Crispy Oven-Baked Chicken Wings with Curry and Sesame Seeds

How I love oven-baked wings with curry and sesame seeds!!! Hot and crispy, with a delicate flavor. A great snack and even a main course. All it takes is wanting them and making them.

I remember that when I was little, buying a chicken at the store was a stroke of luck. People bought a couple at once, or even more. Bluish, scrawny, sickly-looking things. You had to singe them over a flame to burn off the leftover feathers and bits of stuck-on wrapping paper, and peel the flaking skin off the feet. Hardly anyone called them chickens back then; people called them “chicks.”

Much tastier was a real village chicken, not a store-bought chick. My grandmother raised them. I still remember it: a big, brazen, greedy flock in the yard, at least 50 of them. The whole yard was fenced off with netting, because in an hour that flock could scratch up the entire vegetable garden looking for who knows what. Toward autumn, the hens were gradually moved from the category of live poultry to carcasses and pillow stuffing. The exception: at any time of year, the most annoying hen could meet her end in a broth for a sick relative. Later, in the chaos after perestroika, the so-called “Bush legs” appeared, imported American chicken leg quarters. They looked more like the legs of mutants than chickens. Scary stuff.

When we were little, the tastiest part of any chicken that ended up in the soup was, without a doubt, the wings. As everyone knows, a chicken has only one pair of wings, and my grandmother had more grandkids than that. And everyone has their own tasty recipe for chicken wings with whatever you like.

I don't remember when the great chicken abundance began, but buying a kilo or two of wings is now easier than spitting at a pesky pigeon from the balcony. Considering that chicken (supposedly farm-raised) is the cheapest meat on the market, affordable even for the homeless, you could safely call it the people's food.

Take me, for example: all I like in a chicken are the wings and the leg quarters. So we often make vermicelli soup with leg quarters, fry thighs, and bake wings in the oven.