Author Archives: Meg
Cheat Codes: Helping Bread Last Longer
When you live with a bunch of other people, food tends to disappear rather quickly, and you don’t usually have to worry about it going bad before it gets eaten. But when you’re living on your own or with one other person, the food doesn’t fly out of the cupboard as fast anymore. Things that used to be gone in days can now take weeks to finish. And that can be a problem for perishable food items. You don’t want to end up throwing away food you spent good money on. Luckily there are ways to help a lot of foods last longer. Today we’ll focus on bread.
The Snack Report: Mint Kit Kats
Sorry to kind of crap out on you guys this week and have two reviews with no recipes. But we’re still recovering from the string of Christmas, New Year’s and our anniversary so we haven’t had a ton of time to work on blog cooking. But things are finally settling down, so there should be more varied posts again soon.
We’ve reviewed different flavored Kit Kats on the blog before. The difference was that the Vanilla Ice Cream flavor wasn’t a limited edition, but a Japanese flavor. The mint Kit Kats are widely available in America, but won’t always be around. What’s up with that Hershey? Nestle lets everyone else gets fun flavored Kit Kats whenever they want but in the U.S. we only get regular flavor the majority of the time? That’s so not cool. You need to step up the Kit Kat game Hershey Company.
But I’ve digressed…let’s see how the mint Kit Kats stack up to the regular flavored ones.
Test the Recipe: Glazed Pineapple Cookies
“Test the Recipe” is a recurring column on PCFG where we test vintage (anything published before 1990) recipes and see if they stand the test of time or need updating. In this post we test the recipe as exactly as possible for the most accurate outcomes. Those recipes that need updating will be featured later in a “We Can Do It Better” post.
I knew when I started the “Test the Recipe” column that I had to do at least one cookie recipe around Christmas-time. I didn’t want to take on any family favorite Christmas cookie recipes though, mainly because I already know that they’re good. To find a new old cookie recipe I turned to a book from Erik’s mom, McCall’s Cookie Collection from 1974.
There are a lot of interesting cookie recipes in here, but I wanted one that was definitely different from the cookies I knew me, Erik, and our moms would be making. I ultimately decided on this one because it was different from the usual Christmas cookies but also still had a bit of a Christmas call-back since it sounded like it could be a bit fruitcake-esque (without being a food no one wants to eat). So I set to work testing this glazed pineapple cookie recipe.
Quick Recipe: Sesame Chicken
Sesame chicken is a Chinese food restaurant staple. And even though each place usually makes it slightly differently, it’s almost always good and a safe bet to order if you’re unsure what to get. Well there’s good news! You can easily make sesame chicken yourself at home. It’s important to note though, that Chinese food restaurants’ sesame chicken usually has chicken that has been coated and fried. Ours does not. Honestly though, that kind of makes it even better since it makes it a bit lighter than the fried version. This sesame chicken is so good you’re going to want to eat it every day. You could also just make the sauce and use it on another meat like pork or on a ton of veggies (substituting vegetable broth if you want a vegetarian dish) if you wish. This is one of our favorite quick stir-fry recipes to make for dinner.
The Snack Report: Ritz Fudge Covered Crackers
I feel like we’ve said this before in Snack Report, but it seems like everybody has jumped onto the “limited edition” bandwagon lately. Oreos have become the worst offender, but nearly every snack food has dipped its toe into the limited edition waters. One of the latest to join in is Ritz crackers. Their limited edition offering is Fudge Covered Ritz. We first saw these in the grocery store last week, and this week they just happened to be on sale, so I decided to give them a try. I was actually kind of excited about them because I really enjoy crackers. Cheese and crackers and peanut butter and crackers are classic snacks, but I’ll also just snack on crackers plain. So the prospect of a dessert cracker was intriguing.
The chocolate plus salt combo is nothing new. It has gained in popularity over the past few years though. Chocolate covered pretzels and peanuts have been around for a long time. And chocolate covered potato chips entered the scene a bit later. There’s even chocolate covered bacon. So chocolate covered crackers really isn’t that far out of an idea. But can they stand up to their predecessors?
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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