Baked Garlic Chicken Wings

Taunting Twilly with a baked garlic chicken wing.

Making the perfect chicken wing is one of my greatest challenges in life. Today I got a little closer to winning that battle.

My mother is a chicken stockpiler. She always keeps an ample supply of frozen chicken - breasts, thighs, and wings - from Aldi in our basement freezer, so I grab a bag of wings and try a new recipe or technique whenever I'm feeling a bit inventive. I haven't found the perfect wing yet. I think the root of my dissatisfaction lies in a fact I try hard to ignore: I will never make chicken wings as good as D's. But I'll keep trying!

This evening I was looking for a healthy recipe. A lot of recipes I found were for fried wings or called for white sugar and brown sugar. So I refined my search to those that were baked and did not call for sweetener. I found this recipe and adjusted it to the one below.

• 24 medium-sized chicken wings
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• 6 or so cloves of garlic, chopped
• 3 tablespoons chili powder
• 2 teaspoons garlic powder
• 2 teaspoons onion powder
• 2 teaspoons garlic salt
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice

Combine olive oil, garlic, spices, and lemon juice in a large ziploc bag.

Add chicken and toss it around with mixture.

Pour it all onto a baking sheet. Cook at 400 degrees for 60 minutes. 

About 30 minutes into baking time, pour all the

sauce into a pan, reduce it, and sift out the fat.

Remove wings from the oven when they look nice and crisp.

Add wings to a bowl with your reduced sauce and shake!

Drain sauce again (so they don't get soggy) and serve.

Next time I make wings I'm trying a slow cooker recipe. Bye bye!