Kitchen Adventures: Spicy roast chicken with corn on the cob and sweet potato pie

Love it when the heat from the oven warms the entire house -- keeps our tummies and toes cosy all at the same time, what more could you ask for!
On the dinner table tonight:

• Spicy roasted chicken legs, tweaking a recipe from The Pioneer Woman and corn on the cob
• Sweet potato pie from AllRecipes.com

The spicy chicken legs turned out awesome! I had to tweak the recipe from The Pioneer Woman because well, she was making 24 chicken legs -- me, just 2! I gave the chicken legs a good rub of coarse ground black pepper, Himalayan pink salt (because that's what I had) and cayenne pepper a few hours before dinner and then popped it in the fridge. When it came to cooking, instead of hot salt, I melted the butter and lemon juice with minced garlic, cayenne pepper and some Himalyan pink salt. The cayenne was way hotter than I thought it would be, so the chicken definitely had zing! I also had to cook the chicken for close to 45 minutes instead of 30 minutes, but the skin came out golden brown and the chicken was uber moist! Zhuang loved it so much, he cleaned it to the bone. And what's better than asking for seconds? "We should make an entire roast chicken next time." Yay!

For the corn, I was debating whether I should roast or boil the corn and since I already had the oven running, I went with roasting. Which, if you ask me, is a fancy way of saying "throw the corn with the entire husk in the oven" and tadaa, add butter and salt to serve. Rustic.

 

To finish off -- since I already had the oven all warmed up -- sweet potato pie. We fell in love with this pie when we were skiing in Tahoe and never looked back. It's so easy. Sweet potato, cinnamon, nutmeg, eggs, butter and pre-made graham cracker pie crust. I wanted to add fresh ginger but couldn't find a grater. Some recipes get you to add yogurt or evaporated milk, but I didn't with this one. Maybe next time and maybe I'll even try making the pie crust from scratch! Note to self: Need to half this AllRecipes.com sweet potato recipe because there was too much filling for one 9-inch pie crust. The pie turned out okay, not as pretty as I wanted it to be and there was way too much filling and not enough spices. On the bright side, it tastes much better than it looks.