Next Week: How to do a self-angioplasty.

A while back, someone arrived at Byzantium's Shores via a Google search for a Buffalo-style chicken wing recipe. Just in case anyone wants to do this at home, here's how.

For the sauce, melt 1/3 cup of butter and miz it with 1 / 2 cup of hot sauce. Now, the hot sauce is obviously a matter of preference, but my personal favorite is Frank's Red Hot, which has a pleasant vinegary taste along with the heat. Tabasco works too, but it's not my favorite. There's also a Mexican brand whose name I can never remember exactly, but it's always on the table at Don Pablo's.

For the wings themselves: in this region, you can actually buy frozen wings already prepared for use as Buffalo wings. However, if such a thing is not available in your neck of the woods and you have to resort to buying packages of whole wings, then what you do is cut the wings apart at each joint, discarding the tips. (The tip is that little, scrawny part of the wing that's virtually useless.) You'll end up with a wide, flat piece and a piece that looks like a little drumstick. (By way of analogy, if you compare a chicken wing to your arm, the drumstick is the part of your arm from the shoulder to the elbow, the flat piece is the forearm, and the tip is the hand.)

Once you have your wings prepared (roughly two pounds for each recipe of sauce, as given above), you can either bake them at 350 degrees until done, or you can deep-fry them. Deep-frying is the authentic method of cooking, but this is, shall we say, less than healthful.

After the wings are cooked and drained, plop them in a mixing bowl with the sauce and toss them until they're all well-coated. Serve while hot, with beer. A typical side item is celery sticks and blue cheese dressing. Some people even dip the wings in the blue cheese, but I'm not big on that. And the beer has to be really, really cold. None of that British room-temperature stuff. The point of wings is the contrast between the heat of the hot sauce and the icy goodness of the beer. (Wings also go incredibly nicely with equally-cold Pepsi or Coke, for the non-drinkers.)

So, there you go: authentic Buffalo-style chicken wings. If you find wings someplace that are breaded before frying, they may well be very tasty. There are a lot of fine ways to prepare chicken wings, but only one way to prepare Buffalo chicken wings.

(I also like to cook wings over a charcoal grill and put barbecue sauce on them, but that's not Buffalo, either. And you have to be careful with that, because wings, by virtue of their small size and more concentrated fat and natural gelatin, can burn very quickly on the grill.)