Babe, These are not Cookies.

For Christmas, Chris and his family all head to the family seat in Rochester, NY. It's a house built circa 1950's (or 60's) by his grandparents, and its a week staying there with his whole family. It's a massive endeavor to cook Fish Sauce (Spaghetti Sauce with calamari) for Christmas Eve, and an even bigger endeavor to cook standing rib roast on Christmas Day. I'll let Chris cover those because it's more his purview than mine.

In addition, there is loads of cookie making. On Christmas Eve, Chris and I followed an old family recipe for what his father fondly recalls as "Wands" This may or may not be the technical name, and it may or may not be the direct or indirect interpretation of an unpronounceable Italian word that may or may not have meant wand, sounded like wand, or was spelled like wand.

The recipe must have come from a handwritten notecard (of which I saw many) but had already been entered into a computer. It follows here:

6 eggs (beat) 
6 tbl sugar
6 tbl oil 
1 tsp vanilla 

1-1/2 tsp baking powder
3-1/2-4 cups of flour - Do not add more. Add flour on board

Notes: 
These are deep fried or with honey or powdered sugar but not both. 

So Chris, and Jim (Chris' dad) and I are in the basement and we have all of the ingredients out and are ready to start mixing. Jim says "It could either turn into a batter, or a thick dough. I'm not sure which. Here's the pasta sheeter in case its dough. I just remember that it's deep fried strips." Then Erica ( Chris' mom) comes down the stairs and she and Jim decide they need to leave to finish some last minute holiday bits.

Leaving Chris and me in the basement with the ingredients and no idea what we were supposed to do. So we mixed everything together and it turned into a very very sticky dough. We floured up a board, and tried rolling it out, and the dough was elastic (similar to pizza dough). Chris tastes a bit - its like mild bread, not really much of a taste. We try to roll it through the pasta sheeter. Once. Twice. It turns into a tangled glutenous mess, very sticky, pulling lots of holes in it.  I yell at Chris because it's not a cookie, its fried bread, and its not even working. He tells me its a cookie. I tell him cookies taste good as dough. He says it doesn't taste bad.

I throw up my hands and go watch Doctor Who until Jim comes home.

Jim walks into the basement, runs a hunk of dough through the sheeter, and says "Oh guys, this looks great! It's doing exactly what its supposed to."

Turns out, the recipe, handed down between generations, hadn't included instructions that the dough needed to rest, for about an hour. After resting, it rolled out beautifully. Rolled into sheets about 3-4 inches wide, 1/8th of an inch thick, and then sliced into thirds, these "wands" are fried in oil, then drained on paper towels. Hit immediately with powdered sugar, or drizzle with honey.

They are lovely (if not a bit crunchy) the next day reheated in the oven before Church, intentionally or otherwise. 

Saukerkraut Attempt #2

So we are doing it again.


After losing out on the argument over which recipe we would use (I always prefer anything from the Joy of Cooking) we have started a new batch of kraut. Chris does not have my same preference for the joy. (Much to my frustration most of the time.) So we've been using a lot of guidance from Michael Ruhlman. He recommends using 50g salt/1 liter of water. So, for the second batch of kraut we shredded our cabbage, and made a 4 liter brine with 200g of salt. (The determining factor in the winning of the argument is that the joy recommends 3-6 weeks for a timeline, while Ruhlman says we can have it as soon as 2 weeks. The Joy also calls for much much less salt, and less brine. It relies more heavily on liquid coming out of the cabbage.)

In so doing, we also used our Wort Chiller to cool down the brine in a reasonable amount of time. We've officially used it more for pickling than we have for brewing. (Chris used it at Thanksgiving for the turkey, and when we tried to use it prior to that while we were brewing we ran into a mishap because of a missing adapter.) We also got our hands on some kraut with live and active cultures, so I seeded our batch with a tablespoon or two of the juice and mixed it in well. It's my understanding that this will get us a better kraut taste. But what do I know, I said this time if its screwed up that I'll be to blame.

If we are lucky, the brine will take about two weeks to mature, which puts it at 12/28 - the day before we come back from a long road trip. I think the plan will be to add extra brine just before we go, cross our fingers, and hope for the best. Otherwise, we get to come home and clean the crock again.

