(5) Fried chicken wings

I used to consider fried food as a simple dish before. How could it be difficult? All I have to do is to dip the ingredients with batter and bread crumb, then put them into hot oil.

However, after one home economic (家政) class which the teacher asked us to fried onion rings in senior high school, I realized that frying food is not as simple as I thought because I fried at least five burned onion rings and another five raw in the beginning. The members of our cook group and I got very tired to measure and control the temperature of the oil, not to mention frying something merely "eatable."

Fried food seldom appears on the table of my home, not only because fried food is high-calorie and unhealthy but also because it’s troublesome to cook.

However, sometimes when my mother has no ideas about what to have as the main dish of dinner or feels lazy to prepare for meals, she will go to traditional market and buy some fried chicken wings from a vender. The vender is a generous and tender guy so my sister and I love him so much when we were still young and had spare time to go to traditional market with mother after school. Buying ingredients, observing how my mother cooked and at the same time sharing something interesting happened in school, and taking a bite secretly after the dishes were done are important parts of my childhood. Every time I got nostalgia, I recall and miss the taste of my mother’s dishes, the surrounding of traditional market, and the memories of the past.

As results, we take fried chicken wings as an example here. There are lots of tips of frying food perfectly. The most important of all is the temperature of oil; the second is the time, which means how long you fry.

After the batter is done (you can adjust the consistency by yourself, which decides the quantity of the crisp coating and whether the wings are heavy or not), dip the chicken wings in it.
Heat the oil. We don’t have to pour much oil in pan because it’s hard to dispose the used oil for ingesting them is not good to health; nevertheless, it is so wasteful to abandon it. Besides, using special one like sesame oil will add the chicken wing extra taste and aroma.

The temperature we need is around Celsius 165 degree. In order to measure the temperature, I use wooden chopsticks for help. When you put a chopstick into it and every part that stays in oil all bubbles, it’s time to fry the wings. Once you put the wings into the pan, don’t flap them until the lower side is well-shaped. In my opinion, it takes practice and patience to observe the best timing of scooping wings up.

The idea of placing green onion and pouring sauce (mixture of soy sauce, used hot oil, vinegar, sugar, and rice wine) on the wings which shown in the first picture is from traditional Chinese cuisines, which we can fine out in many restaurants.