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Good morning. You’ll sometimes hear that you can’t make proper chicken wings in the oven, that the only true wing is deep-fried.
This is nonsense. Deep-fried chicken wings are awesome, and a good reason to go to a bar that serves them to watch football while you eat. But you can make superior chicken wings at home, in the oven, and ought to. Each time you do, you’ll make them slightly better than you did the time before. You’ll develop a chicken-wing style.
That’s the Saturday night forecast, then: wings. You can start with the Buffalo classic if you like, but I’m turning south for Eric Kim’s Atlanta hot wings (above), sharp and fiery, salty and crisp. He uses a dusting of baking powder and salt to enhance the crustiness of the skin, and a combination of cayenne pepper, onion and garlic powders in the sauce to deliver heat against the acidity of lemon juice. For those raised on butter and Frank’s, it’s a revelation. Serve with batons of carrots and celery, and plenty of blue cheese or ranch dressing.
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Oven Fried Hot Wings
Other wingish possibilities, delicious for lunch as they are for dinner: Buffalo cauliflower; Chinese mustard wings; Buffalo salmon; spicy, lacquered chicken wings; chicken wings with gochujang, ginger and garlic.
Don’t neglect breakfast, though! This weekend is prime for buttermilk pancakes, for biscuit sandwiches, for steel-cut oatmeal with fruit. (I don’t know if I’ll make one, but I ran into a Dagwood at the 7-Eleven that amazed: a French toast sandwich of sausage, egg and cheese, with chipotle-bacon mayonnaise. What?!) Maybe some Bircher muesli. Or a classic avocado toast.
And then, for Sunday night, how about a mushroom lasagna with a very green salad? Or, staying in the Italian vein, a sausage ragù with a lemon-garlic kale salad? I like all four of those recipes, but may yet pivot toward something that keeps me wing-adjacent: pan pizza, buttery and rich, to serve with leftover ranch.
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Now, it’s some considerable distance from anything to do with lobster or cannoli, but Hua Hsu has a good piece in The New Yorker this week about the decline of the working musicians who used to be at the heart of the gig economy. No longer.
You know what holds up? Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed,” from 2006. Next for me is “Internal Affairs,” the 2002 Hong Kong thriller on which the film was based.
Here’s a lovely essay by Alexandra Jacobs on two new books about Hollywood writers, in The New York Times Book Review.
Finally, it’s the birthday of the artist Pablo Picasso, born in 1881 (he died in 1973). Here are the Modern Lovers with “Pablo Picasso,” music for chicken wings. I’ll see you on Sunday.
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