Amazing Discoveries!

Today, I've learned three important pieces of information for all foodies.

First, while I have no reason to think that my beer won't be totally awesome, I have noticed, at least in some of the bottles that I filled later in the process, that there is a small amount of white sediment at the bottom of the bottle. This appears to be the same gross looking stuff that was at the bottom of the fermenting bucket; so my guess is that to some extent this is leftover from the fermenting bucket. Not a big issue, but if I have a way to get rid of that, I'm interested in finding out. I've heard that Irish Moss is used as a clarifying agent in beer and I'm beginning to wonder if it is for clarifying that white stuff. We'll see. Of course, I'm not sure that it's an issue for the beer that was bottled first. This is all just an experiment, so we'll have to wait and find out.

Second, I discovered a blog called Orangette. It is freaking amazing. In fact, you shouldn't even be reading my blog right now, you should be reading Molly's blog. While I'm busy screwing up homemade beer, she just opened a restaurant. Plus, even if you like my blog, she does far more desserts than I ever will. Plus she has fantastic pictures (which I'm not allowed to reprint, so I can't show them to you). It really boggles my mind when someone who is the same age as me becomes my hero. It is approximately the same feeling I get when I find out that professional football players who are my age should start to think about retiring.

Incidentally, I discovered her blog by reading her column in Bon Appetit, a magazine that I have often said is like porn for foodies. Well, in this case folks, I was reading Bon Appetit for the articles, so there! Here is a link to her Bon Appetit bio . Go Molly!

Third, I hope it comes as no shock that a man who can cook is already married. Indeed, that is the case. And to boot, we've got a little bun in the oven, a soon-to-be little man with an apron. So what good fortune and intrigue did find me when I was sitting in class today and a classmate was picking at what looked to be an amazing sort of french pastry that surely has a name, but not one that I know (because of my bad manners, the classmate also falls into this category of nameless yet intriging encounters today). Anyway, I asked her where she got this amazing looking thing and she told me and now I will tell you. Ladies and gentleman, today's third amazing discovery for today is Patisserie Claude, a pastry chop in New York's Greenwich Village.

This is no joke, my friends. I came. I saw. I conquered. When I arrived, I knew that the thing that my classmate was eating was not for me. One of the few things that I really dislike eating is anything that too closely resembles whipped cream or jello. Her pastry seemed a bit creamy for my taste, but I knew by the looks of it that whoever made this pastry cared about what they were making. In sum, while her pastry was not for me, I knew there would be other pastry's at Claude's that WOULD be for me. In fact, four of them are in a box, waiting for me to take them home to my wife, who I hope will elect me as most popular husband. Nothing scores domestic points better than bringing desserts to pregnant ladies (as long as your bringing the desserts to the right pregnant ladies, otherwise its trouble).

Thanksgivings

So, you might remember that I was thinking of making something for Thanksgiving with my in-laws this year.

Here is what I came up with:
1) Beer
2) Pecan Pie
3) Cranberry Sauce with Port and Cinnamon

I think I've said all there is to say about the beer for now, so that leaves the pecan pie and the cranberry sauce. I've never made a pecan pie, but I recently got my hands on some pie recipes from Bangs, Texas where my father's family is from. Those people know pecan pie, so I'm going to trust them. I'll do a test run, and report on a winning recipe to bring to Thanksgiving.

As for the cranberry sauce, I already know what to do there. There are few recipes that I am willing to follow verbatim. Often I like to add stuff where none is called for, and often I decide to make things at the last minute, and so use lots of substitutes. In this case, though, I follow this recipe to the T. It is a cranberry sauce that puts those crappy tin can shaped jelly cranberry sauces to shame. It's got, *gasp*, fresh cranberries! The cranberries are cooked in a sugary mixture of port and water and cinnamon sticks. If you love real (versus processed) food, you are going to LOVE this cranberry sauce.

The Brew is Bottled.

I intended on taking pictures of the bottling process, but that will just have to wait till another time. Use your imagination, there were bottles being filled with beer with a long hose siphoning from a 5 gal pail. There was a huge mess of beer on the floor and the counter and I had to shower before being allowed to come to bed. Cause I smelled like beer.

Enough about me though, let's talk about my beer. Friday night I bottled the stuff. It is looking and smelling and tasting pretty damn good. It is certainly hoppier than what I'm used to drinking, but not overly so. It's not the sort of beer that you would drink ten of. But one or two with a hearty steak would be a carnivorous dream come true.

I strayed from the strict instructions of the experts in one key way: I bottled some of the beers with screw-top bottles. I didn't have enough regular pop-top bottles to bottle all of the stuff, so I had to resort to whatever I could find. Some people say that the screw-top bottles can't be capped with a hand-capper. Maybe I'm just a natural, but it really didnt' seem like a problem. I could, however, imagine, that if there isn't a perfect seal on that bottle, that it won't become carbonated.

Just to explain, after you remove your fermented beer from the beer pale (and scrape the nasty stuff from the bottom of the bucket), you have to add some priming sugar. In my case, I added about 5oz of priming sugar, boiled in 2 cups of water. This gives the yeast a little more sugar to digest, but the priming sugar makes the yeast particularly gassy. You bottle up the beer, with your priming sugar, and the extra gas mixes with the beer and makes it carbonated. Some people use CO2 cartridges to accomplish the same thing, but that requires more equipment than the natural way of doing it.

I promise I'll post some pictures soon. Next fermentation projects will be making a small batch of Mead. It'll be a good opportunity to show some pictures. I have a rig worked out that will let me just make a gallon. 5 Gallons of Mead seems like a bit much.

The bubbling has ceased, but the good times are at hand.

So, I checked my beer today. I was looking to see if the airlock was still bubbling from CO2 being excreted by the yeast. After about a week of fermenting, the bubbling seems to have ceased. My recipe predicted that it would take significantly longer than that, but I didn't make my beer quite as dense as the recipe called for, so it makes sense that the yeasties finished fermenting earlier than planned. I'll be going out of town tonight, but I think tomorrow I will bottle the beer.

Bubblin' Beer Deliciousness

On Friday, I checked on the status of our Thanksgiving beer. The recipe that I have calls for an addition of maple syrup midway through the fermenting process. This will make for a really nice brown ale. I couldn't resist the urge to taste the beer just to see how things are coming along. To my delight, the beer smelled great, and tasted great. It was quite hoppy, with the faintest hint of cinnamon. Sometime next week, I will bottle the beer, at which point it will carbonate. Oh joy!

In other news, I spoke to my aunt, an almost Vermonter (she's lived there for almost 20 years now) about what it would take to make some maple syrup. She explained that I'll have to tap some maple trees in February. I've put it on my calendar.

My foodie life and my law student life collide.

This story on Above the Law, a blog that (often brilliantly) covers the legal profession, had my obsession with jerk chicken and my obsession with keeping abreast of legal news collide in fantastic and delicious ways.

I wonder if by serving less than excellent chicken, the community service would not be counted.

Meat Hand

This is incredible! I wonder what other creepy halloween recipes there are out there?