Smokey Chicken with Blue Cheese Dip

Everyone loves hot wings with blue cheese dip, right? Well, at least I do. Except I prefer legs to wings, since there's so little meat on the wings. And if I make them myself... I don't really want to be frying all that chicken, because frying is always kind of scary in a way - as in, really, that much fat? So these legs are baked. They could easily have been barbecued, but the weather wasn't great and we figured the oven would do a good job of it. We were right.

Pimentón de la Vera is a smokey paprika powder from Spain, that comes in a few different varieties - I have picante, dulce and bittersweet sitting in my spice cabinet. I used a mixture of the first two here, and you can totally up the spice by using more picante. I wanted to keep mine fairly mild, but I'm a heat wuss.

The dip goes well with a lot of veggies - I made a big tray of red bellpepper, cucumber, carrots and sugar snap peas. (The vegetable of doom, celery, is banned from my kitchen.)

This is a big hit with the kid.

Smokey Chicken with Blue Cheese Dip

serves 6

2 kg chicken legs

1 tbsp salt

2 tsp hot smoked paprika (Pimentón de la Vera, picante)

4 tsp sweet smoked paprika (Pimentón de la Vera, dulce)

5 tbsp cooking oil

1-2 tbsp tabasco

Mix all ingredients for the marinade in a ziploc bag. Add the chicken, and mix carefully. Let it sit for a few hours or over night, or cook right away. (It'll still have a lot of flavor.)

You can barbecue them, or just cook them in the oven, on a rack, for about 25 minutes on 200°C.

Blue cheese Dip

140 g creamy blue cheese, crumbled

100-150 ml mayonnaise

200 ml sour cream

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 tbsp lemon juice

1 tbsp white wine vinegar (or apple cider vinegar)

1 tsp tabasco

salt, pepper

Mix all ingredients and season to taste - I had to use an immersion blender to get it to blend properly. (You don't want a bunch of cheese chunks.)