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
Recipe Time! Chipotle Brownies
As some of you may know, I’m on a continuing quest to find ways to use up leftover chipotle peppers (the canned ones in adobo sauce). Even after using them in the original dish I needed them for, making chipotle butter, and chipotle ranch, I still had some left. It was time to expand my thinking. Since the combination of chocolate and spicy is a popular thing now, I turned my mind to dessert. Now, I may have mentioned before (though I’m too lazy to actually go back and check) that I’m not the biggest fan of brownies. I know, I know…I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But in this case brownies seemed like the perfect subject to turn to for my chipotle experiments. Actually considering I’m kind of a weenie when it comes to spicy it’s somewhat surprising that I’m the one who came up with these brownies. And that I actually like them! But the chipotle adds a nice subtle, smoky kick without setting your mouth on fire. So I guess the point you should take away from this is that if someone who isn’t a huge fan of brownies or spicy likes these brownies they must be really good. 
Read the rest of this entry
The Snack Report: S’Mores Oreos
It seems like more and more food companies are joining in on the ‘limited special edition’ bus lately. What once used to be this short exclusive list which included breakfast cereals, ice cream, and a couple restaurant chains, has expanded now to huge proportions. Taco Bell went from a couple recurring menu rotations per year to miraculously managing to pump out limited time menu items on what seems like a bi-monthly basis now, simply by stacking cheese, meat, and tortillas in different orders. Lay’s has been doing the “Do Us A Flavor” with whacky chip varieties every Summer for a few years now. And especially Nabisco, namely with Oreos, has been finding various new ways to inject the longtime standard cookies into your veins under the guise of new ridiculous flavors. We’ve covered quite a few of these on PCFG for better or worse (was red velvet cake really frigging necessary guys?), and lo and behold a new variety has popped up for Summer 2015.
Pizza Lab #30 : Breakfast Pizza
I’m sure I’m not the only one who still remembers the jingle that Bagel Bites used to use in their commercials: “Pizza in the morning, pizza in the evening, pizza at supper time. When pizza’s on a bagel you can have pizza any time.” But I think we can all agree that pizza doesn’t have to be on a bagel to be eaten any time of day. I fully own up to having eaten cold pizza for breakfast on occasion, and I know there’s others out there like me. I suppose that means that any pizza could be a breakfast pizza if you eat it for breakfast. But! This month’s pizza lab is not just a pizza that you happened to eat for breakfast. It is a breakfast pizza.
We’ve seen breakfast pizzas other places before but they’re not really breakfast food pizzas. They’re more like brunch pizzas at best. Most are more like flatbreads with some greens and cheese and maybe eggs on them. We wanted to make a breakfast pizza that was actually inspired by breakfast foods. Not stuff people pretend to like to eat for breakfast (spinach? No thank you…) but stuff people actually eat for breakfast (helloooo bacon).
Tea Time: Garlic Green Tea
One handy feature on the behind the scenes aspect of this blog is that we can see what kind of search terms people used to find our blog. Sometimes though, people find our blog through search terms for something that we don’t actually have directly on our site. It always makes me a little sad when this happens, thinking about someone coming here and then leaving disappointed. So whenever possible I want to try and remedy that. One search that’s come up a few times is “garlic green tea” or some variation on that. And while we have our regular garlic tea (and also garlic lemonade) recipe, I want to give the people what they’re looking for! So I came up with a garlic green tea recipe as well.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
You must be logged in to post a comment.