Wing It

If you’re a guy, and you hate to cook, but you bought my book anyway just because you love me, let me reward you. Here is the lunch I just ate. It takes no skill at all, and boy was it good.

Buy a package of six or eight chicken wings. Salt them and sprinkle them with garlic powder. Preheat your oven to 425. Put the wings on a broiler pan and bake them for one hour. This is the recipe from the Frank’s Red Hot label. Obviously, it’s for non-breaded wings.

Wash a medium-sized baking potato and rub it with salt. Poke a few holes in the skin. Nuke it for 5 minutes. Turn it over. Nuke it for 5 more.

When the chicken is done, put it in a bowl with a tablespoon of bacon grease. If you have butter, add a tablespoon of that. Soak the chicken thoroughly in your favorite mild hot sauce (Texas Pete or Frank’s, maybe) and toss it in the grease so it gets coated with everything. If there is grease in the bottom of the broiler pan, add that.

Jam the potato full of sour cream. Pour the stuff in the bottom of the chicken bowl on top of it.

I also heated up a can of greens.

This was totally delicious. If deep-fried wings are better than baked, the difference is beyond my powers of detection.

I have been fooling with welding. Someone astutely suggested that my needle scaler might be a good tool for removing…scale. So I tried it. It works, but it dings the metal up a little. I finished up with a wire brush, and things look okay. I also tried hydrochloric acid. You won’t believe me, but when I took the metal out, it looked like the areas with scale had developed rust, and the rusty areas were rust-free but covered with scale. Seriously.

Sandpaper does absolutely nothing. A wire brush works okay, but it’s slow.

I think sand-blasting is the best answer. I should spring for a blaster and a refrigerated air dryer. I’m too cheap to get a cabinet. I’ll just blow sand into the yard.

Here’s something I can’t figure out. Where does the liquid go when you use an air dryer? Does it drain out of the machine somewhere? Hmm…web sources say it does. I guess that must be one reason these things cost so much. It must be a pain, building something that will drain water out of chilled, pressurized air, without releasing the air.

I should go ahead and drive to Harbor Freight. Water was squirting out of the needle scaler.