Why hello there! Welcome back to Kitchen Catastrophes, where we fail with food to improve your mood. I’m your Awkwardly-Absent-Author, Jon O’Guin, and…Look, I’ll make my apologies in a moment. For now, let us lay down the law. For I may vanish unexpectedly. I may deceive. But what I strive to never do, whenever possible…is fail to meet contractual obligations. SO TODAY’S POST iS A PATREON REQUEST, and we’re going to the Far East to eat some simple meat. For those of you who just want the recipes, here’s your link. For everyone else, let’s dig in.

A Brief (for Jon) Apology for my Bad Brain Algorithm

So, no posts since August, eh? I wish I could say I had a clear reason for why I suddenly stopped posting, but there isn’t one. It was just…MORE of some of the things I was already talking about in those posts: whatever reserves of energy I had when I first popped out to Leavenworth ran dry, and I just couldn’t get everything I mentally wanted/needed to get done in a week to fit in the time. A MONTH of smoke-filled air didn’t help, nor did losing several of my days off on trips back and forth to the West side for various social and professional issues, but none of them stand out as a clear reason why, suddenly, I just couldn’t get it done. Well, no, I think I have one fairly clear reason, even if it gives you no joy to hear it, and that’s that I built a bad heuristic for decision making. Or, not necessarily “bad”, but one that caused me to abandon you.

In case it’s a new term for you, and to give me a hit of that sweet sweet linguistic unpacking power: a “heuristic” (more formally a “heuristic technique/approach/method”) is, at its core, a decision-making or problem-solving tool. To be a little more precise, it is the word FOR “decision-making/problem-solving tools or methodologies”. Like, the concept of “trial-and-error” is a heuristic.

Here’s a heuristic tool businesses use: slapping shit on a board! Truly a wonder of management. (Before I get hounded by MBA’s, this is an HIT board, and it’s used to see if there are intersections/ideas in your business model/products that you’re not tapping into. Like, for this one, every entry in the “rant” column is an idea for a rant about (CATEGORY ON THE LEFT))

Another kind of heuristic, or a way of thinking of them, are like, internal-thought-algorithms: you set up a mental go-to process for handling certain things so that you don’t have to fully think through every choice you make in a day. For example, Steve Jobs felt he had too many important decisions to make in a day, so he didn’t want to waste mental energy on unimportant choices. His partial solution was to always wear the same outfit, every day. If you’ve only got one outfit, you don’t have decide what to wear when you get up, one decisions saved. And that is a kind of heuristic.

So, in Port Orchard, I had a heuristic that was a mental ranking system for how to assign my time, with a relatively benign sounding system: When in doubt or conflict, prioritize real-life friends. Well, FIRST, handle any mandatory/already agreed-to theatre stuff, THEN real-life friends, and then, in rough order online friends, blog work, then solo ‘fun’ like Youtube, with the last one getting promoted to “as a 15 minute break” between other tasks.  Which was a functional and useful tool when my day-job was blogging from home for 15 hours a week. But in Leavenworth, it’s created a mental log-jam, because there are VASTLY MORE ‘real-life friend” things, AND more ‘work’ things. Like, in PO, my family had a set rotation of dinners, including one weekly meal together, and I had the ENTIRE DAY to myself to handle the site and keeping abreast of the many YouTube creators I watched. Here in Leavenworth, there’s just much more going on that I am indirectly connected to: There’s a literature open mic once a month that my friends go to, and weekly RPG sessions, and the occasional board game nights (which are easier to convince people to come to because we, you know, sell board games. It’s fun AND it’s making us marginally better at our jobs by helping us know what to recommend) and every month or so there’s a new movie to go see, and then there’s birthdays and holiday events and all of it is sitting on top of me working 32ish hours a week. That increased social life and workload mean that when I get home, I ALWAYS feel like I need a break, so I’m ALWAYS prioritizing YouTube over Blog work. And that’s how we get here.* Because from my perspective, it wasn’t a ‘clean’ break: I started a different post, months ago, and then when my ability to keep up collapsed in September, I just…couldn’t finish it. I probably will, someday/soon, but right now, there’s just a post with like, 600 words in it languishing on my hard-drive. I have delayed so long that a recipe I cooked in March was just covered by the chef whose cookbook I got it from, in a video series they didn’t start until SEPTEMBER. They needed 3 weeks to edit the video, 6 months after I made the recipe, and they STILL beat me.

