Habaneros

This creamy stovetop mac and cheese is super spicy and has a sweetness from the basil and green onion.

A compound butter with habanero, cilantro, lime, and garlic mixed in. It tastes amazing on a burger.

This tripe sandwich is inspired by a sandwich I had on vacation in Florence Italy.

September is the time when I crave chili the most. I love a veggie packed chili, but this time of the year it is a shame to cook your veggies too long because they are so fresh and tasty! I decided to try and make this chili sort of backwards by letting the meat and spices simmer away in the crock pot all day and then adding the veggies at the last minute. The resulting dish was super tasty with a nice juxtaposition of deep slow cooked flavors and fresh light crunchy veggies.

Because I work at a burrito shop that has great tacos, I don’t usually make them at home. The craving came up the other day though for plantain tacos so I whipped some up! They were much different than what we have at work so I was happy that I had made them. I highly recommend these as a filling vegetarian dinner and something new to eat next week!

I thought it was pretty convenient when Pepcid wanted to do a sponsored post with me. I don’t know if you guys have seen this here blog of mine, but if you have you probably can believe that I get heartburn from time to time. My plan was to make an aggressively spicy feast for my friends and see if Pepcid was strong enough to prevent everyone from getting heartburn! We started with this appetizer of Polenta Stuffed Mushrooms that I posted on Tuesday, and then we moved on to the main event, these crazy hot chile basil tofu tacos.

Some friends and I got together this past weekend to have a spicy feast and it was lots of fun! I was inspired to create the feast when the heartburn medicine Pepcid came to me and wanted to work with me on a sponsored blog post. THAT blog post is coming on Thursday, but this is the appetizer that we had that day. I got the idea for roulette style spicy apps from a super spicy dinner called Hell Night that is hosted a few times a year at a restaurant in Cambridge called East Coast Grill. What they do is give you one item per person at your table (I had it as meatballs) and most are mild, one is medium, and one is insanely hot. I instead made 75% of these stuffed mushrooms pretty hot, and 25% of them CRAZY HOT, and we all just started chowing down.

Making mustard is really easy, cheap, and a lot of fun. I like to do a lot of trial and error when I make mustard and I have made a lot of batches that I never posted because of this (meaning they came out awful). Over the weekend I made a killer mango based mustard that I just had to post because I seriously have eaten like a cup of it in the past two days it’s THAT good. The mango adds a nice sweetness that gives the whole thing a honey-mustard essence, but a couple habaneros and a cold-mix process give it the intensity you guys can expect from one of my recipes.

Roger Mooking has a commercial on Cooking Channel where he whips together a tasty looking simple plantain gratin and it inspired me to make a more intricate deeper version of a plantain casserole. I wanted lots of layers of tasty things that I think go with plantains, like black beans, cojita cheese, onions, tomato, and habanero. I also mixed in a little quinoa just to add a little more substance and protein to the veggie dish. The whole thing turned out great, but make sure you use really ripe plantains. Most of mine were nice and yellow, but a few still had a little green to them and they were very noticeable and we mostly ate around them.

A super spicy and tangy sweet sauce makes a unique glaze for this ham.

Habanero ice cream has been on my list for a while, because habaneros pair extremely well with dairy, and also sweets so I thought the combo would be only natural. The milk and sugar also helps remove the heat from the peppers and leaves that sweet tropical pure habanero flavor that is like nothing else in the culinary world. At a farmers market last week Warren Farms had a free sample of their habanero infused maple syrup, and I instantly knew that that would be the flavor of the ice cream. I made it only a few days later!

My hobby: making pasta sauces out of vegetables besides tomatoes. I’ve done it with red peppers, carrots, and now corn. Mandi is obsessed with summer corn right now, and for good reason, it just tastes so damn good! I always get happy when I can think of a fun unique corn recipe, because most of the time I just eat it off the cob and don’t get to feature it on the site. This sauce came out really sweet because of the sweet nature of corn and carrots. Overall it was really awesome and balanced with the cheese and bacon, but once in awhile you would get a bite that was a little too sweet.