Do you know of a great recipe for forty pounds of chicken wings?  

The trouble with raising a large family is that the only kind of cooking you can do is for a crowd. And after everybody grows up and moves out, the cook only remembers recipes that come in one size – LARGE. 

One day a couple of months ago, I was ordering some office supplies online at Costco’s Business department.  I noticed a pull-down menu for “Groceries and Floral”.  Browse this department at your own risk.  I have since vowed never to step foot anywhere near it again.  When Costco labels a category as “Grocery and Floral”, they really mean GROCERY AND FLORAL.

People who use Costco’s Business section for GROCERY AND FLORAL apparently mean the restaurant business.  They’re probably catering to hordes of starving convention attendees — not a little cookout for your grandchildren. 

Technically, on average, I only cook for two to four people every day, depending on who’s living here and who’s laboring at our Ford Video work stations. As a long-time Costco shopper I’m used to buying in big sizes.  The reason I can do that is because when you shop in one of the Costco warehouses, and buy – say – 12 pounds of sausages, when you get home and open them, you find they’ve been packaged in individual packs of 3 or 4 pounds each, to be conveniently stored in the freezer till needed. 

So when I browsed all the items in GROCERY AND FLORAL I was impressed. “Hmm, this is just what I need”, I thought to myself. “That great Costco quality delivered right to my door.” The hardest thing about shopping at a Costco warehouse is the dread in knowing you’ve got to transport it home.  And if you get one of the packages of 36 rolls of toilet paper, there’s not enough room in the cart for the rest of the stuff you need. Man cannot live by toilet paper alone.

Thinking ahead to all the glorious barbecues we could have if summer ever comes, these items were among those I included in my buying frenzy that day: 

One 40 lb. case of chicken thighs at 90 cents per lb.
One 40 lb. case of chicken wings disjointed at 1.29 per lb.
One 35 lb. case of pork spare ribs at 2.05 per lb.

There was more.  Much more. But I’d rather not discuss it.

All was fine until the order was delivered.  It was only fitting that it was transported to me in a large semi-truck.

I put all the groceries away, and then tried to lift the first case of meat – the chicken thighs. It was too heavy to lunge it up onto the kitchen counter, so I cracked open the box on the floor, and that’s when the axe fell, figuratively speaking. Actually, an axe would have come in handy for what i was about to deal with.

Inside the box were what seemed like hundreds of chicken thighs, not packaged in smaller packs, but all together and frozen solid in one huge block.  Same with the chicken wings.  It would take more than global warming to thaw those icebergs.

The 35 pounds of spare ribs were also frozen solid, but they at least, were encased in plastic packages – 4 slabs to a pack.

According to my son-in-law Brad, the reason our nice normal neighbors across the street moved away, was probably because of scenes like this one: in an attempt to reduce the huge frozen block of chicken thighs to manageable  amounts that could be packaged, my daughter Susy and I went out on the front porch. We kept trying to lift the box up high, and then hurl it to the concrete floor of the porch.  When, over and over, that failed to break the ice jam, we tried hammers, screwdrivers and chisels.  Nothing worked. 

That’s when I knew that one of these days, I would be preparing a single recipe for barbecued chicken wings or thighs. As Donald Trump would say, “It’ll be HUGE”. It would have to be all or nothing.

The reason I’m telling you this, is that I think the time has come for the thawing and  “presentation” of the forty pounds of chicken wings.  In a couple of days, we might be having 8 visitors coming from Portland, Oregon. The Milners and Roeckers and probably several of my family members may be here, and if everybody cooperates, we’re going to be eating a lot of you-know-what.  

Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess!  That’s what I always say.