Buffalo Wings

Buffalo wings are the crack of food.

For one, they are cheaper byproduct that makes good use of the somewhat cast off pieces of a chicken.  Two, they are as addictive as crack: in a gut wrenching, center of your stomach, can’t think about anything else until you get them kind of way.  When I am not eating wings on a regular basis, I don’t really think about them or crave them.  But, as soon as I have a basket and get them in my system, it becomes an addiction that needs to be filled on a regular basis.

I don’t tend to eat at many chain restaurants and tend to think of their food as soulless and generic, but I do love Buffalo Wild Wings’s Tuesday Wing Night.  It is quite astonishing the amount of beer you can drink and wings you can eat without breaking the bank.   Throw in buffalo chips, ranch dressing, and some celery sticks, and you have one of every food group and a well-rounded meal.

I also really enjoy the fun of Buffalo Wild Wings.  My boyfriend can watch sports on any one of the over fifteen screens in the place.  I can play trivia or Texas Hold’em.  I don’t think of myself as a competitive person, but a little smack talk and team bashing sneaks out in the moment.   For a while, I had a pretty fun trivia nemesis and nothing goes better with sports bar wings than a little competition.   

I’ve played around with several wing sauce options.  I tried the low key the mid range and flirted with the high end.  Mango Habanero is my spicy sauce of choice, but a couple weeks ago I decided to climb Mount Everest.  I had worked my way up from Mango Habenero to Wild.  I figured if I can go Wild then surely I can go all in with Blazin.  If the law of degrees between the top three spicy sauces meant anything, this should be a challenge, albeit a doable one.    What I did not expect is that the highest was more of a balls-to-the-wall, show no mercy kind of hot.  I knew I was in trouble after the first wing.  

With Mango Habanero and Wild, the first wing isn’t but so bad and you think you have them mastered.  Then, slowly, the heat builds and by the second or third, you realize the full gravity of the situation.  With Blazin it was bad from the first wing.

Bad . . . try throbbing, agonizing, burning.    

For the first time ever, a spicy food really made me cry.  Not just a couple of drops eeking out because of swelling nasal passages, but good uncontrollable tears.    I also felt pain.  So much pain that I had to keep myself from drinking the ranch dressing to help sooth my ever throbbing taste buds.  After wing three, I had to pause for a moment of truth and remind myself that eventually, endorphins would kick in and that no spice pain is permanent.  After a momentary breather and a regrouping with beer and water (which do nothing but offer mental comfort), I finished the last two.

Was my moment of triumph slightly marred by the delirium I felt?  Probably.

Was my ability to play trivia affected by the huge amounts of fluid filling my head?  Definitely. 

For better or worse, I did it.  Will I do it again? Never.  No need to keep proving myself.  Once you climb Mount Everest, you don’t have to do it again.  Right?