Well, enough Italo-French cooking, this time I’m veering towards the Far East. Thailand to be more exact. Well Thailand-ish. Big “ish”. This is more or less a glaze adopted and adapted from NYT Cooking, along with some more or less original Casa Radu marinades and “techniques”. Fear not it all makes sense and it’s not all that complicated in the end… read on for details.

There are a couple of ingredients missing the general roll call here. Here’s what’s present: marinated chicken wings, creamer potatoes, garlic, lovage, sesame seeds, soy sauce, fish sauce and peanut butter. The wing marinade this time is beer, garlic, soy sauce, Spanish paprika, fish sauce and a bit of lime juice.

Here’s one of the parts where NYT and I diverge. NYT Cooking would have these grilled in two stages, but our beautiful backyard grill is collecting dust this year as Sandra wants to avoid the “burned” bits for a while. So I need to adapt here a bit as well. Reaching yet again in the curly, eddy currents corner of my mind, I pulled out this idea of not using the marinade as usual. Instead my thought was mixing the potatoes with the wings and starting the cooking process with a cold oven, so as much fat as possible would be rendered and absorbed by the potatoes. Ideally, at the end of this particular step I would have wings almost cooked thru, with good colour but only half done potatoes, so help me God. You will see why in a moment. So, low and slow is the game here, in the oven at 280F.

Two ingredients missing the earlier roll call, coconut milk and lime, ingredients for the glaze I’m about to make as the wings and the potatoes are on Stage 1 in the oven.

It seems Stage 1 objectives were nailed after 20-25 minutes in the oven. The fat has rendered well, the skin on the wings is starting to crisp up and the potatoes still have around another 15 minutes to go.

Oops! Once I removed the wings for glazing separately I faced a half empty tray of potatoes… this is what happen when cooking is not approached with chess playing ahead thinking. Never mind, this was solved with a bit of quick cold-room diving from which I emerged victoriously holding two large red onions, subsequently chopped large-ish so their cooking time would roughly be similar with finishing the potatoes. Back in the oven with the tray, this time at 400F.

Meanwhile the wings were tossed in a glaze whisked up from soy sauce, coconut milk, peanut butter, lime juice, fish sauce and sesame seeds, then lined up like little parading toy soldiers on a rack set on top of the potato/ onion mix tray. Perhaps the only thing missing here is a bit of chili or some heat of some kind. Yes, I kept it out this time around.

This is the situation in the field after another around 10 minutes of roasting at 400F. All done!

We served them garnished with some undoubtedly un Asian lovage, along a mixed salad Sandra put together. And a Sidelaunch beer for me and Natalia. This is a beer brand made by a microbrewery in Collingwood, Ontario. These people know their craft well, I love their beer! Everything went quite well together even though Natalia would have loved to have spicier wings.