Author Archives: Meg

Food 101: How to Make a Pizza

As you may have guessed by now if you’ve spent any time on the blog at all, we’re big fans of pizza.  Pizza is one of the most perfect foods around.  It’s delicious, it’s portable, and it’s relatively cheap both to buy and make.  Specialty slices are great, but nothing beats a really good regular cheese slice.  The sauce, the cheese, the crust…they all just go perfectly together.  In my opinion pizza is comfort food at its finest.  There’s no problem pizza can’t solve.

It can even double as a Frisbee!

It can even double as a Frisbee!

Now we make a lot of specialty pizzas (at least one per month),and we’re all for people experimenting with their own fun pizzas, but with all things you should master the basics before moving on to the advanced.  So this post will go over the basic pizza making techniques for those who may be less familiar with pizza making than we are (and there’s nothing wrong with that!).

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Cheat Codes: How to Make Homemade Chipotle Ranch

Chipotle ranch is a great condiment.  It’s delicious as spread on sandwiches, in burritos, and even as a dipping sauce (especially for onion rings).  Yet despite its rising popularity over the past few years, it can sometimes be annoyingly difficult to find chipotle ranch in stores.  And then even when you find it, it can sometimes be stupidly expensive.  So what are those of us on a budget supposed to do when we crave that smoky, tangy goodness?  Make our own of course!

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Mix these together…

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…and you get magic.

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Quick Recipe: Chipotle Butter

Every time I make a recipe that calls for chipotle peppers in adobo sauce I always have a bunch leftover, since I usually only use one or two at a time.  This time instead of just immediately handing the rest to Erik to use in some flames-shooting-out-of-your-mouth dish for him to make for himself I decided to be thrifty and figure out some other things I could use them in.

One of the things I came up with was a chipotle compound butter.  This butter will be good on anything you’d use regular butter on that you want to give a bit of kick to.

Chipotle butter is really good on a bagel.

Chipotle butter is really good on a bagel.

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Food 101: Compound Butter

Compound butter may sound kind of weird and scary.  It sounds like some kind of chemically scientific thing that’s probably really fake and bad for you.  But really it’s just butter that has stuff added into it to give additional flavor.  You could just as easily call it “flavored butter” but for some reason compound butter was the name it was given, so that’s what we call it.

You may have seen the Land O’ Lakes Sauté Express butters in the grocery store.  These are essentially compound butters.  They’re also pretty pricey, and you know how we feel about things that are too pricey here at Poor Couple’s Food Guide.  Luckily making your own compound butter at home is ridiculously easy.  It’s cheaper, and you can make any flavor you want.

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Quick Recipe: Tzatziki Sauce

If you’ve had a gyro, you know the magical sauce known as tzatziki.  This yogurt based sauce is common in Greek cuisine, often being served with grilled meats.  It can also be used as a dip.  Tzatziki sauce is one of my favorite condiments, and not just because it was a topic of conversation during me and Erik’s second date.  I just find it super yummy.  Luckily it is super easy to make at home.  This is good news, since, while delicious, Greek food does tend to be on the more expensive side.

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It may not photograph well, but it certainly tastes good.

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