luckily for me, the bag rode down the driveway on Liz’s car before being thrown onto the side of the road. I was able to grab them on the way to work this morning and throw them in the dumpster so it could have been worse but I still feel pretty stupid about wasting that much money and meat.
For some reason this morning, each of these little disasters really bothered me. But the point of this post is actually not the catastrophes, it’s that I’m still glad we did wing night, because even with those frustrating elements it was still a great night. A lot of friends got together and had a lot of fun doing something we’ve never done before, and I’m happy that we were able to make that happen, to organize a fun, goofy event that people were pumped on whether they were eating hot wings or just watching others do it. Some events fall flat and those ones are bummers but when an event goes well, it makes me glad I put the effort in to make it happen, even if I did fuck up a crucial aspect of the food prep, make a huge mess, spill my dang bubble tea, ruin my new shorts, and stupidly waste 2 kg of chicken wings.
crimson highway 