I was going to argue that, “in my defense, they’re shooting the videos in their house”. But I COOK AND WRITE in MY house, so that kind of undermines the argument.

(*As a small addendum: while I generally characterized the issue as “too much of a good thing” here, that’s not to say that I have lived an entirely blessed life in the intervening silence: Those “social and professional issues” included things like “interviewing for a job I didn’t get” and “car trouble that the dealer can’t explain”. I lost one of my grandmothers to medical complications, and had to spend Thanksgiving in quarantine because Nate caught COVID that week. In more esoteric woes, my lack of engagement with my cooking hobby is causing me distress, and cluttering up my living space: I haven’t opened a Yums box since September. I haven’t cooked anything more complicated than stir-fry in months, except for a sandwich I made out of Thanksgiving leftovers yesterday*. (* - Jon wrote most of this post on December 8th)  Which, yes, does mean one of my most recent culinary “successes” involved me eating Turkey that was over a week old.

I honestly thought I had a picture of the sandwich in question, but it turns out I don’t, so enjoy this picture of the week before: this is 2 days of snow on my car.

And…I’d like to say I know how to do better. But I don’t. I would quote the opening of Merchant of Venice here, but I’m certain I’ve already done that bit like, twice. I don’t know how to organize my time to make this what I expect it to be. I don’t know what our schedule will look like, going forward. In a “perfect” world, I’ll learn to better moderate my time, and the relative slow season of January-April at the shop will mean we have fewer work pressures, and hell, maybe I’ll have a therapist long enough for us to talk through stuff, and maybe discuss my potential need for medications to regulate my attention span/emotions. More likely…well, I can try and set-aside time to work on posts, and I feel like, at a bare minimum, I should be able to promise delivery of one post a month. Which feels deeply pitiful to me, but I can literally feel my mind shying away from trying to promise anything more.

Anywho, that took a long ass time, and wasn’t particularly fun. Let’s try and change that with some recipes that are pretty simple!

Co-laaaaannnn Wings, Co-lan Wings!

Forgive Title Jon, he is, of course, deeply out of practice, and REFUSED to give me anything other than this incredibly opaque Eric Prydz reference. (I would be DEEPLY careful about clicking that link. While technically SFW, it is on the RAZOR’S edge of that label, and is hornier than the average porn scene.)

This shot of this guy’s goofy O-face is probably the least horny shot in the video. And i had to edit two women out of it.

Fascinating gyrations aside, let’s talk about culinary creations. The Cola Chicken Wing is a Chinese recipe with a deep and intricate lore best summarized as “I accidentally knocked a bottle of Coca-Cola into the braising chicken wings.” Yes, this is entry number 687 in China’s vaunted “I swear I made this by accident” pantheon of dishes. America likes to say it made recipes out of spite, France says it was to impress someone, and China just shrugs and says ‘I mean, I wasn’t going to WASTE FOOD.’

There is some disagreement with that claim, however. See, if you dig around, you’ll find that AMERICA was making Coca-Cola Chicken Wings before China, we just always treated it as something…almost shameful. By which I mean we didn’t tend to CALL them Coca-Cola wings, but people would use Coca-Cola as a secret ingredient/short-cut while making a home-made barbecue sauce. So it’s possible the idea came TO China from us, and they just stripped it down to a flavor profile that centered the soda more prominently, potentially because of the greater prestige of the product when Coca Cola became more accessible in the region.

Look at how great their billboards from the 70’s were!
Except PSYCH, this is just a sepia-toned pic from 2001.
No, I didn’t add the sepia. Either Kevin did, or the smog was INSANE that day.

