"Lord of the Wings"

Whew it has been a long day.. I put off going for a run all day (well, to be fair I was working, but I usually work out on my lunch break). Then finally at the end of the day I thought "enough!" and went to a step class. Those who step regularly, I have to hand it to you, that is hard work. After that, I grocery shopped, made a big batch of spaghetti sauce and then started on this recipe.

On with the recipe: I decided on "Lord of the Wings". This is faked buffalo wings and WOW I am blown away.

I have always liked the taste of chicken wings but disliked a few things. A) there is never enough meat on those bones! B) the calorie content (of course) and C) they can be kind of stringy and... gross.. you know how it is. I am not cool with veins in my chicken.

Well, problems solved! These are made from boneless, skinless chicken thighs so they are 100% meat and they are quite delicious if I do say so, myself. I didn't find they lacked any flavour that I expected from a chicken wing recipe. Scroll to the end of the blog for nutrition info, if you'd like.

Here is some of my step-by-step work: First I had to trim the thighs of all visible fat. To be honest, I never worked with thighs before - and I wasn't prepared for them to be so... for lack of a better word.. icky. I guess I've spoiled myself with all of the chicken breast lately. Anyways, after all the trimming was done (I will spare you the pictures on this) I had to sort of roll each 1/2 thigh to resemble a chicken wing, and spoon the sauce mixture over each piece.

Into the oven they went. My kitchen smelled delicious. When you remove them from the oven there is a fair amount of sauce in the bottom of the pan (or, uh, foil in my case - old pans!)

You take this sauce and mix it in a pot with a little cornstarch to thicken it up. It is suggested to use this as extra dipping sauce, but my "wings" were looking a little dry, and not what I'd be pleased with serving to guests (though for me they were fine - still tasted moist and delicious!)

So I took a pastry brush and spread a little bit of this sauce on each "wing". Perfect! I used a mixture of Kraft Calorie-wise BBQ sauce and Frank's Red Hot to dip.

So what does this run me, nutritionally?

1 wing with 1 tsp of sauce

56 calories

1.7 grams of fat

7 grams of protein

2 carbohydrates

114 mg of sodium

Not bad! I can easily work a couple wings into my dinner as an appetizer, or make a whole meal out of them with a large side salad. These are filling though, being all meat - so you won't need to eat nearly as many of these as you would with regular wings.

The full recipe available in the Eat Shrink and Be Merry cookbook, available on Amazon or at http://www.eatshrinkandbemerry.com/