BA ‘Tubes: French boys do the funky chicken

Geez, I hope y’all can see this one. I’m working on a crappy monitor which makes all photos and videos look like they were shot in a cave. But, the original on the camera’s LCD looked fine.

But anyway, we had another hot wings night. This time, Juan Carlos and I dragged our drunk carcasses out of bed early enough that we could go to a local butcher shop, or granja, and buy cheap, cheap, fresh chicken wings – 2 kg for $5 pesos and so fresh that they were still on the chicken before we walked in. Having the butcher cut the wings in half beforehand also saved us a lot of time, and Art Factory’s serviceable knife a lot of wear and tear.

I doctored the ranchera sauce, made the blue cheese dressing out of sour cream and fresh blue cheese (No more $22 peso bottles of Paul Newman’s, thank you.) while Juan Carlos made an amazing roasted red pepper sauce that was so good I could have sucked it up with a straw all by itself. I licked it plenty off a spoon as it was.

[This is not going to become a Buenos-Aires food blog - there are other people doing a much better job at that than I could - but since porteños love their comida, and since Art Factory often features special dinner nights, and since I frakin' love to eat, and enjoy cooking, I'll probably talk about food more than other hostel blogs.]

We were brainy enough to make the dipping sauces and cut the celery and carrots way ahead of time so that our guests would have something to munch on should we fall behind, like we did on the ambitious but disastrous Pasta Night. We were a good hour and a half late, I had to refund one guy’s money subsequently, and it was the only dish of JC’s, ever, that I didn’t even want to eat myself. When we went to Disco to buy the ingredients for the sauces for Hot Wings Night, Juan kept saying, “Because of that [pasta] night, no one will eat my hot wings.”

I told him not to worry; that the people who trust and like us will show up anyway.

Juan Carlos fried up the wings this time, and because we’d actually planned things out ahead of time, I periodically came up the stairs with platters full of ‘em, wowing those who trusted us and liked us – all six of them.

The best compliment a crowd can give your cooking is if they are unable to speak for the first ten minutes or so after you present the food. Our guests began gnawing and gnashing immediately and didn’t let up for quite awhile. True carnivores, belying the image of the all-veggie backpacker. We’d budgeted 10 pieces per person, and had planned for ten people, but only the French boys managed to eat ten apiece. They had a hard time stopping at ten, in fact.

So, as usual in Buenos Aires, buena onda made up for the lack of bodies. Or profit. We licked, wiped our burning lips, drank and danced, dueled our iPods and traded sex-life stories until 3 in the morning. I busted the balls of the straight boys as much as I could, no surprise. It was my bar that night, after all.

No one went to bed hungry, that’s for sure. Lonely maybe, but not hungry.