Home Brew Update

I spent the better part of Saturday cleansing, sanitzing and dry heat sterilizing in preparation to bottling a sweet Bavarian wheat beer that has quietly fermented over the past two weeks. Now that it is bottled, it will age for three weeks before serving. Only then will I know if all my efforts to create this beer was successful.  Of course, I’ve appealed to all the brewing gods for a drinkable batch of beer.

It is one thing to enjoy craft beer and another to create craft beer.  Surprisingly, I found Donald Rumsfeld accurately summed up the daunting task of home brewing with his famous quote:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

I’m certain Donald did not have home brewing on his mind when he coined this quote. Still, I’ve yet to find a more suitable quote that captures my experience with home brewing.

Craft beer brewing is part art, science and a touch of alchemy.  There are many factors that need attention while creating beer and there are at least a thousand ways you can screw up a batch of beer;  from poor quality wort ingredients, dormant yeast to gaps in cleaning and sanitizing.  Basically, I’m crossing my fingers that everything worked as it should.  I did taste the beer when measuring the final specific gravity before bottling. The beer tasted smooth with a hint of sweetness. I’m hoping that is a good sign.

Another nugget of knowledge:  The amount of careful work and time required to create home brewed craft beer has made me carefully reconsider whom I will share this gift of hops.  Always remember to drink responsibly and to share beer responsibly.  Essentially, if you annoy me – no beer for you!

Batch #1: Bavarian Weizen

Fermentation started: 7/7/2013

Starting Gravity: 1.050

Final Gravity: 1.012

Bottle Date: 7/20/2013

Open Date: 8/10/2013

ABV: 4.9%

Malts: Alexander Liquid Malt extract, Wheat dry malt extract

Hops: Tettnang hops (bittering), Saaz (flavor)

Servomyces yeast nutrient

Yeast: White Labs ‘Hefeweizen’ yeast

Home Brewing Batch #1 – Bavarian Weizen

I have a long history of baking bread whic makes brewing beer  a natural extension in my mad culinary skills.  This weekend I invested in a brewing kit combined with a light summer bavarian wheat beer ingredient kit. Home brewing beer is a science and an art.  It does take a bit of work to create the fementing mixture, but it is well worth the effort. Also, it is a great opportunity to learn new skills while creating a delicious product.

 

First you need to create a mixture called Wort which starts with adding malt extracts to water. This recipe called for two types of malt extract – a dry and liquid malt extract which adds fermentable sugars for yeast to feast upon.

During the boiling process, hops are added bitterness to balance the sweetness of unfermented malt sugars while adding preservative and clearing properties to the mixture.  Hops are added at different times during the boiling process depending upon the result desired.  This recipe calls for two types of pelleted hops to be added at different intervals during the boil.

After boiling for like forever,  the wort is chilled and tranfered to a fermenting bucket before adding liquid yeast.  Once the wort reaches the desired temperature it is transferred and filtered into a fermenting bucket and more cool water is added.  After confirming the temperature of the water is at the right temperature, it is time to take a small sample to test the specific gravity before adding the yeast product.   One the yeast is added, give the mixture a good stirring.  Seal the lid, attach airlock and place fermenting bucket in a warm area with little light exposure.  10-14 days later the yeast should have some sweet  Bavarian Weizen beer that is ready to be bottled and aged.

During this process, I kept a strict eye on sanitizing every item that came in contact with the bubbling wort mixture. In addition,  I thorougly cleaned and dusted every inch of the kitchen before creating the wort mixture and banned the dogs as well.

So far, I noted strong bubbling in the airlock today. My fingers are crossed that this brew turns out well as I plan to give away the finished product to friends and family. Oh, okay, I’ll keep a bottle or two.

Almond Milk and You – Chic, Sexy and Delicious

As readers may know, I’m currently immersed in training for the Philadelphia 2012 Marathon. An important aspect of training is building better eating habits. One such habit is replacing dairy milk with almond milk – preferably Silk Pure Almond Milk. As I write this post, I’m sipping on Starbucks Salt and Caramel chocolate milk mix with Silk Vanilla almond milk. Seriously, I think I’m in love.

Many have asked how do you milk an almond? Quite simple actually – almonds are blended with water to create Almond Milk. This makes a great base for flavors to be added such as vanilla or chocolate.

I’ve discovered almond milk has far more cosmopolitan uses than marathon training. The video below shows how almond milk is used in creating a signature cocktail called ‘Colorado Blossom’.

Chic, sexy and delicious. What more could you want in almond milk?

Pinterest Recipe Meets the Real World – Southwestern Stuffed Peppers

Hey, it’s Sunday and time for another edition of Pinterest Recipe meets the real world!   The recipe chosen for this post: Southwestern Stuffed Peppers.

I’ve curated a rather large collection of tasty recipes on a Pinterest Board simply labeled ‘Food and Drink‘. While it is interesting to build this board, I wanted to be confident that the contents of the board were items that could be made offline, in the real world. The only way to be sure was to recreate the recipes at home.

The pin clicks through to the blog SimplyLoveFood.com where the author shared her recipe for this dish.

