I discovered my love for buffalo wings at the ripe age of nine. Like most nine-year-old girls, the concept of dinnertime consisted mostly of shuffling bits of food detritus around with my fork, in hopes that my mother would actually believe I braved the daunting pile of peas or the slightly-undercooked mashed potatoes sitting ominously on my plate. Yet somehow, at an airport in Dallas, TX, my mother convinced me to try one of the ten buffalo wings she’d ordered. Something about those dead lumps of chicken grease tempted me; perhaps it the way their scent stung my nostrils and made my eyes water. Whatever it was, I was enticed to devour one of the mysterious wings on her plate. And then another. And another. Until suddenly, I’d helped finish her entire plate, and we were ordering seconds. It was there, in that Dallas airport, that my love for buffalo wings was spawned.
And it took quite a while for that love to diminish. I would beg my parents to order pizza from Domino’s, so that they would also order greasy buffalo wings, the kind that were wrapped in tin foil. I remember grating my teeth against that tin foil so as to get every ounce of hot sauce into my mouth. I even got a job at a local burger joint so that I would have access to free buffalo wings.
It was weird, I admit. And I won’t be surprised when gastritis puts an end to my addiction. Or when my metabolism finally slows down and I am forced to sacrifice wings for exercise. But for now, I am content to eat anything and everything that contains buffalo wings. This blog, which I vowed to start years ago, over a bowl of wings in Sacramento California, will document my quest to find the perfect wing, and all that comes in between then and now.
