Buffalo Mash of Deliciousness

Whew! Now here's a bit of an endeavour that I have just gone through in the past two days. I started this -yesterday- just after dinner. Why did I start it yesterday, because I marinaded the wings. It served 3 people comfortably. Here's what you're going to need to pull this off:

Wings
1kg of chicken wings (around 36 individual pieces, each wing makes two pieces)
1 1/2 Tbsp white vinegar
1/4 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/2 tsp worcestershire sauce (a generous galooping)
1/2 tsp tabasco sauce
6 Tbsp chilli 'flavoured' sauce -- A very mild hot chilli sauce, the one I used was Maggi but whichever works for you.
6 Tbsp sweet chilli sauce -- A decent sort, that has flakes of chilli and the seeds visible in the mix. Alternatively, one hot chilli, sliced with half the seeds retained whole, and 6 Tbsp of honey. Less or more depending on how flaming you want this.



Put the whole lot of those sauces and ingredients into a bowl, stir them together so that it is evenly distributed, joint and put your chicken wings into the bowl -- make sure that the chicken can fit in the bowl, obviously. And trust me, there is enough sauce mixture in that above recipe to fill the bowl and coat the chicken as illustrated. Cover, and leave in the fridge to marinade overnight until you're ready to cook it the next day for dinner!

Cheese Dip:
1/2 cup sour cream
1/4 cup crumbled bleu cheese (I used a full 200g and it was a little overpowering in flavour, unless you LOVE the cheese)
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 Tbsp white wine (sweet)
1 1/2 tsp minced garlic



Again, pretty simple, dump the whole lot in, grate/crumble the bleu cheese into smaller pieces, mix it all into a bowl and mash the cheese within an inch of its life. Conversely, you could use a handheld blender, or food processor or something of the sort, but I'm oldschool and used a fork. Once it's prepared, put it in the fridge so it keeps chilled.

Preheat your oven to ~220 degrees Celcius, if you have a fanforced oven it's 170 degrees or so, as the fan makes it hotter and forces air around and so on, so things cook faster and you don't want your so painstakingly prepared chicken to dry out!

The chicken wings should be put onto alfoil wrapped trays with a decent amount of space between each so that they don't stick together, like this;



Put them into the oven, set the timer for 20 minutes and ignore until it buzzes. Once buzzed, turn them over to cook for another 20 minutes. That marinade the chicken sat in? You are keeping it! Put the leftover 'marinade' sauce into a frying pan, and heat it for about 15 minutes or so, just let it gently simmer with the lid on so that it doesn't reduce.

While your oven is heating up to usefulness, we shall get started on the side dishes! Which is the mashed potato, asparagus and capsicum. You will need:

1 medium potato per person (I served 3, so it was 3 potatoes, they were huuuuge) or 2 small.
1 garlic clove per potato (I used 5, as I said, loooots of potato!)
1 tsp of butter
3/4 cup of milk
1 cup of thin asparagus cut in half (If you did what I did last night, it was the 'leftover' asparagus)
1/2 cup of red and green capsicum.

Peel and cube your potato, put it into a pot, cut the base off of the fresh garlic cloves, peel off the papery shell, discard. Cut each clove in quarters or so, so that they are chunky, not minced or diced. Put the whole lot in a pot, with water, and bring to boil. Once boiling, put the asparagus and capsicum into a steamer ontop of the pot (I had a set for this) Or conversely put them into a pan to lightly fry on -low- heat.

When the chicken has five minutes to go, you are turning off the heat on your sides, drain and mash the potato, adding in the butter and milk so that it is very soft and well pulverised. Dish up on the plates, the asparagus goes ontop of the potato as a garnish, capsicum (or bell pepper if you are american) goes beside the potato, your chicken will have buzzed by now, pull it out of the oven, distribute the pieces between the plates (It worked out to 9 per person and 6 left over) and drizzle the sauce over the wings as well.

Distribute the cheese sauce how you like (I used little dishes) add celery sticks and voila, deliciousness is served!

Prior the celery.

The chicken when marinaded, absorbs the sweetness in the sauce, but not a terribly great amount of the spice, which is distributed when the sauce is coated over the top. It does have a fair bite to it, the sauce is much warmer than the chicken, so be warned. Celery and the cheese dip lessens the burn considerably.

Asparagus 'bolognaise'

Technically, it's not a bolognaise, but I can't very well call it a pasta now can I? What I am talking about is the 'side dish'. The meat in this is marinaded chicken steak, available from the butcher. If I marinaded it myself I would add that into this, but I didn't, so I wont. Simple enough? What you'll need to make a rather nice dish is:

A handful of narrow, raw asparagus, cut in half (about 2 cups)
3 whole tomatoes
1 brown onion
Butter
parmesan cheese

First of all, you're going to want to put your meat (if you eat it) on first, this really does not take all that long to cook. While that's happening, get a butter knife, and peel off a scrape of the butter -- about what you'd put on a piece of bread -- and toss that into a separate frying pan from your meat. Let it melt, peel and slice your onion into half moon slices, the basic slice if you're going to fry it, or whatever, so you can pick it up with a pair of tongs rather than needing a spoon or somesuch.

The onion is the first to go into the butter. Let it simmer away and soften, until the individual layers in each slice separate, and you have a tangled mess of semi-transparant onion in your pan. The handful of -thin- asparagus cut in half goes in next, with another scrape of butter on top. Toss it around to get the butter coating everything, and let it simmer on low heat.

This both fries, and steams the asparagus, letting it absorb the deliciousness of the onion and butter, while still retaining some crunch. Not much, but a little. Cut off the top of the tomato, slice and dice it and put it in the pan once the asparagus is half-cooked. Basically, if you filch a piece from the pan and bite into it, it tastes not -purely- asparagus, it's soft on the outside but still crisp in the middle and warm the whole way through, that's when you toss the tomato in.

(don't forget your meat, you should have turned it over by now)

Put the lid on and let the tomato steam and simmer until there is a fine layer of sauce on the bottom of the pan. Toss the asparagus and onion repeatedly through it to get a lovely layer, shake a -little- salt over it if desired, but there should not be much at all. You now have soft, soupy like tomato, crisper asparagus and strips of onion to compliment. It is ready!

Serve onto a plate, add your meat and grate a little bit of parmesan cheese on top to melt into the dish. Normal cheddar or a small dollop of sour cream would work just as well, but parmesan is slightly better for you and be honest, there's enough fat in there as it is with the butter!

And voila, you have a delicious way to eat raw asparagus that is very narrow and fiddly if you're not sure what to do with the stuff.

Protip: If you are cooking marinaded anything, like I did, fry it with the lid -on- the pan, to keep all the moisture inside the meat, makes it taste much more delicious.