An update, we made some cold pack pickles, and they are quite tasty. They will also be going out the door as last minute gifts for Hanukkah. Someday we will have the time and inclination to make more stuff for keeps. Also going out the door are some lemon pepper canned green beans, and the rest of the apple butter.

Our Sauerkraut is all F'd Up

Really the picture says it all...

Totally gross

Oh well, if at first you don't succeed, use a smaller crock and pay more attention to the brine levels. That's how that saying goes right?

Apple Butter

We are busy people. A lot of delicious things take a lot of time to cook, and when weekends are booked end to end with activities, sometimes cooking can be a real challenge. We've found that the crock pot offers a great way to really leverage what time we do have efficiently.

With the holidays coming up, most gift giving will be home made stuff. From our Milk & Honey Stout, to pickles, to knitted and crocheted things. The following is a recipe for apple butter - one that you can either put into sterile jars and then into the fridge or freezer, or one that you can can in a water canner for longer storage.


Ingredients
5.5 - 6lbs of apples, peeled, cored, and quartered
1 tsp lemon juice
1 cup apple juice/cider
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground clove
1/8 tsp ginger
pinch of salt


Combine all the ingredients in the crock pot and cook on high for 1 hour. Remove the lid, and cook on low (stirring occasionally), until the apple butter reaches a spreadable consistency and is dark brown in color. (You may need to use the immersion blender for super smooth texture) Put into hot, sterilized jars, taking care not to fill past the headspace line.

Alternatively, do what we did: Cook on high for 45 minutes. Reduce to low, leaving lid in place. Leave for your weekly tabletop game. (Pathfinder, for those who are curious.) Arrive home about 9.5 hours later because you had to go do field work for work. Stir down all the big pieces of apple, then mix with the immersion mixer. Set lid offset 1-2 inches so water evaporates, and collapse into bed. In the morning, wake up, stir thoroughly. Turn off your crock pot for about an hour, then set the whole thin in the fridge. Let it sit in the fridge for a day. Then, reheat the apple butter, sterilize cans, and process in a water canner.

To Can: Process the jars for 10 minutes in a water bath canner. Refrigerate any jars that fail to seal properly.

To Freeze: Use sterilized wide mouth freezer jars. Fill to the head space line. Use within a year, for the best quality.

Spent Grain Pumpkin Bread

Frequently, on weekends, I wake up in the morning and immediately desire something along the lines of sweet rolls or some other deliciously gooey yeasty bread product. As I have very little foresight, more often than not this ends up simplifying into scrambled eggs, or if I'm feeling very energetic, a batch of pancakes.

While the scrambled eggs happened today, I couldn't resist making something sweet with ingredients that I had on hand. In honor of the season (and the loads of pumpkin I've got hanging around) I decided on pumpkin bread.

The spent grain pumpkin bread is the most delicious, moist and spicy pumpkin bread I've had. The recipe is rather large - I made it into 1 loaf pan and 24 muffins (since I only own 1 loaf pan..)You can make up to 3 loaves with one batch.

Ingredients

1 can pumpkin pie puree
4 eggs
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup applesauce
2/3 cup water
2 cups white sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar
3 cups all purpose flour
1/2 cup spent grain flour 
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground clove
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease and flour three 7x3 inch loaf pans or whatever combination of oven ware you'd like. The muffins were done in those little paper cupcake wrappers because I have neither the patience nor the desire to grease and clean a muffin tin. In a large bowl, mix together pumpkin puree, eggs, oil, applesauce, water and sugar until well blended. In a separate bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and ginger. Stir the dry ingredients into the pumpkin mixture until just blended. Pour into the prepared pans. Bake for about 50 minutes in the preheated oven. Loaves (or whatever) are done when toothpick inserted in center comes out clean. Or, alternatively, this recipe makes approximately 36 muffins. Reduce cooking time to 30 minutes, insert a tooth pick into a muffin to check for doneness.

The Brew Arrives

We were extremely nervous about the brew when the day came...

Okay, that's not exactly accurate. I was nervous, my girlfriend had since moved on to throwing spent grain flour into everything she could think of. The beer at this point was an after thought for her. For me it was nerve wracking. I don't know why. I mean, it's not like I sell this. We didn't bet the farm on this five gallon batch of partial mash milk stout. Still, brewing beer is a bit like expecting a baby. You wait, you clean, you measure.You clear out rooms so it has somewhere to sleep after it's been delivered (which here means bottling).

