Starry Wisdom

White socks are boring, but if you wear sneakers 90% of the time, it’s a good bet you’ll be wearing a lot of white socks. I wear sneakers at least 90% of the time, so most of my socks are white. And, over the past 3-4 years, my ‘collection’ migrated from calf length to ankle length. This was all well and fine until my left ankle decided it had taken enough abuse over the years and it started hurting me pretty much all the time.

My primary care doctor was baffled by my ankle, since I could support weight on it, hop on it, do whatever I wanted, it just hurt. So he sent me to get an Xray and to see a specialist, who told me that the tendons were inflamed, and that I should wear a brace for 6 weeks. I did this, and my ankle was feeling much better, but he said that really, I should get an MRI to see what’s really going on. The MRI showed a ‘loose body’ near the joint, as well as some damage to the ligament, and these were the primary problems – the inflamed tendons were a side effect of this other damage – and these problems are most likely a side effect of me breaking that ankle when I was 14.

The upshot to all of this is that since the end of January I’ve been wearing the ankle brace pretty much all of the time. The brace is fairly comfortable, that’s not a big deal, but you really need to wear a calf length sock with it. Luckily I still had a few of those left over from the old days (as well as my fancier and heavier hiking socks), so I could get by, but socks became my laundry limiter, instead of underwear, and since I don’t have laundry facilities in my building, doing laundry is sort of a pain in the ass. While the brace was going to be a short term solution, I figured I would just deal with it…

However now that I know what the real problem is, and that it requires surgery to fix (thankfully pretty routine surgery), and that I don’t want to be hobbling around in the summer, I am going to need to wear the brace for quite a while longer. I’m planning on surgery in November (so as to be after my birthday – I guess I can see if I can do very late october too), which is 6 more months of brace wearing prior to surgery, and then there will be months of wearing afterwards.

All of this is a long way of saying that I bought 20 pairs of calf length crew socks at target the other day, and my ankle length socks are going to be taken out of the drawer and put into a box under my bed for the time being. Also, congratulations if you read this far!

Yesterday I tried my hands at hot wings. This was in preparation for an event later this month where I intend to bring some of the wings, but I figured I should try them out myself first! I based the recipe on the one from Good Eats, but I changed the sauce a bit to use Sriracha as the heat component. I did this mostly because I like the taste, but it had the added bonus of creating a sauce that was thicker than the standard buffalo sauce and therefore more of it adhered to the wings.

Sriracha Hot Wings:

12 entire chicken wings
3 ounces (6 tbsp) unsalted butter
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
~1/4 cup Sriracha – more or less depending on how spicy and/or thick you want the sauce to be

1) Cut the tips off the wings, and then seperate into and drumettes and wingettes.
2) Heat 1 inch of water to a boil in a large pot. Spread the wings out in a steamer basket (or make the multi stacked one Alton Brown made in the episode “The Wing and I”. Place the basket into the pot, cover and let steam for 10 minutes. This step renders out a lot of the fat.
3) Pat the wings dry, carefully, with paper towel, and spread out on a cooling rack on top of a paper towel lines half sheet pan. Place the wings into the refrigerator for not less than one hour and up to 24 hours.
4) Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Replace the paper towel lining with parchment paper, and roast the wings for 20 minutes. Flip the wings over and roast 20 minutes more.
5) Melt the butter in the microwave along with the garlic. Put the melted butter and garlic mixture into a large bowl and then stir in the Sriracha.
6) Immediately after taking them from the oven, place the wings in the bowl and toss to coat. Serve warm.

That’s it, simple as can be. I will admit that I did a partial recipe for the test run, but it’s pretty easy to scale the sauce as you see fit for the amount of wings you are serving.