Source: go.redirectingat.com via Tania on Pinterest

 

It is quite easy to make and a favorite go to recipe when my garden grown peppers are ready to be harvested. However, when I prepared this recipe, my peppers were not quite ready, so I substituted them with store bought organic peppers.

Here is my real world version of the same recipe:

• 3 medium to large sized peppers.
• One half pound lean ground beef (or turkey).
• One half cup Brown Rice or Basmati Rice.
• Olive oil to coat the peppers.
• One half cup chopped sweet onion (or any onion lurking in your refrigerator)
• 1 Tbsp Taco seasoning – store bought.
• One half jar Southwest style Salsa – mild.
• One half cup frozen or fresh corn.
• 1 can of black beans (15 oz), drained.
• One half cup shredded sharp cheese for topping.
• Sour cream for topping.
• Cilantro for for topping.

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. While oven is preheating, cook rice according to package directions. If  you don’t have directions, here is basic rice cooking instruction:

Rinse rice before cooking; add 1 and 1/2 cups of water to every 1 cup of rice; bring the uncovered rice and water to a boil; reduce heat to medium partially cover with lid to allow steam to escape; as water evaporates, it will leave ‘craters’ in the rice; reduce heat to low when ‘craters’ appear and simmer the covered rice for 10 minutes. 

Set cooked rice aside.

In a non stick pan, brown the lean ground beef or turkey.

In a large mixing bowl, add the cooked rice, browned beef or turkey, taco seasoning, 3/4 of a jar of salsa, black beans, corn, and chopped onion. Mix ingredients to an even consistency. This is your pepper stuffing mixture.

Slice peppers into halves, remove seeds and excess pepper. Quickly rinse the peppers to remove all seeds, pat dry. Coat peppers with olive oil, spoon heaping amounts of stuffing mixture into the pepper cavity.

Arrange peppers in baking dish, sprinkle shredded sharp cheese on top of the peppers before placing in oven.

Bake peppers for 45 mins. Add additional shredded cheese and reserved salsa when you remove the stuffed peppers from the oven. Don’t forget to wear oven mitts!

Prior to serving, top the baked peppers with a dollop of sour cream and some cilantro.

Enjoy!

 

Peppers, Filling, and finished product

Yes, I intentionally left out salt. The dish has enough flavor that salt is not needed.  For a vegetarian twist, remove the meat and switch the rice with Quinoa.

As you can see, Pinterest can be a great source for meal inspirations and ideas that are actually workable in the real world.  So what are you waiting for? Join Pinterest and follow my Food and Drink board for more Pinterest to Real Life tested recipes.

2012 Get Your Rear In Gear 5K/10K

Uhm, what can I say other than the truth? I overslept Sunday and missed the opportunity to run and raise awareness of the prevalence of Colon cancer in our community.

What is a disconsolate runner to do when a race goes awry?

Drown her sorrow in homemade cupcakes!

Spent the better part of Sunday morning perfecting my ganache and creating  lovely cupcakes like this:

There is lager in the cupcake batter, Jameson Irish Whiskey in the ganache filling, and Bailey Irish Cream liqueur in the frosting. I’d say it’s about 3,000 calories and worth every one of them.

Monday With Martha

Whoa, where has the time gone? Oh yeah, I’m running..everywhere.

No worries, I’ll pick up this series shortly. I strongly believe eating well is the key to running well. Martha was brought in to  to help with the cooking part of eating well.

Monday With Martha

Working through the basics starting with chopping vegetables and working with herbs, I decided to combine the skills and knowledge together in one dish – semi homemade chicken soup. I used fresh vegetables common in chicken soup to practice basic and specialty cuts and selected savory herbs and spices to create a Sachet d’Epice or more commonly known in this kitchen – a bag of spices.

Monday With Martha

A Cook’s Golden Rules.  The take away message of this chapter is an organized kitchen + proper tools = one happy chef. A happy chef has a knack for creating healthy and delicious meals for all who enter the kitchen. Trust me, you always want to keep your inner Chef happy.  I’ve spent the last week reviewing the three main points of A Cook’s Golden Rules and adapting them to my kitchen environment.

Monday With Martha

With a little help from Martha Stewart, I’m going to back to school…cooking school.  Over the past few years, I’ve turned more and more towards expanding my cooking knowledge. This interest has grown exponentially with the creation and maintenance of my award winning vegetable garden. Using  products from the garden to create meals has opened doors to a culinary world I frequently overlooked as being pretentious and way too complicated.  Martha Stewart has a knack for demystifying the techniques and presenting them in a clear and detailed manner.

What I plan to do in weekly installments is to present the material in this book as I learn it – screw ups and successes. Hopefully more successes than screw ups!  I took an inventory of  cooking books I’ve collected over the years, a shocking number of them were never cracked open and covered in a thick layer of dust.  If you are going to read a cookbook cover to cover, then make it the best cookbook available – Martha Stewart’s Cooking School.  Some may suggest Julia Child, to that I say Martha is the Julia of this generation.

Next week: A Cook’s Golden Rules.