Blog Archives
Microwave Popcorn Made Better
Confession time: I’m a procrastination eater. Because you know, you can’t do work if you’re eating. Seeing as how it’s finals time at school, I’m currently doing a lot of procrastination eating in order to put off working on papers. You have to choose wisely in your procrastination eating choices however, since you just want to put off doing work, not put on 20 pounds. One good snack (and not just for procrastinating, just in general) is popcorn. Fresh popped popcorn smells wonderful, and is tasty too. Bonus: popcorn isn’t terrible for you. Using an air popper doesn’t take that long, but it can be surprisingly hard to find a good (and not crazy expensive) popcorn popper, plus, some people just don’t really have room for one in their kitchens. But never fear! It’s easy to make popcorn in the microwave (and I’m not talking about the prepackaged bags you buy at the store).
You won’t need one of these, don’t worry.
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.
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.
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: 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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