Blog Archives
Quick Recipe: Fish-less Ponzu Sauce
Ponzu sauce is a simple dipping sauce served alongside various types of meats in Asian cuisine. It has a lemony base to it, being a bit more tart than other comparable sauces. On a more topical note, it’s great for dipping tempura into! The only problem? Most recipes for it call for dashi flakes, also known as fish flakes or fish powder. Gross. So in my infinite pickiness I decided to design an alternate version of the sauce that doesn’t use that nonsense. I present to you this ponzu sauce recipe without fish in it. I found that onions add a slight pungency that the fish flakes or fish stock would add to it in actual ponzu sauce. The resulting sauce tastes just as good, and pretty similar to more authentic versions with fish in them. It’s tart and dry, and goes great alongside grilled meats, vegetables, tempura, and other Asian treats.
Food 101: How To Make Tempura
So we recently covered frying chicken cutlets, and how it’s pretty much the best thing ever. Today we bring you more coverage of fried chicken in the form of tempura, and how to make it. However, this isn’t the traditional fried cutlet I wrote about in my last post; rather this is a bit more exotic, though still delicious in its own right. Chicken tempura is actually closer to a chicken finger than a chicken cutlet. But hey, they’re all great, so who cares? Tempura is delicious, cheap, and the batter is the easiest recipe on Earth to remember. It has three ingredients. I shit you not, three. Since when does anything delicious have only three ingredients?!
Quick Recipe: Easy Chicken Tikka
Chicken Tikka kicks ass. It’s the chicken fingers of Indian food. You can find it everywhere, it tastes amazing, and everybody loves it. Originally stemming from Indian Punjabi cuisine, the U.K. miraculously likes to take credit for it somehow, since one account states a Pakistani man created it in a restaurant in Glasgow. Despite that, it’s undoubtedly rooted in Indian heritage using curry spices and being cooked in manners consistent with Eastern food. If you want to get technical, Chicken Tikka is plain old boneless chicken pieces marinated in a spiced yogurt. Chicken Tikka Masala is that same thing, only served in a curry sauce, aka a masala. Though it seems fairly intimidating to cook at first, the effort is sooooo worth it in the end since it tastes amazing and looks super fancy. Serve it with some rice or homemade pilaf!
Quick Recipe: Easy Rice Pilaf
Rice pilaf is a pretty wide open dish with lots of variations, so pinpointing it as one recipe can be tricky. Personally I like to keep it simple and forgo the numerous vegetables, meats, nuts, and other foodstuffs that more complex recipes usually call for. This recipe produces a light but tasty rice dish that’s great alongside meats and veggies, but tastes so good, you can just eat it on its own and still enjoy it. Personally, I always make it alongside Chicken Tikka and other chicken dishes with lots of spices involved.
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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