Blog Archives
Food 101: How to Sauté/Pan-Fry Chicken (And deglazing too!)
Probably one of the biggest things standing in the way of people from learning to cook properly is how intimidating it seems. The culinary world borrows words from dozens of different languages and has its own set of lingo that makes no sense outside of context. As mentioned last time, dredging is usually the industrial process of collecting mud, waste, and trash from the beds of harbors, but in cooking terms it simply means coating meat in flour. It’s easy to see how one could be easily confused and overwhelmed when the neat, new recipe they’ve found calls for them to acquire fancy-ass sounding ingredients like anise extract or turmeric or herbes de provence. It’s enough to make someone immediately yell “What the hell?” and quit while they’re ahead.
“Say ‘coriander’ one more time! I triple dog dare you!”
The same goes with directions too. How do you fold a liquid batter? It’s not paper. And furthermore, “browning” your meat doesn’t mean you want it literally the color brown. Actually, one of my favorite methods of cooking is one of those fancy shmancy terms, sautéing. It sounds SO ritzy, yet it’s probably one of the simplest cooking processes out there, and is a key stepping stone to learning to cook.
Cheese Review: Goat’s Milk Ricotta
Last week I told of our adventures in Limburger cheese – a cheese that we ordered special from the internet. This cheese was a much more spur of the moment purchase. A few weekends ago on our way to the Garlic Festival we visited a local dairy farm. I mostly just wanted to hang out with the goats, but we also wanted to buy some super fresh cheese.
The cheese is that way guys!
It was really nice there because they had a large selection of fresh cheeses made from cow, sheep, and goat milk. They also had fresh milk, butter, and eggs. We spent a really long time in front of the refrigerator case trying to decide which cheese to try. We probably would have bought more if we’d remembered to bring an insulated bag. But we didn’t want to risk buying a lot of cheese and having it all go bad sitting in the car all day. Anyway, after a lot of debate we finally decided to buy the goat’s milk ricotta.
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: Homemade Pumpkin Pie Spice
Everybody loves Fall. It’s got everything good about life all rolled into one season. Nice weather, cool scenery, fun holidays, and awesome food. That last part obviously being relevant to anyone possessing a sense of taste/smell. There’s a lot of fun flavors and culinary themes going on from September to November you don’t encounter for the rest of the year. Out of nowhere, it’s the 20th, and suddenly everything smells like cinnamon, and tastes like a pumpkin. I don’t know, I’m not a scientist, I don’t question it, it just happens.
“After countless hours of work we’ve finally concluded that this cinnamon smells EXACTLY like cinnamon.”
Making Your Own McMuffin
They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. The problem of course is that it comes in the morning, and no one likes mornings. The fact that brunch and brinner (breakfast for dinner) are things is proof that people love breakfast foods, just not in the morning.
Generally in the mornings you tend to sleep as late as possible, then run out the door, neglecting breakfast and just grabbing something on the road on the way to your destination. Unfortunately, a lot of times “grabbing something on the road” means stopping at a place like McDonalds and getting something like an Egg McMuffin. Which is fine if you enjoy getting 87% of your daily cholesterol intake and 33% of your sodium intake down in your first meal of the day (you can see for yourself if you don’t believe me). Also, your eggs will look like a hockey puck.
I can practically feel the spongy texture of the eggs from here.
But what if I told you, you could make your own version of an Egg McMuffin (I call mine an Egg MegMuffin, but I realize that won’t work for people not named Meg) at home in under 10 minutes? Surely you have 10 minutes to spare right? It’ll be worth it, I promise.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
You must be logged in to post a comment.