Tag: spicy

Chipotle Honey Mofongo

Disclaimer: This shop has been compensated by Collective Bias, Inc. and its advertiser. All opinions are mine alone. I was paid by the internet, for the internet, and shall not perish from this earth before eating my weight in avocados. 

Christ, do I love bodegas. Hartford has ’em, New York has better. Rows upon rows of food the likes of which I’ve rarely cooked with, and if you’re nice, amazing sandwiches and deli treats to boot. Not to mention being the ideal hangover helper. So while I was in New York last weekend, I picked up some ingredients at my favorite stop (shout out to Tehuitzingo for also making me want tacos after Betony) and came home to cook something amazing. Connecticut is Goya country, so when I was asked to cook something using La Morena’s hot ingredients, like jalapeno and chipotle peppers, I was curious to see what I could come up with. DSC_0006 Continue reading “Chipotle Honey Mofongo”

McDonald’s Buffalo Chicken Poutine

Back from the lean, mean streets of Canada, I bring you the sole restaurant or food review of the entire trip- Buffalo Chicken Poutine from McDonald’s. We opted to take a mainly tech-free vacation to better connect to each other and remember what penmanship was. Subsequently, I had a wonderful time and have a journal full of poorly-rendered sandwich drawings– and now, this, with 100% more surreptitiously taken grainy photos! wpid-IMAG1193.jpg Continue reading “McDonald’s Buffalo Chicken Poutine”

Wendy’s Spicy Chipotle Jr. Cheeseburger

I hate Christmas shopping. Even though I’ve whittled down all but 20% of it to online shopping, leaving my neighbors constantly curious as to whether I’m in a drug cartel or the Make A Wish Foundation, it’s still an irksome chore. The expectations are too high. What do I want for Christmas? I want to feel genuine satisfaction, the kind that comes from inner peace and self-acceptance. So the Cinzia Rocca jacket and tub of popcorn isn’t going to cut it. But I bought gifts for people, anyway, braving the crowds of the BLEEP for the privilege of elbowing a pinch-faced woman in the chin for the last BLEEP on the shelf and waiting in line, only to make small talk with the cashier about specials on BLEEP. I forgot my mother reads this blog. Well, Mom, enjoy your BLEEP this year.DSC_7203 - Edited Continue reading “Wendy’s Spicy Chipotle Jr. Cheeseburger”

Spicy Week II: Eclectic

Yes, today was supposed to be XXX.

Yes, I know I’ve changed the order.

You do not know what my body has gone through in the last 24 hours.
If there is any poster child for body autonomy, it is me, right now, lacking autonomy from my own body.
Holy crap, I kid you not.

All that aside, I’ve decided to treat myself to the most exciting and diverse selection of the sauces before I subject various friends and family members to the insanely hot ones on my trip home tomorrow. Today won’t put me completely out of the woods- I’m trying sauces with ingredients from avocado to salted caramel, to top-notch political preferences to pumpkin. Whew.

Also, someone sent me a holster, which means that now that my first semester is officially done, I’ve spent every minute of the last 24 hours pretending to be Doc Holliday. I’m your huckleberry.

Sauce count: 18 (and five non-sauce goodies!)
Sauce total: 73 DSC_7102-001 Continue reading “Spicy Week II: Eclectic”

Spicy Week II: Hot

Day three of Spicy Week and I’m rediscovering what it means to introduce fiber, green vegetables, and daily exercise into my system. Funnily enough, this is also how I felt when I did the juice cleanse. Is hot sauce the next diet fad? You heard it here first. While supping on a sumptuous mixture of chia seeds, pecan-cranberry oatmeal, and peanut butter, please let me regale you with the legends and lore of the sauces boldly known as ‘hot.’DSC_7040-001 Continue reading “Spicy Week II: Hot”

Spicy Week II: Medium

We’re on a roll now, and are discovering exactly how many McNuggets two mid-sized women can eat before they reach a threshold that they can never return from. Answer: roughly seven. Yeah, we’re no Furious Petes. But we prevailed, and went to the gym, and took a hot soak, and now we’re on to Day II of Spicy Week II: The Medium. Hartford Medium. Medium-sized Appetites. There are no more puns.

I introduced the feature last night, and wanted to take some time today to tell you how our testing works. Taking a few notes from famed hot sauce critic Scott Roberts and the team at Chile Pepper magazine, we decided to divide the sauces into categories: mild, medium, hot, xxx, eclectic sauces and snacks, and fruit-based sauces, with an extra day at the end to rank the winners of each category and crown an overall winner of Spicy Week II.

We ranked the sauces using the website’s 0-10 rankings. For reference, 5 is the midway benchmark for rankings- average, run-of-the-mill hot sauce, like what you’d find at a restaurant next to the salt and pepper, and the ratings move up from there. We tried to explain our reasoning in each blurb, along with what we liked and didn’t like about each sauce.

Sauces tasted: 31
Sauce total: 55DSC_7001 Continue reading “Spicy Week II: Medium”

Spicy Week II: Mild

It took three weeks.

One sponsor.
One hundred and six packages.
Two hundred and seventeen bottles of hot sauce.
Tons of crowd and brand support, and only two refusals.DSC_6969-001And a yearning. A simple, dumb yearning coming from the awestruck realization that one day, I was out of hot sauce. It was a reality I thought I’d never face, and from that cosmic upset (and bland plate of eggs) came a project borne from the dead and the archives of my mid-2011 dining hall plates and Razr medium. Spicy Week II: The Spicening. What was strange and surreal turned into an organized project of militant precision. I had a hot sauce bar graph lining the northern wall of my bedroom for a month. I researched into the depths of old webring circles and etsy pages to find my subjects, and now, here we are. Continue reading “Spicy Week II: Mild”