Cooking can sometimes be about delicate flavors and a careful presentation. Other times, it’s about getting messy, having fun, and pigging out. Erik and I had both had a pretty long day, and we both knew that we needed to cook something. Never would either of us have guessed how perfect this meal was for our mental state.

We had some chicken limbs left over from a chicken stock endeavor from last week. Tonight was the last night to cook ‘em, and we had been dreaming of hot wings. We poked around the web looking for recipes, and the resounding theme was surprising: Coke, as in Coca Cola. Neither of us is really into soda, but we decided, tonight is the night to go crazy. We simmered and grilled almost 5 lbs of meat over the course of an hour, cleaning up the kitchen from the weeks’ messes along the way. It turned out so juicy, delicious, and caveman-satisfying that we barely managed to save two legs for lunch!

This is a meal that anyone can cook, and it’s pretty near impossible to screw up. Here’s the basics, adapted from allrecipes.com (we didn’t have two cups of Louisiana-style hot sauce!):

Grab a cast-iron skillet that will fit most/all of your meat (we had ~5 lbs of wings, legs, thighs, etc.), and pour in enough coke to half-submerge everything (about 4 cups for us). Then pour in about half that amount of mixed hot sauces, orange juice, apple cider vinegar, a touch of orange zest, and some lemon juice. We had more hot sauces, and juices, less vinegar, but cooking isn’t exactly scientific in this household. We’ve got plenty of science and precision going on outside of the kitchen, no reason to bring it in!

Bring the slurry&meat to a gentle simmer on your stove, and move it out onto a warm gril (yes, put the skillet on the grill!). Keep the side the pan is on a bit hotter, and swap meat from the skillet onto the grill, rotating about every 10 minutes for a bit more than an hour. All of our meat didn’t quite fit into the skillet, so we had half on the grill, half in the pan, which worked out great.

Serving and eating was the other half of the fun: Erik and I ate off of newspaper, with a bowl of ’slop’ (the sauce) each. Don’t put out forks like we did, you won’t need them. Dive in, and never look back. Cleanup was a breeze!