I spent most of these wee hours with my sommelier boyfriend, André, who was not only game for a taste test, but always had wine on hand.  Bubbles? Spanish?  Burgundy?  When we worked together at the restaurant, he always posed the question towards the end of the shift when the bread-baskets and chocolate trays—forbidden to employees—began to beckon.  Maybe a nice German Riesling?

Sometimes we were stumped in our quest for a perfect wine pairing, as we were the night we tasted all the salsas sold in the corner bodega.  That night, we pushed aside the pile of sweaters on top of the milk crates that housed his wine collection, debated over a few possibilities, and finally ran back to the bodega for Corona. On the night of the meatball sub tasting, we cracked open a Rioja as we waited for each delivery when, perhaps, Barbaresco would have been more appropriate.

On an evening not long after the meatballs, we found ourselves in the mood to experiment. Having asked all we could from the bodega, we moved on to the 24-hour Food Emporium. Peanut butter? Could be dangerous. Vanilla ice cream? André's freezer couldn't hold more than a pint, even if he ever defrosted it. And then we came upon the hot dogs, uncharted territory for a reformed vegetarian (me), intensely appealing to a ballgame junky (André).

André's only pot lived in his only cabinet with the rest of his minimalist kitchen collection, a Riedel decanter and—strangely—his wallet when not in use. It occurred to us as we browsed through buns options that our cooking methods were limited. We could throw them all in one pot, thereby risking cross contamination of flavors; we could boil them individually, thereby risking the sun coming up and the stark reality of hotdogs for breakfast; or we could microwave them. This, we decided, was the practical solution

As this was not a bun taste test, I reached for the flavor-neutral Wonder Bread buns, forbidding André to ever disclose this to my mother. If it tells you anything about my upbringing, my brother Sam rushed home from school one afternoon dying to tell my mother that they sold bread at the donate/store—sliced!

André doesn't do sauerkraut and I don't do relish, so ketchup and mustard it was. We still had some mustard in the fridge left over from the night we checked into the Plaza with a few bottles of wine and half a ham, a story for another time. The perfect pairing would be Beaujolais, he thought, but there was none to be found under the sweaters, so he opened a Californian pinot noir as I lined up the dogs in alphabetical order so that we would not—god forbid—confuse the Sabrett with the Hebrew National.

Maybe that was what hot dogs were supposed to taste like, I proposed as we tried the first selection, an all natural beef dog the color of a new bruise and sausage-like in flavor. No, this is what a hot dog is supposed to taste like, he countered, handing me the slim, deep red Hebrew National. It was the closest to a ballpark frank we tried, the Sabrett proving to be bland and mushy and Nathan's to be a little tough (although we agreed that it would hold up the best on a grill). After the formal part of the tasting was done (and by formal, I mean that we were still paying attention), we opened the tarragon mustard and dug into the Wonder Bread with true relish.

As usual, it was after 4 AM when we finally crawled under the covers and only hours later that we awoke to our alarms with wine-stained lips and the sweet smell of grease still on our fingers. Should we look into other hobbies? Probably. But I am curious about the differences between boxed macaroni-and-cheeses. I will not, of course, tell my mother that ours won't be made of whole grain pasta, nor will we add a wheat germ crust. It'll be nuclear orange as mac 'n cheese should be, and perfectly paired with the finest Mersault we can dig up.