Growing up sucks! You’ve got bills to pay, work to do, and just not enough time in the day to get it all done. Sadly, in today’s high-technicaaaal society, many people find themselves at a loss when it comes to putting food into their bodies! Unless you grew up in a household that cooked a lot (read: Italian) cooking feels like an expensive, complicated endeavor.

Naturally, a lot of you turn to the almighty Google for answers on how to make food happen in a home environment. And as it turns out, many times, the results you end up with don’t make it any easier! Instead of simple, step-by-step instructions that look like something out of a cookbook, you end up with a low-key bragging wall of text about the author’s cherished memories at nonna’s villa in the sprawling Tuscan countryside, but for a dish that even hubby will love! Finding the actual recipe turns into a challenge in its own right, and by the time you find it, odds are you don’t even have half the specialty ingredients required! What’s a poor, hungry shlub with limited time to do?

That’s where we come in. We are Poor Couple’s Food Guide, your premier how-to-cook blog for your average Joe-shmo who isn’t looking to reinvent the wheel or score their next big Instagram masterpiece. We offer recipes that are simple and easy to follow. We try our best to avoid complicated ingredients that no one stocks in their pantry, while still introducing readers to a fun, wide variety of dishes. If we cover a recipe that has more exotic ingredients, we’ll do our best to suggest substitutions so that you don’t need to drop what you’re doing, and run out to the nearest ethnic food market. And most of all, we promise you’ll never have to pour through 8 paragraphs about how we discovered a recipe while vacationing in Belize. (Like we said, we are poor, after all.)

The best way to learn to cook is by practicing, and by keeping a bunch of simply recipes you like under your belt, it becomes easier and easier to add more! Cooking your meals at home is almost always cheaper and healthier, so we feel it’s our duty as a couple of lower-middle-class kidults that have been cooking their entire lives, to impart this knowledge on our hungry brethren!
In addition to recipes, we also feature how-to tips, relevant product reviews, and general entertainment articles related to food and health. We also host Deep Dish!, a show in which we take a close look at the history of various food dishes, in a light-hearted, joke-filled podcast romp.

Still want to know who we are? Well, in that case, let’s answer that question more in-depth.

PCFG Erik

Occupation: Pest Control Technician / Retired EMT
Cooking Specialty: Curries
Favorite Pizza: Buffalo Chicken
Favorite Color: Forest Green
Likes: Writing music, trumpets, cooking, hawks, martial arts, Nintendo
Dislikes: Sleeping, unoriginality, salads
Favorite Bands: The Heavy, Murder By Death, The Doors
Hobbies: Music, Video Games, Drawing
Favorite Couple’s Activity: Playing Tennis

Erik has been cooking since early childhood, and is a graduate of Stony Brook University, where they (regrettably) studied political science and (yay!) music performance. They also operate Gentleman.BOSS, a solo music project that focuses on folk, electronica, and folktronica music. Erik also has a background in standup comedy, and now dabbles in game design, currently working on an indie game!

PCFG Meg

Occupation: Dog Walker
Cooking Specialty: Comfort Food
Favorite Pizza: Neapolitan
Favorite Color: Blue
Likes: Crocheting, arts & crafts, baking, goats, yoga, plants
Dislikes: Mornings, baths, pollen
Favorite Bands: Green Day, Regina Spektor, She & Him
Hobbies: Crocheting, Spinning, Photography
Favorite Couple’s Activity: Making fun of terrible movies together.

Meg is also a graduate of Stony Brook University, where she majored in art history. After this, she went on to attain her Master’s degree in decorative design and pop culture. Meg has tried her hand at countless different types of arts and crafts, including cooking which she started learning from her parents when she was 11, and is an avid crocheter. When not creating hats and scarves, she enjoys both working out at the gym AND sleeping for long periods of time! (Sometimes even in that order!)

SrsBusiness Stuff:

Poor Couple’s Food Guide is a New York and Long Island based food blog founded in 2013 by Erik and Meghan A. It focuses on living a healthy, enjoyable lifestyle through knowledge of cooking and food, as well as how to apply that knowledge with limited funding and income. Our recipes have been featured online by Food and Wine magazine, and at the Long Island Garlic Festival several years in a row. Growing in popularity, monthly views have maxed out at nearly 10,000 from fans across multiple forms of social media. Features of PCFG include cooking tips and tutorials, product reviews, as well as general interest and humor articles about food and its role in a happy relationship.
Erik and Meg both host Deep Dish!, a podcast show which focuses on a different dish, each episode, and does a deep dive to explore its origins and histories, in a humorous, comedic fashion. Poor Couples Food Guide also operates a Facebook page, an Instagram account, a Youtube channel for uploading podcasts and video content, and posts NYC/Long Island restaurant reviews on Yelp as well.

The name and website Poor Couples Food Guide © is copyright 2013-2020, all rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without expressed and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Recipes, excerpts, photos, and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Poor Couple’s Food Guide and its authors, with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.