Because that’s one of the interesting details about this recipe: if we believe the “oops, I spilled the Coke” story, this dish HAS to come from one of two eras, meaning it’s either younger than 50 years old…OR it has to be between 95 and 73 years old. Because we didn’t sell Coca-Cola to ‘pure’ Communist China: It was sold from 1927 to 1949, and then it didn’t come back for 30ish years. Kind of. And this is where things get…messy. Because the “oops, it fell in the pot” story is supposed to come from Jinan, the capital of the Shandong province. Which is in northeastern China. But Cola Chicken wings are most popular in HONG KONG, which is 1,000 miles south of Jinan, and which was ruled by a different government for most of that century. So it’s not IMPOSSIBLE that some chef in Jinan accidentally created the dish, it briefly/quietly spread down across China in the 30’s and 40’s, and then it only SURVIVED in Hong Kong, where Coke was still accessible, until the late 70’s…but if that were the case, you’d think there’d be MORE information about that. There was a LOT of writing about the symbolism of Coke coming back to China in the 70’s, and what it meant, and how China was going to handle it…and you’d think people would have brought it up if there was a semi-popular dish connected to the soda they all knew about.

I’m just saying, if OXFORD UNIVERSITY has scientific articles about Coca-Cola re-entering China 40 years after the fact, you think someone would mention the wings.

But, then again, I’ve noted before that it’s often hard to imagine/remember just how isolated we all were in the pre-internet era. Unless someone wrote it down, or told it to someone who had an audience, things just…weren’t known. For all I know, there were dozens of Chinese people scoffing at those breathless articles, who just didn’t share that history with anyone before they passed.  So who’s to say? The important thing is that the recipe exists now, and we’ve got to make it. So first, we need some meat, some sauce, and some time.

Double Trouble

We ended up making this recipe on Black Friday, because, as I briefly mentioned, Nate tested positive for COVID ON Thanksgiving, so all our plans for family bonding time with Stephen, Anna, and our Aunt and Uncle who were in town to help my grandfather with handling my grandmother’s passing, had to be thrown out the window, giving mom and I plenty of time to whip up a simple recipe like this.

My mom wanted to cook the recipe because it showed up in one of her dramas, where the characters do not explain the recipe at all: we just vaguely see the character making it, and had to estimate based on other recipes we looked up what the likely ratios and even ingredients were. Our conclusion was that she briefly marinates the chicken with ginger, soy sauce, and two other sauces, one of which ‘gooped’ in such a way as to make us believe it was oyster sauce, and the other of which was in a bottle so identical to the first that we’re still not certain they didn’t just do a weird jump-cut while she was adding the soy sauce, but which I suggested could be dark soy sauce, since it would make sense the bottles would look a lot alike, and if we’re wrong, it’s not like we committed to something vastly different.

Honestly, I don’t know if this is my recipe, which has a reason to be more red, or if this is Mom’s recipe, and that’s just how thinned out soy sauce looks.

Toss the wings to coat, and let marinate for 15-30 minutes. Most recipes we encountered say 30, but in the show, the dude definitely says he wants to EAT in 30 minutes, so maybe she just tossed the wings in the salty sauces. Whatever you choose to do, you then drop the wings into a fry pan, and…fry them.

My god, the culinary ingenuity.

You can add some oil here, or not. Chicken wings, especially with the skins on, will have a lot of surface far that can easily render out, so it’s really more of whatever makes you more comfortable. After a few minutes on each side, you just…pour a can of coke over them. Cover that and simmer for a while, then take off the lid and cook down the cola until it’s a glaze, and boom, you’re done. Easy peasy, coke-can squeezy. At which point I decided to get a little funky.

Specifically, tasting the wings left me a little…disappointed. Personal preference, of course, but the sauce was neither particularly sweet, nor did I feel like I was getting ANY of the soy sauce. I also don’t like when the fat under chicken skin isn’t well-rendered. But rather than piss off people by claiming I was “improving” a dish whose qualities I only vaguely understood (hey, maybe it’s SUPPOSED to be fatty. China loves doing texture-stuff with its food) , I decided to make a ‘fusion’ version, because then probably no one could possible say if I had succeeded or not. Specifically, I was going to make “Kimchi Cola Chicken”, a plan I almost immediately backed-down on.

One day, my can of chaos. One day.

