Author Archives: Erik
Food 101: How To Make Shish Kebab
Everyone knows my favorite season is Summer. Everything about it is awesome. The weather is great, you can enjoy being outside, plants are in bloom, fresh fruits and vegetables are growing, and the list goes on… I guess if you don’t tolerate heat well, you could go on about the weather not being great and drag in that tired, pointless argument of ‘Derp but if you’re cold you can always put on more layers, if it’s hot you can’t take more clothes off.’ Seriously that explanation makes sense in the very plainest of forms, but it makes absolutely no sense in the real world. Also, I doooo love when people in the first world with air conditioned homes and air conditioned cars and pools and refrigerators and freezers list off their white person problems and piss and moan about how it’s too hot during the Summertime. Oh I do love it!
But really, come on, how can anyone complain when it’s barbecue season? Definitely, inarguably one specific great point about Summer is grilling, which cements it in the running with Autumn when ranking seasons based on their food. We’ve already explained how to grill in another post, but now we’re gonna talk about one tried and true favorite, skewered meat, AKA shish kebab!
The Cereal Report: Cap’n Crunch’s Sprinkled Donut Crunch
The Cereal Report is a column in which PCFG conducts various cereal reviews, of new or limited products, as well as providing brief backgrounds on the cereal. Cereal is delicious and fairly cheap as far as meals go. Everyone should eat cereal!
About a decade ago General Mills put out perhaps one of the most random cereals of all time, Cap’n Crunch Choco Donuts. It was comprised of a bunch of small, doughnut-shaped chocolate cereal pieces meant to resemble, um, donuts. It was aired as part of their “Oops” line, with the cereal mythos being that once in a while the Cap’n Crunch factory just screws up and puts out a brand new cereal by accident, such as the “Oops All Berries” cereal. At least the idea that they accidentally made a cereal all crunch berries made sense since they already existed, but the idea that their factory somehow randomly started making chocolate donuts instead of sweet cornmeal pillow things and fruity puffs was a little far-fetched even for dumb kid cereal marketing. Either way, from what I remember the cereal was kinda generic, not awful but not great. It was standard chocolate cereal.
However, apparently they decided to give it a sequel cereal ten years later, in an almost equally random fashion:
Cheat Codes: How To Substitute Buttermilk Using Vinegar and Milk
Buttermilk is a weird concept. It’s milk that’s cultured with bacteria to curdle it slightly, making it kinda gross and blorpy, but actually good for you and better for certain types of cooking. It originally was made from the leftover milk when butter was churned, letting bacteria build up to acidify the milk and thus curdle it. In plainest terms, it’s really just a controlled version of spoiled milk. Obviously it’s not the same as leaving milk in the fridge for a month and having it taste like hot-ass and sponge, but both the old-fashioned butter churning way, and modern day cultured way result in milk that’s been curdle due to high amounts of bacteria in it.
Oh boy! Yum!
But actually, I should stop kidding around, buttermilk actually plays a really big role in foods like cake and waffles. It transforms pancakes from good to legendary. It’s ironically become somewhat of a luxury item today, despite the fact it’s not very dissimilar to yogurt. If you can find it at your local grocer and don’t mind shilling out the extra money for it, go for it! But if not, there’s a way to simulate it at home pretty easily.
Spices 101: What is curry powder? Garam masala? Curry leaf?
Over the past couple of years I’ve really become a hardcore fan of curries. The flavors that come out from combining the amazing blends of spices they employ are out of this world. Best of all, they’re easy. Throw a bunch of shit into a pan and 40 minutes later, there’s a complete meal which smells like upper class India. Unfortunately there’s this odd misconception people seem to have about curry in general. For most of my adult life, my mother has expressed her distaste of Indian food because she “can’t stand all the curry they use in their food!” She’s somewhat come around from that perspective from eating my cooking, but alas there are still a lot of people out there who believe ‘curry’ is some sort of single mystical spice from a far-off land. If you’re not aware, curry seasonings actually encompass a great deal of different spices such as cumin, chili powder, turmeric, etc… But there isn’t actually one single spice called “curry”.
Son of a bitch!
Cheat Codes: How To Dry Your Own Herbs
Some people say variety is the spice of life. So I guess that makes spices the spice of food? However you wanna look at it, there’s no denying the important of herbs and spices in cooking. Without them, your flavor options would be pretty limited to really bland combinations of salt, cream, and plain vegetables/fruits. Virtually every recipe calls for herbs thrown in for that extra flavor mile. The only problem with these culinary truths is that buying herbs isn’t always cheap or convenient. We’ve already discussed growing your own herbs at home a long time ago on PCFG, but what if you want to hang onto those herbs all year round? Potted herbs are great, but sometimes it’s a pain to bring them inside over the Winter, and beyond that sometimes you just need to heartbreakingly say goodbye when a good herb plant simply dies in the cold. Big name spice companies dry their herbs and bottle them for sale, obviously. They probably use some sort of space-age water neutralization mega oven science shit. No one could do that at home, right? Believe it or not, actually yeah you can. And it’s pretty easy. Probably 90% of the process involves literally doing nothing, so it’s totally possible to dry herbs at home even if you’re super lazy. Read the rest of this entry
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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