To be honest, this isn’t that spicy of an entry. Spices are involved, but not to the extent where I think it does the title justice. I’ll probably end up writing another post in the future about spicy food and wishing I didn’t already use such a great title that makes people nostalgic for 90’s Brit pop. But alas, life and blog writing isn’t about what if’s and anticipation of future entries. So let’s get down to it.
I baked and cooked this week! After a two weeks of pretty unhealthy restaurant and fast food eating, I decided to go on a juice cleanse for a day and then... Go back to unhealthy eating! I’m tryin’--not real hard--but I’m tryin’. At least this time around I’m baking and cooking my own food. That’s healthier than eating out, right? Maybe not ‘cause I baked pumpkin cream cheese muffins and harissa chicken thighs with buttermilk, but at least I know exactly what I’m putting into my body!
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Pumpkin Cream Cheese Muffins
Ever since I had a pumpkin cream cheese muffin at Whole Foods in November, I’ve been wanting to replicate it. Now, the recipe I used didn’t replicate the look (the one from Whole Foods was huge and had a lovely mushroom-like muffin shape), but the taste was pretty spot on... Maybe even better because it was more moist.
In the past, I used to use Punchfork to look up recipes and see how people would rate them to decide whether or not I would try a recipe out. Sadly, Pinterest--which I adore except for the fact that the company took away one of the most useful and awesome recipe sites gifted to the Internet--bought Punchfork and absorbed it into their site. Except, they didn’t really incorporate Punchfork with all its rating glory. All you can do on Pinterest concerning food is pin great photos of food. For all you know, it might taste horrible.
The point to my rant (LONG LIVE PUNCHFORK) is that I had to find a recipe online blindly. Sure, some sites have comments and people can rate on the site directly, but how honest can it be if it’s on their own site? Websites are free to delete or write their own comments. I digress. I ended up picking Crazy for Crust’s recipe and am pretty happy with it.
Now why did I decide to bake these Fall/Winter friendly muffins when Spring is around the corner you might ask? Well... There was a sale on pumpkin puree at Ralphs. I got too excited and bought three huge cans. I had no clue that I would only use 3/4 of a can for 36 muffins (that’s right, I made 36 muffins--for no reason other than to share), so I’ll be eating a lot of pumpkin-flavored goods for the next month or two. I CAN’T WAIT.
I’d now like to give a little shout out to my sister and her husband for gifting me these lovely silicon spatulas that were extremely handy in this whole baking process. They gave them to me for Christmas and had them specially engraved with the most British sentence they could think of...
Back to baking, the recipe online is pretty self-explanatory. I didn’t change the recipe. My only “complaint” is that there was too much cheesecake filling leftover. I put complaint in quotations because it’s not really a problem because I ate the rest of the filling. Problem solved! You probably only need about 10 oz of cream cheese or maybe you can get even get away with using 8 oz and save yourself from buying an extra box. Oh, another thing is that I would recommend you leaving the muffins in the oven for an extra 2 minutes. I think my muffins came out a little undercooked. Eh... They were still yummy. And to tie in the spice theme... Pumpkin spice is in the recipe! See... The title does work.
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Harissa Chicken Thighs
Now these little puppies were a lot of work. I recently went to the LA Art Book Fair and stumbled upon an adorable, mini cook book published by Short Stack. I bought the Buttermilk edition by Angie Masier (there are other editions highlighting other ingredients) because I don’t have much experience using buttermilk (I remember the first time I bought it and was surprised it was tart!).
There are plenty of other recipes that I’ll be getting to later on this year, but I decided to try the harissa chicken recipe because it looked relatively simple and incorporated interesting flavors. Little did I know Ralphs didn’t carry harissa paste and I would have to make it from scratch. I’m sure World Market or some other market in LA has harissa paste (a Tunisian hot chilli pepper paste), but I don’t have time to scour Los Angeles for it. I ended up finding a simple recipe for the paste on good ol’ About.com and adapting it to what I could get my hands on. For instance, I didn’t have coriander or caraway seeds, so I used rosemary instead. I also doubled the amount of everything in the recipe because it didn’t seem like enough for amount of chicken and veg I was cooking. The recipe on About.com also doesn’t specify what type of red peppers you should use, so I went for the standard thin red ones (please excuse my lack of knowledge of red pepper names).
To respect the publishers and writer of Short Stack’s Buttermilk, I will not be posting their recipe online. However, if you ask my personally I will email you the recipe with my notes.
During my prep, I had to de-seed 24 peppers, which took awhile and left me with stinging fingertips. Let me tell you, the acidity of spices quickly uncovers where you have cuts. Oh, and I don’t advise rubbing your eyes or really touching any part of your body while working with peppers. Seriously.
I ended up using my mini blender (similar to a Magic Bullet) to blend all the spices and herbs together instead of using a food processor (‘cause I don’t have one). A mortar and pestle would probably give you the best results though.
The end result was so tasty! I love the sauce, especially with the baked sweet potatoes and red onions. I wish I bought leaner and thinner cuts of chicken thigh, but it’s not a huge deal. If you want to attempt to make this, I would set aside at least four to five hours to prep and bake. Not only does make the paste take time because of all the de-seeding, but the chicken needs to marinate for 30 minutes in the fridge and 30 minutes at room temperature. The vegetables also have to bake for 20 minutes before you place the marinated chicken on top. And lastly, the bake time is about an hour (or at least it took me that long because my chicken thighs were pretty thick). Nevertheless, the labor was worth it and now I can enjoy this dish for the next three to four days!
Why is it so hard to cook for one?