My thought had been “Sweet coke and salty soy meets spicy and funky kimchi”, but given, again, the relative lack of saltiness and complexity of the first batch, I didn’t think the funk of kimchi would WORK without the saltiness of soy, and I felt trying to balance the soy levels was a bridge too far. So instead I stepped back to “Korean” Cola Wings, where we drizzled some kimchi juice and some garlic into the marinade for the chicken.And then added about a tablespoon and a half of gochujang to the cola, using the soda to ‘wash out’ the Ziploc bag we had marinated the chicken in, in order to hopefully pick up more salt and garlic for the final dish.

I mostly included this shot to highlight that, for some reason, I was CERTAIN I would want a pic of the remaining dregs of the bag, and didn’t think to take pictures of THE COMPLETED CHICKEN DISHES.

I also, and this was just personal preference, spent a fair bit more time trying to ensure my wings had rendered their fat before the sauce hit them: I started in a cold pan, came up to temp, held them on each side for longer, and cooked them for an extra 2-4 minutes. Then I dumped my “marginally redder than the base-batch” sauce on them.

I can taste the salmonella from here.

A couple minutes of simmering, a quick cook-off, and…hmph. In my opinion, we’ve improved. But like, we made it to 6.4 or 5 instead of 6. There’s a LITTLE more heat/nuance to the sauce, but it’s certainly telling me that, if you want to iterate on this attempt, you can probably increase all of the salty elements, and probably the spicy one as well.

But hey, on the plus side, this is a super-simple recipe to iterate on: a pound of chicken wings, and like, 30-45 minutes, most of it non-active? You only chop like, ONE ingredient! And we saw PLENTY of variations while researching: one chef had a lot more soy sauce in the marinade, as well as some black pepper, and added the left-overs to the pan like with my recipe. Another chef added beer to their marinade. Everyone uses different ratios of Coke, so you have TONS of space to play around with the components and figure out how you like it. So if you want to try your hand at riffing on a supposedly accidental Asian classic, I bet you’ll do a decent job, and with a couple tries, I bet you can get it to great.

NEXT POST: MAN, I DON’T KNOW. WE’LL SEE IF I CAN INCORPORATE THIS BACK IN MY SCHEDULE. IF SO, EXPECT A FUNKY LITTLE PASTA DISH AROUND CHRISTMAS.

RECIPES

Coca Cola Chicken Wings

Makes 1 pound of wings

Ingredients

1 pound chicken wings, separated into flats and drumettes

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 tbsp dark soy sauce (if unavailable, just double normal soy sauce)

1 tbsp oyster sauce

One knob of ginger, roughly the size of your thumb, cut into matchsticks

8 oz Coca-Cola

Sesame Seeds and chopped scallions (optional, for service)

Preparation

1. In a large plastic bag (or bowl if you want to have to wash dishes), toss the chicken wings with all the ingredients except the Coca-Cola. Let marinate for 15-30 minutes.

2. Place wings in a 10” skillet, and cook over medium-hight heat for 2 minutes per side. Add the Coca-Cola, and cook until liquid has evaporated, tossing to coat wings occasionally.

3. Serve as is, or topped with a sprinkle of sesame seeds and some chopped scallion

“Korean-Style” Cola Chicken Wings

Ingredients

1 pound chicken wings, separated into flats and drumettes

2 tbsp soy sauce

1 tbsp dark soy sauce (if unavailable, just double normal soy sauce)

1 tbsp oyster sauce

2 cloves of garlic, minced

One knob of ginger, roughly the size of your thumb, cut into matchsticks

2 tsp kimchi brine

1 tbsp of gochujang

8 oz Coca-Cola

¼ cup kimchi, coarsely chopped, for service

Preparation

1. In a large plastic bag (or bowl if you want to have to wash dishes), toss the chicken wings with all the ingredients except the Coca-Cola. Let marinate for 15-30 minutes.

2. Place wings in a COLD 10” skillet, set burner to medium-high heat, and bring to temp, turning chicken occasionally until lightly browned, roughly 7-8 minutes. Add the Coca-Cola to the marinade, stir to combine, and then add to the skillet, cooking until liquid has evaporated, tossing to coat wings occasionally.

3. Serve as is, or with some kimchi on the side to cut the sauce.