My husband does the cooking in our house. It’s not that I can’t cook — I survived making my own dinner for many years before I met him. He just enjoys cooking dinner each night, and if I am being totally honest, I’m much more interested in eating than I am in creating interesting meals every night. Now I do love to bake, but that’s a totally different story.
My husband likes his routine, especially for dinners. On Saturdays, he will cook dinner on our outside smoker. He’ll usually think about it during the week, check the weather for Saturday and come up with a dinner plan. This typically involves marinating or brining meat for at least 24 hours, making his own rub and starting the smoker in the early morning hours or sometimes putting the meat on before we go to bed on Friday night. He invests a lot of time into cooking, and it’s not just our Saturday evening meals, this is a task he spends a ton of time on and it’s always evident, especially in the amount of dishes I have to wash!
And that means he is always his biggest critic. Maybe I’m just easy to please, but in the 13 years I have known him, I can remember maybe three meals that I wasn’t super happy about. And that doesn’t mean that they were bad or inedible, that just means my steak wasn’t medium rare, or the pork was hard to cut, or the spice didn’t bring the heat as much as we’d hoped. I still ate every single meal and most definitely cleaned my entire plate.
Tonight, my husband made chicken wings on the smoker. To be perfectly honest, I am not a huge chicken wing fan — they are messy and take a ton of work to eat. I end up using four napkins and have to really gnaw on the bones to get all the meat. It’s not attractive.
To do these chicken wings, my husband will brine the wings in water and spices overnight in the fridge. The next day he will make his own rub in the food processor. He sticks the wings on the smoker for a few hours, there’s even a part were he wraps them in aluminum foil and beer. He finished them up on our gas grill so they get a delicious crisp.
It’s a long process and it’s worth it. They were delicious tonight. My husband hated them — he complained that they just didn’t have enough flavor and they weren’t tender. I don’t agree, I thought they were fabulous. And I ate every single one on my plate!
Notes from a Self Quarantine 