Author Archives: Erik
Food 101: How To Make Tempura
So we recently covered frying chicken cutlets, and how it’s pretty much the best thing ever. Today we bring you more coverage of fried chicken in the form of tempura, and how to make it. However, this isn’t the traditional fried cutlet I wrote about in my last post; rather this is a bit more exotic, though still delicious in its own right. Chicken tempura is actually closer to a chicken finger than a chicken cutlet. But hey, they’re all great, so who cares? Tempura is delicious, cheap, and the batter is the easiest recipe on Earth to remember. It has three ingredients. I shit you not, three. Since when does anything delicious have only three ingredients?!
Quick Recipe: Bruschetta Tomato Salad
Coming from a family of Italian-American stereotypes, one of my all time summer favorites is the classic antipasto, bruschetta, a bunch of little toasted bread pieces with tomatoes and basil on top. Bruschetta salad is interesting because of the misconceptions about it. First off, despite what you think you know about speaking other languages bruschetta is in fact pronounced “broo-sketta” with a hard C sound. Not a shh. Also it doesn’t start with a P or end with an A, and it doesn’t make you more Italian or cool to say “HEY HAVE SOME PROO-SHETT”.
The second big misconception about it is that bruschetta, semantically, technically, refers to the little toast pieces that we serve with the tomato salad. That mixture of tomatoes on it is not the bruschetta, a mistake I even made until fairly recently. If you wanna be truly faithful, the stuff on top is just “tomato salad” but that’s kinda ambiguous, so I like to refer to it alongside its namesake sidekick.
Nevertheless, bruschetta tomato salad is exceptionally tasty and yummy, specifically when using some fresh-ass tomatoes straight from the garden or farmstand, to the point I don’t even bother making it unless it’s summer. I am admittedly a bit of a food snob, so don’t let that keep you from eating it whenever you want. It’s perfect on top of the mini-toasts, but I personally love serving it on top of chicken cutlets, like so:
Food 101: How To Make Chicken Cutlets
Possibly one of the greatest, most useful foundation blocks of a balanced diet is the mighty chicken cutlet. Hailing from almost all corners of the world, almost every cuisine on the planet features some variation of a breaded cutlet made from chicken, pork, or veal. In America we’ve come to embrace chicken as the one true cutlet in modern times, since chicken is objectively better than other meats in every way, shape, and form. Plus, not only are they fairly easy to make and pretty good for you health-wise if fried in olive oil, but they’re also amazingly versatile and can be used to make a like eight billion different dishes. Seriously, the sky is the limit if you have a steady supply of chicken and breadcrumbs. Everyone on the planet should know how to whip together a quick batch of chicken cutlets, as if it were a rite of passage (and in some Italian households it is, haha). If you were never scolded or shamed into learning how this late in the game, then you’ll be happy to know it’s something that nearly anyone can make.
Quick Recipe: 2-Minute Microwave Blondie
So we’ve covered microwave cakes before, but what if you want a vanilla one? This recipe is the same exact concept, a quick and yummy cake cooked in a mug in the microwave, only this time it’s for everyone’s favorite flipflop of fudge brownies. Bear in mind, the “Two minute” part is how long it takes to cook. But mixing the ingredients together shouldn’t take much longer than a few minutes either, so you should have it ready in about five minutes tops. Don’t be leery if it seems undercooked, there’s no egg in here so you can technically eat the batter carefree! The resulting cake actually tastes pretty close to a giant chocolate chip cookie. If it seems raw, feel free to microwave it an additional 10 seconds or so.
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Pizza Lab #20: Raspberry Tart Pizza
One of my favorite pastimes of the Summer is eating fruit straight off the bushes at my parents’ house. I could make a quick breakfast or even lunch just out of foraging around the yard. And no, they don’t live in some remote backwoods town deep within the Ozarks, they live right here in Patchogue on Long Island. The suburbs. 10 minutes away from a frigging Wal-mart. But! There’s everything ranging from blueberries to raspberries to apples to pears growing there; their property is a lesson on the virtues of planting edible landscaping when you finally own a home. Of course that’s an article for a different time, but for now we’ll dive into this edition of Pizza Lab, which was fashioned from the fresh, organic, homegrown raspberries I bring up.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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