Blog Archives
Food 101: How to Make Basic Frosting
I am very particular about frosting. I find a lot of frostings to be too sweet and often times are piled on too thick on cakes. Then there’s also the frostings (generally I’ve encountered them on store bought cakes) that don’t have much flavor at all but are weirdly artificial and greasy in texture. No thank you. This means that I pretty much have to make my own frosting if I want it to be to my tastes. Fortunately basic frosting is really easy to make at home. We’ve covered basic icing on the blog before, but while some people using “icing” and “frosting” interchangeably to me they are different things. Icing is more thin and glaze-like, whereas frosting is more thick and fluffy. This is primarily due to the addition of fat in the form of butter. Icing is mostly just sugar and milk, while frosting has sugar, milk, and butter.
This is a good place to mention why making your own frosting is better than using the kind that comes out of a can. While flavor-wise store-bought can frosting isn’t terrible, its ingredients aren’t really great. In order to be shelf-stable it tends to be full of things like hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, preservatives, and artificial flavors and colors. Even if you’re someone who is anti-butter I would think one ingredient you don’t like is better than a whole list of potentially sketchy ingredients.
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
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.
Food 101: How To Make Tomato Sauce (or “Red Sauce” if you will…)
Tomato sauce, it’s everywhere. For Italians, it’s on and in everything, to the point that there probably isn’t a single human being in Italy over the age of 7 who doesn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge on how to prepare a pot of sauce. The majority of my family’s heritage is Italian. I grew up in a household where it got tossed on everything from pork to pasta to pizza. Every Sunday was time for everyone to head on over to my aunt’s house for a big-ass Italian dinner with pasta and antipasti and bread and etc… You get the picture. And yet, I have a confession to make, I actually don’t really like tomato sauce all that much.
DUN-DUN!!
Yes I know, I know, blasphemy. But in all honesty I felt like the fact tomato sauce had to be thrown onto every edible item on planet Earth kind of made me sick of it by the time I hit my teen years. Now, I don’t necessarily hate it, but it just feels overused and homogenous to me. That may not be a popular opinion, but I feel like many in Italian-American families simply don’t have the guts to actually come forth and say that, for fear of ridicule and mafioso style ” ‘ey, come on.” half-slaps on the cheek.
That all being said, I ironically am a staunch opponent of jar sauces, both because I’m pro-from-scratch on the food front and also because despite my relative lack of enthusiasm for it, I know what a good tomato sauce tastes like. And jar sauce tastes like shit, frankly. Rather, I will admit objectively that having a good tomato sauce technique in the back of your head is a vital skill for most cooks, if for at very least making pizzas.
Because, well, pizza.
Cheat Codes: Tips For Reheating Rice
Rice is a big staple in many cultures’ diets. Pretty much everyone outside of Europe has been dumping rice on the sides of their plates since basically forever. And in modern day, everyone eats rice. That’s right, everyone. Even gluten-free people. With good reason too! Rice is a really effective side-dish, is easy to prepare, and unless you’ve got blood-sugar disorders it’s pretty innocuous in your diet. Interesting fact I learned a couple years ago, all you Italians out there, know how your mother/grandmother would whip up a pot of sauce on Sunday, then you’d just use that sauce all week for different dishes? Many Asian families have done the same thing in a similar manner using a pot of rice. Call me a traitor, but I forgo the pot of sauce, and instead use the weekly rice batch for my own meals ranging from burritos to curries. Rice is great and versatile, but actually come to think of it, there’s a lot of people who aren’t really sure how to heat it up correctly.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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