This is what passes for fine dining in the Gustatory Circuit these days. Also, it takes some practice to get that sauce-smear thing right.

One of the things I enjoy most about cooking is the creative problem-solving/engineering aspect of it. I have ingredients X, Y, and Z and want to eat something resembling dish D. Given what I know about flavors and cooking techniques, how can I get from X, Y, and Z to D?

I was driving home and decided I really wanted to have buffalo chicken wings for dinner.

Solution 1: Heat frozen chicken wings and toss in store-bought buffalo sauce, both things we have on hand.

This solution was dismissed outright for being boring and borderline cheating. Save it for some other night when we’re working late and too lazy to cook. I got home a bit early today and I wanted to cook.

Solution 2: Do something with the package of chicken breasts that’s been defrosting in the fridge and needs to be used up within the next few days.

Making the chicken breasts into something wing-like would be easy enough: cut into wing-sized pieces, marinate, dredge, and pan-fry.

I’ve been on a marinade kick ever since the flavor episode of Worst Cooks in America and I’ve managed to crank out some pretty good ones in the last few weeks. Out came the Pyrex bowl and in went some olive oil, some hot sesame oil, apple cider vinegar, lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, five crushed garlic cloves, red chili pepper flakes, salt, and pepper. It smelled and tasted terrific. In went the chicken pieces.

But what about the sauce? I did what any wandering home cook would do: look in the Joy of Cooking index.

Let’s see…chicken…chicken…more chicken…children? Oh, fun recipes for kids…back up…a-ha! Chicken, wings, buffalo. Page 80.

I’d always thought buffalo sauce was some complex concoction, but it turns out it has exactly three ingredients: butter, vinegar, and hot pepper sauce.

I did not have hot pepper sauce, and we’re down to a few drops of Tabasco. Time to improvise.

I opened the fridge and eyed a container of leftover ancho chiles in adobo sauce.

Out came the food processor. In went three chiles, some generous squirts of ketchup, apple cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, and brown sugar. Puree. Taste. Good front of mouth kick, nice spicy finish, but nothing in between. I hoped the butter would take care of that.

I melted 3-4 tablespoons of butter on low heat, then stirred in the mixture from the food processor along with some salt, pepper, and garlic powder (because I forgot to add garlic to the food processor). It was kind of chunky, but I didn’t feel like being fussy and straining it. The butter did round out the flavor nicely and also took down some of the heat.

I quickly dredged the chicken in some seasoned corn starch, then pan-fried them in my cast iron pan and laid them out on paper towels to drain. I served the sauce on the side with some celery sticks, baby carrots, and blue cheese dressing.

Buffalo chicken equation? Solved.

If I had to choose one food to eat for the rest of my life, it would be jiaozi, preferably the pan-fried variety that Americans know as potstickers. Good thing that’s true, since now I have about five dozen of them in my house.

We used to have marathon dumpling-making sessions when I was little. My family didn’t so much have a tidy assembly line, but a gather-’round-the-table free-for-all, children and adults lunging for the pot of filling whenever we needed it, churning out little folded dumplings that we set on washed styrofoam meat trays and froze. My family always did the two-pleat dumpling, pictured above. It’s not as pretty as the traditional rippled edge, but it’s much more efficient.

Some friends came over yesterday to celebrate Chinese New Year with our own marathon dumpling-making session. Fifteen dollars and about ten man-hours later, we had over 150 dumplings. We used the Wall Street Journal recipe as a base, tweaking the ingredients to use what we had available and using frozen wrappers instead of rolling our own.*

*I remember my mom tried to make the potsticker wrappers from scratch exactly once, when I was a kid. It ended with someone going out to the store for the frozen kind. My mom’s kitchen skills far exceed mine, and I totally suck at making dough-based things, so I’ve never tried to make the wrappers from scratch.

I watched the steak fajitas episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay a while ago and it stirred up a huge hankering for fajitas. Of course, Houston happens to be having an actual cold spell (current temp: 30°F) so there will be no grilling outside for the time being.

And then my birthday rolled around and with it came a Hamilton Beach MealMaker Express Contact Grill courtesy of my wonderful (and hungry) hubby. This guy is much larger than our old contact grill, which struggled with two paninis at once, and has removable plates for easy cleaning. This grill also opens all the way flat so you can cook different things on each side without pressing. Fajita time!

Sadly, the recipe for Father Leo’s fusion fajitas is not up anywhere on the internet. So I improvised. I put some ground cumin, garlic powder, paprika, crushed garlic, grated ginger, brown sugar, soy sauce, lemon juice, rice vinegar, sesame oil, and olive oil into a giant baggie and threw in a 1-lb. skirt steak to marinate for an hour or so.

Meanwhile, I put two (Japanese) cups of long-grain white rice, some chicken broth, butter, and saffron into the rice cooker. Then I chopped up some peppers and onions and hubby made some guacamole to serve on the side.

I opened the grill flat and sprayed the grill with some nonstick cooking spray, preheated according to instructions, and then plopped the veggies on one side and steak on the other. I got a nice, satisfying sizzle.

The grill does not get super hot when it’s open (or maybe I didn’t preheat long enough), so everything took longer to cook than I thought it would. I also didn’t get a really good sear on the steak, but had to pull it after it hit medium rare.

It was still good.