Breaking the ice, with hot sauce…

Sometimes it’s hard to get the brain going, As I sit at my chair after the paper is all done there are some weeks that I struggle to come up with things to write about for the next week. I decided that I would go back to a trick I used over a year ago. I looked up an unknown holiday. This is what I found.

Apparently today is the holiday of two of my favorite foods. It is National Chicken Wing Day and Lasagna Day.

Chicken Wings have a dear place in my heart and my soul.

It was just over three years ago, in May of 2012 that my wife Susan, then long-distance girlfriend, came to Bolingbrook, IL to hang out with me for a day. It was our first date.

The original plan was to take her out during the day for some Chicago-style pizza and gelato. However she and her friends Laicee and Sarah (who are also related to her) came during the night, right after my shift at Walgreens in Romeoville.

That particular night, my co-workers and I planned to go to Buffalo Wild Wings as is our ritual every other Tuesday. I tried to leave my friends to hang out with Susan until someone just said, “Bring her, we want to meet her.”

So instead of Giordano’s or Lou Malnati’s, our first meal together as a couple was a platter of hot wings.

While I prefer traditional bone-in, Susan prefers boneless… Gross, right?

I fancy exotic flavors like Asian Zing and Mango Habenero and my wife loves the traditional Buffalo Sauce.

That meal was also the first time we held hands and the both of us had the biggest grins on our faces.

My friends from Walgreens loved Susan after meeting her for the first time and I finally proved to them that I indeed had a girl from another state.

So now nearly every time we go out of town, we have to go back to the franchise that fed our love that day, though when we go on vacation later this year, we will hit up another one of my favorite wing joints, “Buffalo Wings and Rings.”

The night of the date went well.

The following morning, I brought the trio from Malta a cup of coffee and then we hit up Naperville, which is another fancy suburb of Chicago.

We ate a Lou Malnati’s deep dish that had sausage, pepperoni and jalepeno. They couldn’t have made a better pie.

After a walk through downtown Naperville, we went to get some Italian Style Ice Cream (gelato). Every once in a while the girls still talk about that ice cream, so I guess I did good.

Eventually Susan married me, so I did great. And it started with a few hot wings.