Author Archives: Meg
Thanksgiving Leftover Recipe: Cranberry Pancakes
It’s the day after Thanksgiving. You open your fridge and remember that it’s stuffed to the gills with leftovers. What do you do with it all? There are only so many sandwiches, burritos, and pizzas you can make. Never fear, we’re here to find even more ways for you to use up your Thanksgiving leftovers! This recipe features cranberry sauce. And by cranberry sauce I mean cranberry sauce that has whole cranberries in it. Not the pure jellied stuff. I’m not dissing the canned, jelly cranberry sauce, I have a soft spot for it in my heart, but it won’t work for this recipe. You could also just toss in some smashed up cranberries if you want, but you’ll need to add extra sugar.
Test the Recipe: Hearty Whole Grain Coffee Cake
It can be a lot of fun looking through old cook books. Some recipes you look at wondering what people were thinking back then while others still sound really yummy. Though it’s usually pretty easy to tell the horrific vintage recipes at first glance, sometimes it can be harder to tell for sure which recipes have actually stood up to the test of time. That’s where our new recurring “Test the Recipe” posts will hopefully come to help. We plan to find recipes from vintage cookbooks/recipe cards/magazine cutouts, etc. and test them out. For the first run through we will follow the recipe exactly (barring any possible ingredients that are very hard to find/might not exist anymore in which case we will make the closest possible substitution) and see how it turns out. If it turns out good, then that’s it! Recipe is good to go and you can rest assured that you will end up with something yummy if you make it. If it doesn’t turn out good? Well then we’ll be revisiting the recipe and tweaking it and then posting our version of it as a “We Can Do It Better” post at a later date.
Our first recipe up for trial is from the Quaker Oats Wholegrain Cookbook from 1979.
There’s a bunch of interesting sounding recipes in there, so we’ll probably test some more from there, but first up is the “Hearty Whole Grain Coffee Cake.” I enjoy coffee cake but hadn’t had any for awhile, so it seemed like a good place to start.
The Snack Report: Simply Nature Pumpkin Seed Tortilla Chips
We’re in the heart of fall, which means everything we review must be pumpkin. I kid, of course. Not everything has to be pumpkin. It just so happens that a lot of the stuff we’ve been reviewing lately is pumpkin. But that’s because most of the limited edition snacks and beverages out now are pumpkin or pumpkin spice flavored. Today’s pumpkin offering is, I think anyway, one of the more unique pumpkin items available this year: pumpkin seed tortilla chips. We found them when we were wandering around Aldi looking for appropriate snacks for our fall party. Unfortunately Simply Nature is an Aldi exclusive brand, so if there isn’t an Aldi store near you you’re going to have to sit this one out. Or have a friend or family member who does have a local Aldi go and buy it for you. Without giving away too much of the review before the “read more” cut, I will say that they’re worth the effort.
Quick Recipe: Apple-Stuffed Baked Apples
A couple of weeks ago we were trying to think of desserts to serve at our fall party that were simple, but yummy. We’d served our Apple Crisp Pizza last year and felt like we should mix it up a bit. Baked apples seemed like a good choice. But we didn’t want to just fill them up with brown sugar and call it a day. So what better way to get the most apple-y apple dessert? Put apples inside the apples of course! Add some pumpkin spice, and bam! Super fall dessert. This recipe is super yummy, and really easy. It’ll impress your friends without stressing you out. And it’s great to serve at fall parties, though you could totally just make some for yourself if you want (which you probably will).
Food 101: Simple Syrup
You may not need to use simple syrup super often, but it’s handy to have in your cooking arsenal. While the “simple” in simple syrup presumably refers to the fact that it’s pretty much the most basic syrup you can make, it is also incredibly simple to make. As I commented to Erik after making it for the pictures, this was probably the fastest thing I’ve ever made for a post.
Simple syrup is useful to keep on hand if you have cold beverages to sweeten. Because the sugar is already dissolved you don’t have to worry about it not doing so in your drink. Pretty much anything you want to sweeten that’s too cold for sugar to dissolve in is where simple syrup shines. Lemonade, iced tea, flavor infused water – all of these can get a kick of sweet from simply syrup. It’s also used a lot in the making of cocktails.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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