Warning: you’ll want to read this all the way through before you start cooking.

Because I’ve received numerous two requests, and because we are just that cool on this Friday night, here’s our recipe for some delicious teriyaki chicken wings with wasabi ranch. This was a very experimental dinner, so measurements are somewhat approximate, and we had to sort of play it by ear when things like burning sauce happened.

brad really did the creating, but the plating was all me

So, courtesy of Brad, the marinade:

• 1/2 cup soy sauce
• 1 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 cup orange juice
• 1 1/2 tbsp chopped or grated ginger
• 1 big-ish clove of minced/smashed garlic
• 3 to 5 splooshes of your favorite hot sauce (we like Louisiana Hot Sauce)
• 1 1/2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
• 1 spash of sake or other dry white wine
• 1 pinch of salt

Marinate 2-3 pounds of chicken wings for 40 or so minutes at room temperature. If your wings didn’t come pre-separated, after marinating would be a good time to do so. Separate the wings from the drummets and throw away the tips (or if you separate them beforehand – we forgot to – you can save the tips for a stock).

Line your wings and drummets up on a baking sheet, skin side up, place them in the middle of your oven and set the timer for 15 minutes. Oh, you probably want to have pre-heated your oven about 20 minutes ago. 450 degrees, please!

While your wings do their thing, put your marinade into a small saucepan. I hope you didn’t throw that away! So, put it into a saucepan, let it boil and then turn it down to like … medium high … whatever keeps it at a low boil. Give it a good stir every few minutes. You want to reduce the sauce and thicken it up nicely. At this point, I think we added a few small pours of Yoshida’s teriyaki sauce to thicken/sweeten. The thicker it gets, you’ll want to turn it down and stir it more often, or you might burn it. Like we did.* When the bubbles stop popping right away, are sitting on top of the sauce and it looks nice and shiny/sticky … it’s done. Remove from the heat. Brad needs me to tell you that it will look like bubble wrap. But I don’t like that analogy. But there it is anyway.

When the timer goes off, drizzle some sauce on your wings with a spoon and rotate the pan 180 degrees. Then put your sauce back on the burner (your sauce probably won’t be done yet at this point) and set the timer for another five minutes. After the timer goes off again, pull your baking sheet out, flip all the wings and sauce them again. 20 more minutes on the timer. You still with me? Sauce conservatively – you want them to crisp up nicely, and you’ll use the reserve sauce later.

Total cook time should be about 40 minutes – I’ll let you do the math.

Pull them out of the oven and let them coast on the counter for five or so minutes. Toss your wings with the rest of the sauce.

don't they look tasty?

For the wasabi ranch (which you probably should have made right after you put your wings in the marinade, but who’s counting?), mix one 16-ounce container of sour cream (we used fat free) with almost all of one packet of ranch dressing mix. In a separate little bowl, mix some wasabi powder with just a tiny bit of water, enough to wet it. We used probably a total of one tablespoon of wasabi, but I’m a weener about spice, so you might want more. You could also just buy wasabi paste instead of mixing your own paste to save a step.

We had this with broccoli, which was SUPER good with a little bit of the teriyaki-ish sauce.

Let me know if you decide to try this, what you did differently and how it turned out!!

*In the event that you burn your sauce, too, you should know we added some honey and more Yoshida’s. Hopefully you’re more attentive to your sauce, but at least now you know how to save it!