Author: brandon
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March Wings, No Particular Occasion
Early March 2019, a white-and-blue plate, wings arranged with more care than usual — almost fanned out, like I was trying to make a statement. The statement, as far as I can reconstruct it, was simply: these are good wings and I wanted a nice photo of them. Recipe inspiration: RecipeTin Eats’ Truly Crispy Baked…
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Southborough, Take Two: Now With a Flatbread Chaser
Back in Southborough less than a year later, and this time I upgraded — there’s a buffalo chicken flatbread and a bowl of popcorn in the wider shot, which strongly suggests I’d found a real bar-menu situation rather than a one-off wing plate. Still can’t tell you the name of the place. I was too…
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Wings and Bacon at the Home Office, No Regrets
This is one of my favorite entries in the whole archive: a grey plate of wings and a few strips of bacon, eaten at what is unmistakably a home office desk, keyboard included. I don’t remember exactly what possessed me to pair wings with bacon rather than, say, anything green, but February 2019 me clearly…
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Pre-Holiday Wings, Because Priorities
Three days before Christmas, and instead of cookies or a ham, the kitchen produced a grey plate of wings. I respect this decision entirely — holiday cooking is stressful, and sometimes the correct move is a low-effort, high-reward plate of something you already know how to make well, before the real marathon begins. Recipe inspiration,…
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The Placemat Era
September 2018, Acton, and a blue plate resting on a placemat with enough pattern to suggest someone in this household was, at some point, trying to make dinner presentation a whole thing. The wings themselves look like a solid oven batch — good color, no obvious burnt bits, the placemat doing its part to elevate…
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Southborough, Take One
The first of what turns out to be a small trilogy of Southborough wing outings, this one from a low-key Memorial Day weekend in 2018. Wings, celery, a black ramekin of ranch, a white plate — the platonic ideal of “fine, unremarkable, would order again.” No restaurant name survives in the photo, which by this…
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The Plain One That Almost Didn’t Survive the Archive
A round, lightly-topped pizza with a browned edge, preserved only as a small, low-resolution thumbnail — April 2018’s entry didn’t make it through the years in full quality, but the shape of the story is still there: another pizza, another Thursday, another photo taken mostly out of habit by that point. By April 2018 this…
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The Well-Done, No-Regrets Rectangle
A large, oblong pizza with a seriously charred crust — this one pushed further into “well-done” territory than almost anything else in the archive. Late March 2018, and someone clearly wasn’t afraid of a dark crust that week. Some people call that burnt. This household apparently calls it flavor. I’ll invent that the oven ran…
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The Skillet Pizza Nobody Photographed Well
A round pizza in a metal pan or skillet, photographed in low light with what survives in the archive as a fairly low-resolution shot — March 2018, and this one clearly wasn’t the priority documentation-wise, but it still earned a photo, so here it is. I’ll invent that this was a cast-iron-skillet pizza experiment, deep-dish…
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Basil, Tomato, and a Margherita Moment
Fresh basil leaves scattered across a red-sauce pizza, photographed just eleven days after the white pizza above — January 2018 was apparently a two-pizza-in-two-weeks kind of month. This one leans margherita, and the basil placement looks almost deliberate, which for this archive counts as high styling effort. Invented detail: I’ll guess the basil came from…