Blog Archives
Food 101: How To Make Shish Kebab
Everyone knows my favorite season is Summer. Everything about it is awesome. The weather is great, you can enjoy being outside, plants are in bloom, fresh fruits and vegetables are growing, and the list goes on… I guess if you don’t tolerate heat well, you could go on about the weather not being great and drag in that tired, pointless argument of ‘Derp but if you’re cold you can always put on more layers, if it’s hot you can’t take more clothes off.’ Seriously that explanation makes sense in the very plainest of forms, but it makes absolutely no sense in the real world. Also, I doooo love when people in the first world with air conditioned homes and air conditioned cars and pools and refrigerators and freezers list off their white person problems and piss and moan about how it’s too hot during the Summertime. Oh I do love it!
But really, come on, how can anyone complain when it’s barbecue season? Definitely, inarguably one specific great point about Summer is grilling, which cements it in the running with Autumn when ranking seasons based on their food. We’ve already explained how to grill in another post, but now we’re gonna talk about one tried and true favorite, skewered meat, AKA shish kebab!
Smoothie Sunday: Cherry Mango Smoothie
Sometimes I give a lot of thought to my smoothie flavor combinations. Other times the ideas arise mainly from, “I need to use up this fruit before it goes bad.” This smoothie happened to come from the latter category. Luckily it happened to turn out really yummy! It became one of my new favorite smoothies. I realize cherries are kind of a pain in the ass to use in smoothies because you have to remove the pit. If you plan on using them a lot you can buy frozen pitted cherries and use those. If not you’re going to have to bite the bullet and pit fresh ones. I admit this does add a bit of prep time to this smoothie, especially since the mango isn’t super fast to dismantle either. But I think it’s worth it.
What you’ll need
Cheat Codes: Homemade Tortilla Chips
Tortilla chips are a party snack classic. They’re strong enough to hold up dips of pretty much any kind, but mild enough in flavor to let said dip shine. And yet they also have enough of their own flavor to be yummy eaten on their own. Tortilla chips bought at the store are usually pretty good (though some are better than others. Perhaps we’ll have a snack report comparison about it one of these days), but tortilla chips at Mexican restaurants are usually even better. That’s because most places make their chips fresh from scratch. And is the case with almost all food stuffs, fresher is better.
Making tortilla chips from super scratch involves making tortillas from scratch. While probably awesome, making fresh tortillas is a bit too much work for this particular application. That’s why this is a cheat code; it’s halfway between totally from scratch and straight up store bought.
Luckily, despite soft tortillas from scratch involves multiple ingredients and special equipment, making tortilla chips only requires three ingredients and standard kitchen equipment.
Smoothie Sunday: Carrot Cake Smoothie
Smoothie Sunday is back everyone! After taking the winter off from smoothies, now that the weather has finally turned warm it’s time to go back to smoothies. While starting the brainstorming process for smoothies I decided I wanted to try to work some more veggies into smoothies this year, since I didn’t use any last year except avocado (and even then I believe that’s technically a fruit). One of the first things that came to mind was a carrot cake smoothie. Carrots are a vegetable, but they’re on the sweet side, and carrot cake is definitely sweet, so it would make it seem less like drinking veggies, and more just yummy. While a lot of my smoothie recipes call for yogurt, mostly just to add substance, in this case the yogurt plays a vital flavor role. The vanilla yogurt adds a sweet tang, similar to the cream cheese frosting that normally tops carrots cakes, without as much fat and sugar and whatnot. This smoothie is like eating dessert for breakfast, but it’s good for you!
What you’ll need
Cheat Codes: How To Substitute Buttermilk Using Vinegar and Milk
Buttermilk is a weird concept. It’s milk that’s cultured with bacteria to curdle it slightly, making it kinda gross and blorpy, but actually good for you and better for certain types of cooking. It originally was made from the leftover milk when butter was churned, letting bacteria build up to acidify the milk and thus curdle it. In plainest terms, it’s really just a controlled version of spoiled milk. Obviously it’s not the same as leaving milk in the fridge for a month and having it taste like hot-ass and sponge, but both the old-fashioned butter churning way, and modern day cultured way result in milk that’s been curdle due to high amounts of bacteria in it.
Oh boy! Yum!
But actually, I should stop kidding around, buttermilk actually plays a really big role in foods like cake and waffles. It transforms pancakes from good to legendary. It’s ironically become somewhat of a luxury item today, despite the fact it’s not very dissimilar to yogurt. If you can find it at your local grocer and don’t mind shilling out the extra money for it, go for it! But if not, there’s a way to simulate it at home pretty easily.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
You must be logged in to post a comment.