Funnel Cake, Buffalo Wings, and Fried Oysters

Funnel Cake, Buffalo Wings, and Fried Oysters - must be Super Bowl fare! Since the Patriots had been eliminated, we got to focus on the food on Super Bowl Sunday - and we wanted to do something different. We dug out an old gift we had received a few Christmases ago - an electric fryer - and decided to put it to use.



We started with fried oysters. We drained one of those small 1/2-pint containers of oysters and dried them pretty good, then added salt and cayenne pepper to them before rolling them in a mixture of 1/2 white flour and 1/2 corn meal, seasoned with salt and more cayenne. Allowed to sit in the fridge to solidify the "batter", we loaded up our fryer with canola oil and heated it up to 375. Took the oysters back out and it seemed some moisture had broken through the batter, so we panicked a little and rolled them one more time in corn meal before frying them up for about 3 minutes. Despite the extra layer on the outside (that was probably unnecessary) they came out really good! Ate these with some tartar sauce...



We moved on to Wings by halftime... We air-dried our little chicken parts with some kosher salt on them as long as we could - then we threw them in the 375 oil as-was. After about 8/9 minutes, they were ready to come out (the frying-noises had pretty much stopped). Let them cool for a minute and then tossed them in Buffalo sauce. We had pre-made Frank's buffalo sauce as someone had seemed to buy out all of Stop and Shop's hot sauces - but we've made buffalo sauce before. It's really easy, 1/2 melted butter and 1/2 hot sauce.

We ate these with a big iceberg/cuke/celery salad with blue cheese dressing - dipping the wings in the dressing as well. These came out so good - there is really no substitute for that texture you get from frying the wings instead of baking them.



Finally - Funnel Cake! We made a simple batter of white flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, egg, milk, and a little salt. We made sure to make it extra liquidy to be able to squeeze it out into the oil. Added the batter to a ziplock bag and cut out the corner and squeezed the batter in - and it CAME TO LIFE! It was fun to watch these cook, after a minute or two we used tongs to flip them over. Out they came for a pat-dry, then we added some powdered sugar.

So good! None of the flavors from the other foods are transferred, as we feared. We ate these cakes warm with a little iced cream... DELICIOUS!