Smoothie Sunday: Apple Horchata Smoothie
This smoothie has a bit of a back-story. Erik and I first encountered horchata at our favorite Mexican restaurant. They have it up at the counter and we kept seeing it, saying it looked interesting, looking up what it actually was, and then somehow instantly forgetting so almost every time we went we’d look up what horchata is. Horchata (and yes, I had to look it up again just be sure I got it right) is a type of beverage that is made of ground almonds, sesame seeds, rice, barely, and/or tigernuts. The Mexican version of horchata is usually made with rice and also contains cinnamon. Finally we actually ordered it. And it was super yummy! We drank it all up and that was it. I didn’t really give it much more thought. Then a few weeks later we were at a local deli and lo and behold, they had dry horchata mix*. “Dude, I should get this and use it in a smoothie. It’ll be awesome,” I said, and Erik agreed. And thus the beginning of the apple horchata smoothie was born.
Unfortunately I still had to figure out a fruit to include, since without a fruit it wasn’t going to be a smoothie…just a really big glass of horchata. I tossed around a few ideas. Erik suggested apple would go best, and even though I was a bit skeptical of putting an apple in my blender, I ultimately decided to give it a try.
What you’ll need
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!
Pizza Lab #31: Tres Leches Pizza
We’ve come up with some crazy crossovers for our pizzas before. This pizza maybe one of the strangest. But strange doesn’t mean bad! The inspiration for this pizza was tres leches cake. “Tres leches” means “three milks” in Spanish, so as you can imagine, three milks are involved in the making of the cake. Traditional tres leches cake is composed of a sponge cake soaked in a combination of evaporated milk, condensed milk, and heavy cream after baking. Yet despite this, when done correctly the cake is still light and airy, not soggy. I’m not entirely sure of the origins of the cake, but I imagine someone dipping cookies into milk was involved somewhere, since it’s a similar concept.
How we came up with the idea for this pizza I’m not entirely sure; this was mostly Erik’s idea. But we both brainstormed out the details and execution. Obviously we couldn’t just have a mostly naked pizza that’d been soaked in milk. A pizza needs toppings. The original plan was to top it with dulce de leche. Dulce de leche is a caramel like sauce made from condensed milk. This plan eventually changed though, because despite the fact that pre-made, canned dulce de leche is a thing that exists, we could not find any in stores near us. And making it from scratch takes at least 2 hours, and quite frankly, we just didn’t have the time to babysit cans of milk for that long. So we ultimately ended up on plan B, which was to use our go-to caramel sauce recipe, which takes about 5 minutes to make. I’m getting a bit ahead of myself though…
Smoothie Sunday: Cherry Mango Smoothie
Sometimes I give a lot of thought to my smoothie flavor combinations. Other times the ideas arise mainly from, “I need to use up this fruit before it goes bad.” This smoothie happened to come from the latter category. Luckily it happened to turn out really yummy! It became one of my new favorite smoothies. I realize cherries are kind of a pain in the ass to use in smoothies because you have to remove the pit. If you plan on using them a lot you can buy frozen pitted cherries and use those. If not you’re going to have to bite the bullet and pit fresh ones. I admit this does add a bit of prep time to this smoothie, especially since the mango isn’t super fast to dismantle either. But I think it’s worth it.
What you’ll need
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:
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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