Wherein I “Cook” with Beer.

Forgive the brevity, this is only even getting posted because I said I would.

Here we go. Somehow, despite being out of town the day before (and the morning of), I got it into my head that I was going to make food for the Superbowl. I also decided that rather than make food I’d made before, I would try out all new recipes I got from a podcast. Better yet, they were recipes that weren’t actually written down anywhere, but instead just copied by me while listening to said podcast. This is how it turned out.

The plan was sausage, peppers, & onions (cooked in a mix of Otter Creek’s Copper & Winter Red Ales); accompanied by a series of sides/dips like sour cream & caramelized onion dip (made with Copper Ale), guacamole (made with Black IPA), and a kickass restaurant style salsa with no beer whatsoever. I had pans for the Hop Cream, Beer Hummus, and possibly 7-layer dip, but that never manifested.

The sausage was delicious. But let’s face it, cooking sausage in beer isn’t exactly a novel idea, so no big surprise there.

Emma‘s restaurant style salsa was also delicious, but has nothing to do with beer.

The guacamole was perfectly tasty, but we were pretty split as to whether or not you could even taste the beer, so clearly not worth it.

The sour cream & onion dip stunk.

Allow me to explain. In my humblest of opinions, sour cream & onion dip should taste at least slightly, if not strongly, like …wait for it… onions & sour cream! In this recipe, however, you’re supposed to caramelize the onions, and then deglaze the pan with beer. Once you’ve done that, you’ve created a delicious, sweet mass of caramelized onions, with a slight beer flavor. However, it completely and utterly undoes any bite from the sour cream. And since the onions are now sweet, they lack any bite whatsoever, so you’re left with a sweet, creamy dip that’s so bland no one wants to eat it. One way this might be able to be salvaged, is to add a bit of fresh chive and use it as a vegetable dip, but even then I doubt it’ll even approach being the most memorable dish served at any party.

Meh, I’ll continue to use beer as an ingredient from time to time, but in the future I plan on using a bit more common sense instead of blindly following directions.

Cameroon? Really?

Wow, roughly four times the traffic I get daily, on a day I didn’t post anything? Let’s check…. Aha! Yup, Hello everyone from Cameroon!!!!!

Damn clickjacking spammer people.

Curioser and Curioser

This may seem odd, coming after a nearly week long unofficial hiatus, nevertheless… I find it interesting the degree to which my amateur blogging has altered my daily thought process after just a few short months.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise to those of you who write for a living, but the difference in the length of my trains of thought is astounding. I’ve yet to decide if it’s a good thing, but it’s certainly interesting. As those of you who know me personally can attest to, my thought process is just scary. While I make connections easily between things that appear completely random, as a result I often miss the simpler, more common connections that I’m supposed to be making. Basically the assumptions that we as a society make when communicating with one another are not the same assumptions that I generally make right out of the gate. I know it’s no cure, but I’m beginning to wonder if writing in general isn’t some sort of treatment for N.A.D.D..

This post has been Gabriella Approved.

I also feel like stopping and seeing exactly how things stand ‘right now’, before I do something. Looking at the chaos of a messy room before cleaning it, mise en place prior to making a meal, things like that. I’ve always appreciated in others the ability to do just that, but somehow until now I never really derived any benefit from it myself.

Random thoughts throughout the day get filed away for possible discussion later on, and notepads are being used more frequently in our house, as I write down, well ‘thought fragments’ is even too generous, let’s go with ‘trigger words’ to inspire thoughts later on when I have the time.

In short, I fell down a rabbit hole I didn’t know existed, and I’m well on my way to being pleased with the results.

This is what I’m sayin’

I just stumbled on a blog post I just had to share. Tiffany Lim puts very concisely something I often feel, but can never quite articulate.

The desire to be green is a respectable impulse, but somehow, as in so many other aspects of our society, the standard bearers for the movement are off-putting in their zealousness. This post gives some evidence that shows it’s not just in my head.

Now I’m not saying we should all paint our houses with lead, drive SUVs to the corner store, and send our empty plastic bottles in the incinerator. I’ll do my part to help with the local drought watch, and use rainwater to water the garden. But don’t get all high and mighty if my shoes aren’t made out of recycled tires, because your second house probably runs 3 window air conditioners, even when you’re not at home.

P&S ~= PoS?

I keep toying with the idea of making a coffee table book composed solely of photos from our garden. There’s certainly enough material, but there’s one huge roadblock – our camera.

I put a lot of thought and research into the purchase of our camera, and I like it. For most things, it’s more than good enough. But it suffers from a fault that’s common to all “point and shoot” models, lack of manual focus. The automatic focus is great for faces, framed shots, and plenty of other day to day stuff, but when it comes to shooting one specific spot in a frame with lots of varying depths, but not much variation in color, it’s crap. I know that sounds like a complex and infrequent occurence, but it’s really not. When I want to snap a shot of a single flower or pepper in amongst other flowers and peppers, I’m pretty much SOL.

I’ve simply taken to framing a larger area, snapping a half-dozen shots, and cropping the image to what I want once I find one that has my desired object in focus. This accomplishes what I want, but it is terribly annoying.