Winging It

You know what's nice to come home to on a cold November evening?

Wings night!

In some ways, Mr. Muscato has taken to the cooler weather with remarkable élan; Egyptian cooking tends toward the cozy in any case, and he has more than risen to the challenge of coming up with new takes on old favorites.

And not even favorites, as it turns out, at least until now. I'd never really understood chicken wings.  They always seemed like an awful lot of work, if nothing else.  Well, all that has changed in the face of a homemade sauce that is more or less a summary of the decade we've spent on the road together.  It's probably pretty unrecognizable to a Buffalo purist, but nonetheless an amazing amalgam of tomato, Ethiopian berbere (the fiery red spice that propels the country's mouth-searing cuisine), mint and cumin and other spices common in the Gulf, and some other magic that he won't fully share.  Combine it with his own take on blue cheese dressing, and you've got yourself a meal.

Not pictured, alas, is my rather more traditional contribution to dinner tonight, a very nice succotash.  It's lovely to once again get real lima beans (for some reason the ones overseas tend toward the very large and fatally mealy), and while Mr. M. was initially dubious ("Corn?  With beans?  Why?"), he's almost as much a convert as am I toward those wings.

It's almost enough to make up for the prospect of walking the dogs now that the temperatures are hovering around freezing.  They're taking to the changed weather with even more vim than the Mister to cold-weather cooking; me, not so much.  I think I'll have to encourage the Mister to consider the possibility of pot pies...