Honey and spice and good ol’ Mrs HS Balls’ peach chutney give these chicken wings plenty of flavour and a golden brown colour. They went down a treat at a Karoo stoepsit we went to in late April, just as the winter was about to set in.

Stoepsit? It’s a Karoo thing. You invite a couple of friends over for a chin wag on your stoep while you watch the sun go down and tell stories of the derring-do of the veld and strange Karoo habits. You take a plate of “Karoo tapas”, which in my case was these oven-baked wings drenched in a sweetly sticky baste.

Sit, sip, eat, tell stories. That’s living.

Ingredients

Friends

A stoep

Whisky and wine

Stories

18 chicken wings

½ cup Mrs HS Balls peach chutney

½ cup honey

Juice of 2 lemons

1 tsp ground cumin

1 tsp ground ginger

1 tsp garlic salt

1 tsp sriracha or other dry chilli mix

Olive oil

Method

Preheat the oven to 220℃.

Snip off the wing tips. (Freeze for a future chicken stock.)

In a bowl, mix the chutney, honey, lemon juice and spices (not the friends, you add them to the mix later) and salt. Douse the wings in it, massaging them with your hands.

Oil a baking tray. Place the wings side by side and drizzle over the remaining baste.

Bake until cooked to the bone, about 50 minutes to an hour. Turn the wings over after 25 minutes.

My gas oven being the temperamental creature that it is, they took up to an hour and 10 minutes to turn golden, but an electric oven will cook them a fair bit faster. Either way, they’re only done when cooked to the bone and beautifully browned. DM/TGIFood

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