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: 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 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
Tea Time: Garlic Green Tea
One handy feature on the behind the scenes aspect of this blog is that we can see what kind of search terms people used to find our blog. Sometimes though, people find our blog through search terms for something that we don’t actually have directly on our site. It always makes me a little sad when this happens, thinking about someone coming here and then leaving disappointed. So whenever possible I want to try and remedy that. One search that’s come up a few times is “garlic green tea” or some variation on that. And while we have our regular garlic tea (and also garlic lemonade) recipe, I want to give the people what they’re looking for! So I came up with a garlic green tea recipe as well.
Food 101: How To Make Tomato Sauce (or “Red Sauce” if you will…)
Tomato sauce, it’s everywhere. For Italians, it’s on and in everything, to the point that there probably isn’t a single human being in Italy over the age of 7 who doesn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge on how to prepare a pot of sauce. The majority of my family’s heritage is Italian. I grew up in a household where it got tossed on everything from pork to pasta to pizza. Every Sunday was time for everyone to head on over to my aunt’s house for a big-ass Italian dinner with pasta and antipasti and bread and etc… You get the picture. And yet, I have a confession to make, I actually don’t really like tomato sauce all that much.
DUN-DUN!!
Yes I know, I know, blasphemy. But in all honesty I felt like the fact tomato sauce had to be thrown onto every edible item on planet Earth kind of made me sick of it by the time I hit my teen years. Now, I don’t necessarily hate it, but it just feels overused and homogenous to me. That may not be a popular opinion, but I feel like many in Italian-American families simply don’t have the guts to actually come forth and say that, for fear of ridicule and mafioso style ” ‘ey, come on.” half-slaps on the cheek.
That all being said, I ironically am a staunch opponent of jar sauces, both because I’m pro-from-scratch on the food front and also because despite my relative lack of enthusiasm for it, I know what a good tomato sauce tastes like. And jar sauce tastes like shit, frankly. Rather, I will admit objectively that having a good tomato sauce technique in the back of your head is a vital skill for most cooks, if for at very least making pizzas.
Because, well, pizza.
The Poor Couple's Food Guide 
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