One day, when I was in my early teens, I came home from school to find my mom browning a turkey patty in the kitchen (salt and pepper, non-stick skillet, to be eaten over cottage cheese with sliced tomato on the side). The smell of meat cooking in that moment was so overwhelmingly intense to me that I decided then and there I wouldn’t be eating meat anymore. I was now a vegetarian.
It wasn’t a difficult transition for me, though I couldn’t tell you what I replaced meat with or what I ate throughout high school to sustain myself. I do remember eating a lot of Subway sandwiches during this time (there was one at the mall where we hung out) and getting “the vegetarian one”: lettuce, tomato, pickles, peppers, black olives, oil and vinegar dressing and plenty of yellow mustard. Effectively a salad wedged between soft, freshly baked-on-premises white bread.
For many years, nothing cooked around me or served at any restaurant tempted me back to eating meat—surprising since my vegetarianism wasn’t rooted in anything moral or ethical. You’d think I’d break easily. But I was stubborn, and maybe making the point that I was in charge of my own decisions was enough for me to keep at it.
One thing finally convinced me that being a vegetarian wasn’t actually as important as eating that one thing: chicken wings. Not a fried hot wing or one attached to a perfectly roasted bird (my favorite part)—these were braised chicken wings that my best friend's mom made. Stephanie Mayerson may not be a household name, but if you are steeped in the Alison Roman lore, you might remember her as the one who inspired the slow-roasted tomato sauce in Dining In. I spent a lot of time in and around her kitchen growing up; her influence runs deep.
These wings were slow-cooked in the oven, swimming in a generous amount of Mister Yoshida-brand teriyaki sauce. Sweet and sticky, they went against my usual flavor preferences, but for some reason teenage me had to have them, and so I did. Without much ceremony, that was it: I was not a vegetarian anymore.
It wasn’t until I discovered that Charlie loves chicken wings that I started to stock them more regularly. I’m not sure why he likes them so much—maybe because holding them satisfies his need for toddler independence—but now I always have them in the fridge or freezer, ready to be grilled, roasted, or, more recently, braised at a moment’s notice.
On the heels of Braised Chicken Picatta, I know it’s very “rains once” of me to all of a sudden turn my attention all the way towards braising. But here we are, at the end of September, and it has, indeed, rained once and I wore my thrifted Polo Ralph Lauren leather jacket out to dinner last night so, yeah: You could say I’m braising now.
The goal here isn’t a crisp-skinned treat, more of a sticky-from-collagen-breakdown treat. Meat you can suck off the bone without effort in a shallow sauce that’s both for cooking in and then dipping in. If you wanted to recreate my childhood return-to-meat moment, you could go for the Stephanie Mayerson, tossing your wings in a teriyaki sauce and slow cooking in the oven and you’d have yourself a very good time. But here is another version, still tender and fall-apart, in a very bright, vinegar-forward sauce with hunks of zucchini that get equally soft, finished with raw garlic and fresh torn herbs. These wings are good by themselves, but there’s plenty of sauce, and it does want something to soak it up, so do the right thing and serve them with thick cut toast or, better yet, a bowl of buttered orzo or rice.
This is not the time to be demure. Like most wings (or, frankly, most bone-in meat), these want to be eaten with bare hands and a devil-may-care attitude. For some reason a bowl of wings isn’t as popular a weeknight dinner as, say, a bowl of steamed mussels, but to me they sort of eat the same: Pick them up, clean them of the good stuff, discard the rest, repeat. If you love the texture of a braised wing but crave the spiciness of a hot wing, you can always finish with hot sauce or add some crushed red pepper flakes to the oil as the garlic cooks. Feel free to replace the zucchini with any quick-ish cooking vegetable here, like tiny turnips or hunks of fennel.