Spicy Archives - Nerds with Knives

Spicy Cheddar Cornbread Pudding

February 23, 2021July 27, 2020 by Matt

A little spicy, a little sweet and a lot delicious, this Spicy Cheddar Cornbread Pudding is our most-requested side dish ever. We use two kinds of cheeses — extra-sharp cheddar and pepper jack — to give it loads of flavor. Make it with fresh summer corn when it’s in season, but it’s just as good with frozen corn the rest of the year.

As a Brit, I get a lot of questions about pudding, most often along the lines of “Why do you have so many of them?”. It’s true. Puddings of all sorts — whether sweet or savory — are practically part of our DNA. There are gelatin or custard puddings (such as blancmange), steamed puddings (sticky toffee or Christmas pudding), baked puddings (you’ve probably heard of the Yorkshire), and even sausages (black pudding).

But corn pudding is American through and through, and this week we cooked up our favorite version: a spicy cheddar cornbread pudding, flavored with fresh sweet corn, scallions, and our two favorite cheeses from Cabot Creamery: Seriously Sharp Cheddar and Pepper Jack (though you can also use the Habanero Cheddar if you like things extra spicy!)

This is a sponsored post in collaboration with Cabot Creamery.

Cheddar Corn Pudding — Our farmer’s market haul from the weekend, and our favorite Cabot cheeses!

Thai Basil Gimlet

February 19, 2021July 20, 2020 by Matt

We’re very fond of our herb garden. A few years ago, we built a step stand on the back deck, and this holds enough aromatic greenery to pinch for the kitchen all summer long. Having herbs so close to hand means that it’s easy to get inspiration for a food or drink recipe. Herb pots are easy to set up, don’t require any digging, and can be positioned wherever you have a sunny spot. A few years ago, in our garden-less apartment in Brooklyn, we’d sneak herb pots out onto the fire escape in defiance of the landlady. When Emily lived in an industrial loft building, the roof was always the sunniest location and where herbs thrived. The pride of our raised bed garden is always late-summer tomatoes, but there’s a hero of the herb garden that brings us delight from early summer onwards. To paraphrase T S Eliot, we can measure out our summer in basil leaves.

This is about a third of the herbs we’re growing, though the shiso (bottom left) is trying to take over the world.

Sticky Gochujang-Honey Chicken

February 17, 2021February 12, 2020 by Emily

What happens when you marinate chicken in gochujang (spicy Korean chili paste), honey, ginger and garlic? Deliciousness, that’s what. Sticky Gochujang-Honey Chicken is our newest weeknight favorite: a little sweet, a lot spicy and just plain tasty.

Hey, remember us? Nerds with Knives? The cheeky duo (plus dog) with a pantry full of spice and a devil-may-care attitude to food blogging? It’s been a minute since we’ve had a chance to blog a new recipe but we’re back, and we’re ready to mumble. (I think that’s the correct saying, anyway.)

It may not strictly be the New Year any more, but since this is our first post of 2020, we’re going to pretend that it is. And we wanted to start the year’s posts off with a bang. And when we think “bang”, we think “gochujang”.

Red Curry Chicken Meatballs

February 17, 2021August 26, 2019 by Emily

This Thai-influenced dish delivers big flavor for very little work. Tender oven-baked chicken or turkey meatballs, simmered in a delicious coconut milk-based red curry sauce. Packed with ginger and garlic and showered with fresh herbs, this is a guaranteed crowd pleaser.

It’s been made clear to us that we don’t talk enough about balls on this blog. This must be rectified. Because there’s nothing quite like the culinary experience of shaping a firm ball, baking it to meaty perfection and then slathering it with lashings of hot creamy sauce. And if you think we started with that sentence just to titillate and excite you, as well as improve our search engine rankings, you couldn’t be further from the truth, although those are two very good reasons. The fact is, we’ve only assembled four meatball recipes in the last six years of Nerds with Knives, and we felt that it was time to give those balls another gentle squeeze and/or spin. So here we go.

Spicy Thai Shrimp Salad

February 19, 2021September 6, 2018 by Emily

A simple, healthy Thai shrimp salad with an authentic sour-savory-spicy-sweet combination of fresh lime juice, fish sauce and chili paste, showered with fresh herbs and crunchy roasted peanuts.

Summer is almost done but we are officially in the middle of a heat wave. You know those shots in movies of a long, empty road, heat lines shimmering up from the pavement? Maybe a tumbleweed blows by, lazy and misshapen? That’s our living room right now. In this case the “tumbleweed” is Arya, our rescue dog who, for a pup who lived her first year on the streets of West Virginia, is hilariously particular about the range of temperatures she finds acceptable. 70º – 75ºF is fine, but a few degrees in either direction and get ready for dramatic sighs and woeful glances.

I hear you, puppy. I’m hot too.

Kimchi Pimento Cheese

February 18, 2021June 11, 2018 by Emily

Pimento cheese doesn’t have to be eaten in a sandwich – and neither does it need to contain pimento. Say what?! Before you flay us alive for our heresy, let us hurriedly explain that we replaced the pickled pepper with fermented home-made kimchi. And we, frankly, think it’s even better.

Pimento cheese, the iconic spread of the American south, turns out not to be very southern at all – at least in terms of its origins. It’s so associated with the south that it’s hard to imagine the spread (a mix of cheddar cheese, cream cheese, mayonnaise and diced red pimentos) as coming from anywhere else, but our friends at Serious Eats did a little digging and discovered that pimento cheese actually got its start up north, in New York, as a way to market the burgeoning production of cream cheese.

In the 1870s, New York farmers started making a soft, unripened cheese, similar to Neufchâtel, that eventually evolved into cream cheese. Around the same time, Spain started exporting canned red peppers — or “pimiento” — to the United States. Eventually a combination of the cheese, peppers and mayonnaise became the spread we know today and like any good origin story, the lore soon outgrew its humble beginnings and pimento cheese became a staple of church picnics and neighborhood potlucks and fancy restaurants all over the southern U.S.

While most loved between two slices of bread, the cheese spread is versatile enough to lend itself to a variety of uses – as a dip, as a topping (think cheeseburgers, or our favorite, patty melts), and even as a stuffing for meats like chicken breasts, or pork chops.