Blog Archives
Food 101: How To Make Bibimbap, Donburi, Rice Bowls, Etc…
One of my big things I like to preach to people unexperienced in the cooking world is the importance of leftovers. Leftovers are the best utility at your disposal when it comes to making lunch, and can really help out at dinner too. I bring this up because of the versatility of everyone’s favorite starch: rice. Leftover rice is a brilliant tool that can form the basis for an entire lunch pretty easily. The easiest way to do this is through what’s known as a “rice bowl”. They’re delicious, easy, healthy, and can be made with pretty much anything lying around.
Quick Recipe: Chicken Fingers Burrito
So now that you know how to make your own homemade chicken fingers, you’re gonna be making a shit ton of them at home. But oh no, you suddenly find yourself with this tremendous influx of heavenly ambrosia and can’t eat it all. What do? WHAT DO?
Obviously, you make a burrito.
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.
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
Food 101: Compound Butter
Compound butter may sound kind of weird and scary. It sounds like some kind of chemically scientific thing that’s probably really fake and bad for you. But really it’s just butter that has stuff added into it to give additional flavor. You could just as easily call it “flavored butter” but for some reason compound butter was the name it was given, so that’s what we call it.
You may have seen the Land O’ Lakes Sauté Express butters in the grocery store. These are essentially compound butters. They’re also pretty pricey, and you know how we feel about things that are too pricey here at Poor Couple’s Food Guide. Luckily making your own compound butter at home is ridiculously easy. It’s cheaper, and you can make any flavor you want.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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