Author Archives: Erik
Quick Recipe: Strawberry Shortcake Pancakes
These pancakes are a delicious way to add fresh strawberries into your breakfast. Shortcake is one of my favorite desserts of all time, so I made this recipe to change up the basic pancake formula to make them a bit sweeter and more buttery, since shortcake tends to have a higher fat content than other cakes. The strawberries themselves form a natural syrup with sugar added onto them, so this gets poured onto the tops, making everything delicious and berry-flavored.
We Can Do It Better: Taco Bell Quesarito Recipe
Another few months, another new Taco Bell featured item… son of a bitch. Anyone who’s read our past WCDIB posts knows I used to be a raging Taco Bell junkie, but stopped eating it years ago when I switched to a healthier diet. Whereas I’d jump in my car and race to the nearest Taco Bell upon seeing an ad for something new, now I simply bow my head and shed a single tear. Fortunately though, since starting Poor Couples Food Guide, Meg and I have started recreating popular franchise foods as a hobby of sorts. Not only does it make it easier to bear the temptation, but making your own versions at home is rewarding since you can actually improve upon the source material.
That brings me to Taco Bell’s newest item. Want to know how to make your own Quesarito at home?
Cheat Codes: How To Melt Chocolate in the Microwave
We’re all aware with the world’s fascination with chocolate. I like chocolate too. I don’t love it per se, but chocolate is good when necessary. Some recipes for frostings or sauces will call for it melted, and quite frequently they recommend using a double boiler to do so. A double boiler is essentially just a a big pot with a smaller pot inside it, with water in between the two. They do work great for melting chocolate, since throwing chocolate into a pot on the stove will generally burn it since the flame / heat striking the bottom of the pot makes it grow too hot too quickly, which can scorch your chocolate or whatever you’re warming.
But really, who even owns a double boiler, outside the hoity of toitiest? They’re handy, but not necessarily a requirement since there’s better, easier ways to heat up delicate foodstuffs like chocolate. Instead, let’s look at how simple it is to use your microwave to melt chocolate chips into a luscious chocolatey liquid. By the way, it’s incredibly easy.
Food 101: Barbecue Basics and How To Grill
It’s the first official day of Summer, and you can bet your ass there’s gonna be ton of barbecues today! The two go hand in hand, thanks to grilling being a particularly outdoorsy activity. Sure, you can barbecue food during winter, but the comic relief will be off the charts. Beside that, there’s still just something charming about seasonal cuisines, and so leaving the grilled food to summertime just seems right in a sense. Grilled foods, afterall, are one of the healthiest ways to cook. They contain less fat due to it dripping away under the high heat, and don’t need breading or extensive manipulation, meaning they’re easy to prepare gluten-free or for people with other food allergies.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Some people don’t know how to grill. What do you do if you’ve never done it before? Hell, as far as cooking methods go, grilling is potentially one of the more… not ‘dangerous’ ones per se, but rather you do need to know the proper techniques involved in grilling or you can either injure yourself or just totally ruin the food. If you’re an out and out dad and can grill in your sleep, fantastic. This post is here for everyone who’s trying it for the first time, or just wants the knowledge for future reference.
Pizza Lab #18: Tikka Pizza
Believe it or not, Meg A. and I plan our Pizza Lab choices pretty well ahead of the time, for the most part. Sometimes we throw it together last minute, but most of them come from a laundry list of ideas and experiments. This month’s Pizza Lab actually has been on the drawing board for quite sometime, originally being formulated almost a year ago! The two of us love Indian food and a trip to the local curry house wouldn’t be complete without some Chicken Tikka. Yes, I realize it’s heavily Americanized (or technically Englandized since they’ve erroneously claimed it to be “a true British national dish” years ago, despite originating in Punjab) however its flavor and background undeniably lies in Indian cuisine. As such we tossed around the idea for a pizza featuring curry spices and soon the idea for a Tikka Pizza was born.
Also, it’s just really fun to say ‘tikka pizza’.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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