More Food: Vegetarian Chicken Wings (Among Other Things)!

A few days ago I went to my parents house to taste test a few things they are hoping to serve at their Superbowl party on the weekend! Now, no one in my family is actually that into football, but an excuse to have people over and cook food is always a good thing. I'm a CFL fan now thanks to my boyfriend anyways, but I'll be there on Sunday to eat more food!

We made piles of chicken wings and tested out a few different sauces, and we also made vegetarian chicken wings! Unfortunately I didn't manage to get any chicken wing photos, since I kind of forgot about the camera and just started eating at that point but I'l give you a quick run down of what my parents did to them anyways, because these were honestly some of the best wings ever!

They started by brining the wings for a few hours in a saltwater brine that had some red pepper flakes and spices in it as well. After that they were rinsed and dried off, coated in oil and baked in the oven for about 40 minutes, flipping them once. The brining helps them from getting dry in the oven, so they came out moist and perfect!

We then made a buffalo sauce, which was 1 cup of Frank's Red Hot and a few tablespoons of butter melted together. This is sort of where the experimentation began. We coated some wings with just this sauce first and it was great. We also made a blue cheese sour cream dip and the buffalo wings are amazing in that! We also tried dipping them in ranch dip, which is good for people who don't like blue cheese (my dad). Finally, we mixed some buffalo sauce with a tiny bit of ranch dip and coated the rest of the wings with that. Those wings we also put under the broiler for a few minutes to make the sauce less runny. This was a good way of taking the spiciness out of the buffalo sauce, for those who don't like too much heat (my mom). Sorry about the lack of pictures for this part, but trust me they were good!

My parents also wanted to make a vegetarian version of the chicken wings, and I think what my dad came up with is pretty awesome!

Can you guess what they are? Cauliflowers!!!

We battered the cauliflower in a batter that had equal parts flour, cornstarch, cold water and vodka and then deep fried them until they were golden brown. The batter gave them an extra crispy outside, and when they were dipped in the buffalo sauce, I thought they were pretty convincing! You can't coat these in sauce beforehand like the wings or they will lose their crispiness, but they are great for dipping.

And, since we had the deep fryer out already, we decided to finish the night off with some deep fried bananas!

We dipped these in maple syrup!

Well, that's it for this crazy food post! I'm sorry there are no actual recipes, since my parents have all those. I am writing this from my place right now, but if you want any of them let me know and I can get them for you!