We are going on a camping trip with a large group of friends. We would like to have grilled chicken wings one night but don't want to spend hours grilling 200 chicken wings. Can we cut down the time it would take to make the wings by parboiling them and seasoning ahead of time? How long should I parboil them and then for how much time should we grill them?

 Correct us if we're wrong, but isn't one of the main arguments for camping that you get to slow down a little? Take your time? Flip a few chicken wings? We understand, though, that in between calls on the satellite phone, plugging an extra battery into your laptop, and a forced march with heavy backpacks, there may not be enough time to tend the grill adequately. You can certainly get a head start by precooking the chicken wings, but the timing is a little challenging.

In order to estimate the initial cooking time, we checked a number of grilling books to get a better idea of how long chicken wings are grilled when people are not being expedient campers. The answers are all over the place, from 5 minutes (according to Chris Schlesinger in License to Grill), or 10 to 15 minutes (in Grilling for Dummies), to 25 to 30 minutes in several other books. Of course, there is some variation in the size of chicken wings and some grills cook hotter than others, but that's quite a spread of cooking times.

If we were going on this fast-track camping trip, we would pre-bake rather than parboil the wings (parboiling will leach some of the flavor into the water), on baking sheets at 350°F (175°C) for 15 to 20 minutes, turning them over halfway through. (Parboil them for the same amount of time if you must..)

Then at the wilderness campsite, we would turn the cell phone off long enough to give them as much time on the grill as they need — probably 5 minutes on each side. This will give them time to warm thoroughly, finish cooking, and become crisp. Cut into one and you'll know right away whether it's done — the meat should be white all the way through with no trace of pink.

Finally, we're assuming in this question that you have adequate facilities for refrigerating 200 partially cooked chicken wings in the wilderness, right? Apparently camping means different things to different people.

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