Mashed Potatoes Made Simple and Easy. Or Fancy! (But still easy!)
Everyone knows I’m a pretty big opponent of pre-made foods. One of the more common ones is the longtime favorite mashed potatoes. Fluffy, savory delight made of cream and tender potatoes… yet most people make it out of a brownish dust that came out of a box, reassured mostly by the fact it features a picture of the state of Idaho on it. Our better judgment try and tell us no, for mashed potatoes are whipped, creamy goodness, and how could they come from a powder? But our laziness and gullibility force us to buy into the potato dust hype, since as we all know Idaho loves potatoes. They love potatoes.
“It makes greeeat lube.”
Instant mashed potatoes aren’t the worst thing in the world, and I will submit that they get the job done if you’re cooking en masse and don’t have the time to prepare the real deal. But unless you find yourself preparing a potato feast for 50+ people, you really don’t have much of an excuse, since homemade takes about 30 minutes, most of which time is just the potatoes boiling, and you not actually doing anything.
Pizza Lab #11: Limburger Pizza
Pizza Lab is a fun theoretical column in which Meg A. and Erik S. explore their innermost passion for baking and eating pizzas. It exists purely for the sake of experimenting in the kitchen. It may not necessarily be cost-effective everytime, so don’t try this at home kids.
So it’s November already, huh? What a shame Meg and I already created a Thanksgiving Pizza for Pizza Lab months ago. Hindsight may be 20/20, but now that I’m trying to look back, I can’t exactly remember the rationale in making a Thanksgiving-themed pizza back in the springtime… No matter. Time marches on, and so does Meg and I’s experimenting on all things food. If you recall, Meg recently gave her positive thoughts on everybody’s favorite stinky cheese, limburger. Being unabashedly weird and having a fondness for various weird things, the two of us knew we couldn’t settle with just the one review and call it a day. Instead, we surmised the possibility of a Pizza Lab involving the limburger and give it a send off worthy of our new favorite cheese.
Meg A. Once we realized there’d be leftover Limburger from our cheese adventure, we knew we had to use it on a pizza. We are us after all.
Erik S. Haha yeah, just trying limburger wasn’t enough, heh.
Meg A. Yet despite knowing for about a month we wanted to make this pizza, we kinda put the plans for it together rather slapdash. I fear we let the limburger down a bit.
Erik S. Yeah, we had a loose idea of a pizza, but it was literally the night before we made it, that we actually made a solid plan. Despite how some of our pizzas may look, we do generally put a lot of thought into them.
Meg A. Yeah, this one… we sorta dropped the ball on. We’ve been busy! Bah. Stupid lives and responsibilities we have. It should all just be baking pizza.
Erik S. Oh God I wish… It really should.
Meg A. But even with the relative lack of planning, the pizza still turned out pretty darn good! It has the potential to be my 5th favorite savory pizza we made. Pretty much the only thing keeping it from that was the unfortunate use of maple bacon.
Erik S. Yeah, once again bacon screwed us over in a Pizza Lab. We put too much faith in it for the Disco Fries pizza, and now this time it messed up our Limburger pizza.
Meg A. What makes it even worse is that in retrospect we probably didn’t even really need it. The few strips of regular we had would likely have been enough.
Erik S. Yeah… lesson learned for next time.
Snack Report: One Potato Two Potato Sweet Onion Potato Chips
If you’re anything like me, you sometimes get stuck in food routines/ruts (depending on how you look at it), where you go to the same place and get one of the same few things every time you go there. This happens to me when I’m in the city for school. So I got really excited last week when I was getting my usual sandwich before class and saw these chips. I had never seen them before. Not only did they sound delicious, but the package was adorable. So I bought them and ate them with my lunch.
Midnight Snack – Chocolate Pudding
Midnight Snack is a recurring column focusing on “food for couples” so to speak. Its discussion may hint towards the use of foods during romance and intimacy, and though it contains nothing sexually explicit, reader discretion is still advised. And by all means, DO try this at home, folks.
Of all the foods associated with romance and lovers, none can compete with the almighty chocolate. Known for its ability to release endorphins in your body and generally taste freaking awesome, there’s a pretty large consensus on the planet that chocolate is wonderful! And this is all coming from me, a self-professed not-that-big-a-fan of chocolate. I enjoy it and it’s yummy, but I’m not the kind of person who can literally eat it all day while simultaneously losing it, at the thought of doing so. My point s that even those amongst us who don’t particularly obsess over the divine fruit of the cacao plant will still admit it’s very tasty, and will enjoy some good-quality chocolate with the best of ’em. But no, you probably think you know where I’m going with this article, being a Midnight Snack post, and thus about romance and such. However an entry about covering your lover in melted chocolate is far too easy and predictable (as predictable as a food-romance-crossover column can be). Rather, the two of us wouldn’t settle for plain old chocolate, but instead for the more, in some ways infantile, in some ways lavish, chocolate pudding.
Everyone, start your best Bill Cosby impressions. We know you got ’em.
Food 101: Refrigerator Staples
Last week I gave you the rundown on pantry staples. This time I’m here to tell you about refrigerator staples. To be honest I’m not sure if that’s actually a term, or if I just made it up. But the concept still stands, so work with me here. Refrigerator staples are different from pantry staples in that in general you can’t buy them and expect them to still be good months later. They are by their nature more perishable and require more maintenance, so to speak. However there are a few things I think are important to keep on hand.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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