Homemade Hooters Wings

So when we were cleaning out/reorganizing the pantry last weekend, we saw we had three jars of Hooters-branded buffalo wing sauce. We thought “Hey, we should have a wing night over at Roger and Ursulas!” So we called them and made the plans!

Of course, we didn’t have wings in the freezer, so went to buy some at Sam’s Club. They come in bags of like 10# so we figured with the number of people that usually show up at their house “for a little get together,” we’d better get two bags.

Fast forward to today, the day of the wing night, and I decide “You know what? I am going to mix all the sauces together and maybe add some more spice” so I opened the first jar and it was the consistency of, oh, peanut butter. We hadn’t had Hooters sauce in a loooong time, and I couldn’t remember if that was how it was supposed to be, so I tasted it and it tasted off. I thought maybe it just needed to be stirred, and that was when I noticed the “SHAKE WELL” on the side. Hmmm, not a good sign, as peanut butter never shakes well. :-/

So I looked at the expiration date. Wow—it wasn’t just expired, it was hideously expired. Like March 2005 expired. >:XX

I should have known better, because our pantry often contains items of such age (especially after throwing away brown sweetened condensed milk from 2002 last weekend!), but I was kicking myself for not checking any sooner than the afternoon of the dinner! Yep, at this point it was about 12:30 and dinner was at 6:30 and we had no sauce and people were expecting Hooters wings.

So, I immediately googled for a recipe and the ones I found were extremely different. So I headed off to Top Secret Recipes and ended up paying 79¢ for the Hooters Buffalo Chicken Wings recipe.

Of course by then I was flustered because our plan was thrown for a loop—now I had to run to town to get ingredients, and now we were going to bread the wings (originally we were only going to use the sauce), and the breaded wings had to be refrigerated for 90 minutes, and the wings were still half frozen, and Tom was napping! 88|

So I woke him up, told him the new plan, ran to town, and when I came back we started breading the wings and making the sauce. Phew! (At this point I was VERY thankful that I had already finished making the double batch of tuna salad!)

Fast forward to the conclusion of this saga…

It was only us four for dinner, so we had entirely too many wings (four trays, or about 140 wings) but we put a serious dent in them because they were absolutely amazing—a grand slam hit—and everyone said they were sooooooooooo much better than real Hooters wings. YAY ME!