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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.
Cheat Codes: Homemade Pumpkin Spice Latte
As mentioned in my last post about pumpkin pie spice, every October September August, millions of yuppies and idiots run to Starbucks forking over shit-tons of money for their limited time pumpkin spice lattes. It’s a tasty treat that you can only get for a few months at a time each year, and is pretty fun as far as coffee is concerned. And again, there seems to be a tremendous amount of novelty in the idea of pumpkin pie lattes, since they do taste so reminiscent of their namesake, that you might fool yourself into thinking the flavoring is some sort of complex concoction involving impossible spices mined from the furthest reaches of outer space and dehydrated pumpkin flakes created using factory-grade machinery. But like I said in our article about making your own pumpkin spice, it’s really just a handful of spices you probably already have on hand. There’s no pumpkin involved, unless you want to get really fancy.
Though hopefully not THIS fancy.
Cheat Codes: Homemade Pumpkin Pie Spice
Everybody loves Fall. It’s got everything good about life all rolled into one season. Nice weather, cool scenery, fun holidays, and awesome food. That last part obviously being relevant to anyone possessing a sense of taste/smell. There’s a lot of fun flavors and culinary themes going on from September to November you don’t encounter for the rest of the year. Out of nowhere, it’s the 20th, and suddenly everything smells like cinnamon, and tastes like a pumpkin. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist, I don’t question it, it just happens.
“After countless hours of work we’ve finally concluded that this cinnamon smells EXACTLY like cinnamon.”
Making Your Own McMuffin
They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. The problem of course is that it comes in the morning, and no one likes mornings. The fact that brunch and brinner (breakfast for dinner) are things is proof that people love breakfast foods, just not in the morning.
Generally in the mornings you tend to sleep as late as possible, then run out the door, neglecting breakfast and just grabbing something on the road on the way to your destination. Unfortunately, a lot of times “grabbing something on the road” means stopping at a place like McDonalds and getting something like an Egg McMuffin. Which is fine if you enjoy getting 87% of your daily cholesterol intake and 33% of your sodium intake down in your first meal of the day (you can see for yourself if you don’t believe me). Also, your eggs will look like a hockey puck.
I can practically feel the spongy texture of the eggs from here.
But what if I told you, you could make your own version of an Egg McMuffin (I call mine an Egg MegMuffin, but I realize that won’t work for people not named Meg) at home in under 10 minutes? Surely you have 10 minutes to spare right? It’ll be worth it, I promise.
Cheat Codes: Cinnamon Sugar
Some things are so easy to make yourself that I’m always shocked that people would pay money to have other people make it for them. One such item is cinnamon sugar. For as long as I can remember we’ve had a container of cinnamon sugar in my house that my mom would mix together herself.
This would be the container I’m talking about.
I was absolutely confounded when I saw small bottles of pre-made cinnamon sugar for sale in the grocery store. Cinnamon and sugar are both cooking staples you should already keep on hand, so why buy more of something you already have, and pay more for someone else to mix it up for you?
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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