Thanksgiving Quick Recipe: Fried Cauliflower
One recipe my family has passed around for longer than I’ve been born is for breaded, fried cauliflower. I don’t know why. From what I’ve read, it seems to be more of a common thing in Middle Eastern cuisine. My family is mostly Italian, so I’m not quite sure where the crossover came from. Perhaps because cauliflower itself is a Mediterranean vegetable, and Italians really enjoy breading stuff then frying them. Who knows. Oh well, it’s a really delicious and simple way to prepare one of the more “out-there” veggies.
Food 101: How To Make Basic Fried Rice
Let’s talk fried rice.
If you’ve had Chinese food before, you’ve had fried rice. Hell, if you’ve eaten at any Asian restaurants you’ve probably had it. Each culture seems to have its own little version of it. And for good reason too; fried rice is one of the easiest and fastest ways to convert old rice and leftovers into a tasty, nutritious meal.
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.
Spices 101: What is Coriander? What is Cilantro?
I like to use the word coriander a lot when joking about high-class foods. Though coriander is yet another spice that sounds really complicated and fancy, but in reality isn’t as big a deal as one would think. It’s all in the name. It just sounds ritzy as hell. Four syllables, a bunch of vowels, doesn’t look like any other words… It has to be a big deal right? Weirdly enough, coriander is actually just the seeds of cilantro plants…
Coriander
Origin: Asia
Appearance: Tan, spherical seeds / coarse, beige powder
Scent: Sweet, citric
Taste: Nutty, fresh, Spice-spicy
Foods: Indian, Asian, and Middle Eastern cuisine
Rareness: Uncommon
Recipe Time: Kare-Raisu (Japanese Curry) カレーライス
I’ve gone on about curry before. But really, what’s not to like? It’s delicious, exotic, good for you, and relatively easy to make (provided you have all the ingredients). One thing that I particularly enjoy is discovering new ways to make curry dishes. Every new one I find is familiar, but has its own little twist on it. A year or so ago, I discovered the concept of Japanese curry. It’s weird to think of it, since curry itself derives from India for the most part, and is also popular in Thai cuisine as well. But Japan? No way. But that’s where “yoshoku” comes in.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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