Blog Archives
Quick Recipe: Fish-less Ponzu Sauce
Ponzu sauce is a simple dipping sauce served alongside various types of meats in Asian cuisine. It has a lemony base to it, being a bit more tart than other comparable sauces. On a more topical note, it’s great for dipping tempura into! The only problem? Most recipes for it call for dashi flakes, also known as fish flakes or fish powder. Gross. So in my infinite pickiness I decided to design an alternate version of the sauce that doesn’t use that nonsense. I present to you this ponzu sauce recipe without fish in it. I found that onions add a slight pungency that the fish flakes or fish stock would add to it in actual ponzu sauce. The resulting sauce tastes just as good, and pretty similar to more authentic versions with fish in them. It’s tart and dry, and goes great alongside grilled meats, vegetables, tempura, and other Asian treats.
Food 101: How To Make Tempura
So we recently covered frying chicken cutlets, and how it’s pretty much the best thing ever. Today we bring you more coverage of fried chicken in the form of tempura, and how to make it. However, this isn’t the traditional fried cutlet I wrote about in my last post; rather this is a bit more exotic, though still delicious in its own right. Chicken tempura is actually closer to a chicken finger than a chicken cutlet. But hey, they’re all great, so who cares? Tempura is delicious, cheap, and the batter is the easiest recipe on Earth to remember. It has three ingredients. I shit you not, three. Since when does anything delicious have only three ingredients?!
Quick Recipe: Bruschetta Tomato Salad
Coming from a family of Italian-American stereotypes, one of my all time summer favorites is the classic antipasto, bruschetta, a bunch of little toasted bread pieces with tomatoes and basil on top. Bruschetta salad is interesting because of the misconceptions about it. First off, despite what you think you know about speaking other languages bruschetta is in fact pronounced “broo-sketta” with a hard C sound. Not a shh. Also it doesn’t start with a P or end with an A, and it doesn’t make you more Italian or cool to say “HEY HAVE SOME PROO-SHETT”.
The second big misconception about it is that bruschetta, semantically, technically, refers to the little toast pieces that we serve with the tomato salad. That mixture of tomatoes on it is not the bruschetta, a mistake I even made until fairly recently. If you wanna be truly faithful, the stuff on top is just “tomato salad” but that’s kinda ambiguous, so I like to refer to it alongside its namesake sidekick.
Nevertheless, bruschetta tomato salad is exceptionally tasty and yummy, specifically when using some fresh-ass tomatoes straight from the garden or farmstand, to the point I don’t even bother making it unless it’s summer. I am admittedly a bit of a food snob, so don’t let that keep you from eating it whenever you want. It’s perfect on top of the mini-toasts, but I personally love serving it on top of chicken cutlets, like so:
Pizza Lab #20: Raspberry Tart Pizza
One of my favorite pastimes of the Summer is eating fruit straight off the bushes at my parents’ house. I could make a quick breakfast or even lunch just out of foraging around the yard. And no, they don’t live in some remote backwoods town deep within the Ozarks, they live right here in Patchogue on Long Island. The suburbs. 10 minutes away from a frigging Wal-mart. But! There’s everything ranging from blueberries to raspberries to apples to pears growing there; their property is a lesson on the virtues of planting edible landscaping when you finally own a home. Of course that’s an article for a different time, but for now we’ll dive into this edition of Pizza Lab, which was fashioned from the fresh, organic, homegrown raspberries I bring up.
Quick Recipe: Pico de Gallo
Pico de gallo is funny just because its literal translation in English is “rooster’s beak.” But rest assured, there’s no beak involved here. There isn’t even any chicken involved. Pico de gallo is actually a salad made primarily of tomatoes, onions and chilies, though other ingredients can be added as well. Pretty much you can just think of it as a less liquid-y salsa. This is our version of pico de gallo.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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