So here I was, worrying about whether I could afford private school for the Milk & Honey Stout so that it could get into a good college, while the beer just sat there in bottles, judging me for being a bad brew-daddy.

So the day came, we cracked one open (we probably served it a little too warm, optimal temp here is between 38-40 degrees and ours was probably around 60 when I poured it) and drank it and it was ... good, but not great. Or at least so we thought.

When you tell people that you brew beer, if they're not into that whole DIY food thing they look at you a bit as though you've told them you're a wizard. "Beer? From your home? What is this sorcery?" And of course, because they're your friends (or at least they should be, I don't recommend giving your home brew to random passersby) every word that comes out of their mouth is tainted. "This is delicious. I would totally buy this." And I want to believe it. I want to think that on my second batch of beer I've someone managed to master what took the Belgians and Germans the better part of two millennial to perfect. But I'm far too neurotic to believe that I've produced something palatable to a human being who is not me. Even out of the mouths of the local homebrew club (which were not nearly as kind, but still very complementary) I was suspect that I had made (I say I, but really it's we, but since I'm the only one freaking out about it I'm going to continue to use first person pronouns) a good beer.

That's probably part of it though. The desire to do better comes from the belief that what you've done is not as good as what you will do. And I believe that to be true of any endeavor.

Our next beer will be better than this one. The one after that will be better than all the ones that came before.

And I will be terrified that every last one of them is a delinquent.

Lady Homebrewers

As you can tell from some of the previous posts, we are homebrewers. To me, the fascination with this process does not necessarily stem from my desire to drink beer. Instead, it is the challenge of cooking and creating something new.

Yeast is an endlessly fascinating creature, as is natural fermentation. Brewing beer is just another aspect of canning, pickling, and preserving food. These processes makes something normally wasted, inedible, or at the end of its shelf life, last for a much longer period of time. At the end of the season you can preserve fruits and vegetables from the garden to last through the winter.

This process then, is what I find to be really appealing. And, since my boyfriend likes drinking beer, I like brewing it!

So recently, we went to a local home brewers meetup group. It was in the back room of a bar. We walked into the dimly lit room, and there was a long table set up with a few tubs of ice, and quite a few rocks glasses. We were some of the first folks to arrive.

It didn't take long for me to figure out that home brewing is apparently dominated by men. Everyone was incredibly welcoming and very excited to hear that the two of us brewed together. But, I still struggled with the fact that I felt out of place. It didn't help that the space was also shared by a military reunion of some local veterans.

Two other ladies arrived a little bit later, one of whom I found to be quite helpful. She started brewing less than a year ago and had already won some awards! But, in a room full of 20 brewers, to only have 3 women seemed a pretty terrible ratio.

I guess the question becomes then, are there no women in it because women don't like brewing? Or is it more because getting into brewing is pretty scary - without someone to mentor you the whole process is pretty overwhelming. And when the vast majority of those brewers are guys who started brewing together in college, or do it during the football game, it seems very much a perpetuation of the old boys club.

So ladies wanting to get into brewing - some advice!

Just do it - it's rewarding, delicious, and a lot of fun.

Don't be intimidated. I heard so many times at the home brew club. "Man, I wish my girlfriend would come!", "I wish that my wife would brew with me!", "How'd you get your girlfriend here, man?" Clearly you are wanted and desired in the community, so don't let the fact that there will be a lot of guys there be a turn off.

I would also suggest, even if you aren't super into beer, (maybe you drink wine or cider, those things are cool too!), if friends invite you to brew, do it! It's a lot of fun, and if nothing else, doing it once is a new experience. And if you absolutely hate beer, and don't want anything to do with it, making wine and cider is almost the exact same process as brewing beer. It just takes much longer to get to the end product.

I find myself to be very particular about the beer that I drink these days. Even of the home brew that we make I only have a bottle of it every now and then. The reason I keep brewing is the challenge to create something new, but also the opportunity to share delicious things with friends. We frequently keep very little beer for ourselves - it's a process of creating and connecting with friends over that creation.

So, get yourself out there, find some brew friends, and get started!