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
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
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.
Recipe Time! Chipotle Brownies
As some of you may know, I’m on a continuing quest to find ways to use up leftover chipotle peppers (the canned ones in adobo sauce). Even after using them in the original dish I needed them for, making chipotle butter, and chipotle ranch, I still had some left. It was time to expand my thinking. Since the combination of chocolate and spicy is a popular thing now, I turned my mind to dessert. Now, I may have mentioned before (though I’m too lazy to actually go back and check) that I’m not the biggest fan of brownies. I know, I know…I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But in this case brownies seemed like the perfect subject to turn to for my chipotle experiments. Actually considering I’m kind of a weenie when it comes to spicy it’s somewhat surprising that I’m the one who came up with these brownies. And that I actually like them! But the chipotle adds a nice subtle, smoky kick without setting your mouth on fire. So I guess the point you should take away from this is that if someone who isn’t a huge fan of brownies or spicy likes these brownies they must be really good. 
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The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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