Le Freaky Cabbage

As May winds down and millions of Americans prepare to celebrate our fallen war veterans in the same way they celebrate Mexican independence and everyone's favorite saint, Patrick. While America travels around to celebrate I had a 90 minute commute home from work to return to our apartment which is not at all baby ready. In fact, it's not really even single couple ready. It is possibly in its worst state ever as we prepare to clean and set up a spot for our children to live.



Jen entered week thirty of her pregnancy this week and we really need to get a move on. As we purge our books and DVDs we have also reached the realization that we need professional help in the realm of cleaning. It's a sad realization but I'm pretty sure that once the cleaning lady leaves and we see what our apartment looks like under the layers and layers of filth that have built up in the last few months I'm pretty sure it will be amazing.



Week thirty means that the babies are the size of cabbages. That is if you believe those terrible, poorly-researched produce-to-infant size charts. I personally do not but I've kind of committed to this stupidity so I need to continue on. Since one head of cabbage is usually about 100% more cabbage than I can use before it goes bad I selected these two cabbages which were the smallest I could find. To add a little extra to my skepticism of the produce size chart these heads of cabbage were much smaller than the cantaloupes we had ten weeks ago.



For dinner I shredded the cabbage along with some radishes, carrot, green onion, red onion, cilantro, cumin, hot sauce, mayonnaise, sweet hot mustard, salt, and pepper. I only had a few moments to let it marinate while I tossed some mahi-mahi fillets into a hot pan then finished them in the oven with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper.



To pair with dinner I poured this Le Freak from Green Flash Brewing Co.. I'd been looking forward to sampling this beer for a while now and it was every bit as great as I'd been hoping. It's a mix of San Diego IPA and Belgian-style trippel. The result was fantastic and renews my interest in Green Flash Brewing. nothing I've had from them has quite matched up to their Rayon Vert but this was very close.

I think they've changed the labeling on this one which would mean that this bottle might be a bit on the old side. I don't have anything to compare it to but it tasted pretty damn good to me. It went nicely with playoff hockey as we watched a strange feed which featured a boring recap of this year's breakaway competition from All Star weekend as well as watching Mats Sundin's speech from when his number was retired. The babies didn't seem to like this as much as they did that Flyers-Penguins game where there were all those fights.

Maybe that's because it was really, really boring.

Rock Me, Amadeus!

Today began, like most, with a doctor's appointment. This makes me extra glad that Jen switched to the doctor five minutes away. It makes it easy to access and maintain my mayorship on foursquare.



As soon as I got home I put out some bread and cheese. For cheese I selected this Amadeus cheese from Austria. I got it for a few reasons. Firstly, it was on sale. Secondly, it looked pretty tasty. Thirdly, it gave me a reason to sing, "Oooooh, rock me, Amadeus!" during dinner. Jen appreciated the first two reasons. Not so much with the last reason.



I made this salad with Kumato tomatoes, red leaf lettuce, croutons, feta cheese, and red onions. It had a lot of promise but, unfortunately, the lettuce was kind of gross. Every so often you get a batch of lettuce that sort of tastes like dirt. Sadly, we were due for a kind of gross head of lettuce.



I had chopped, seasoned, and strained some tomatoes for the pizza tonight and I tossed the salad with the flavorful tomato juice which leeched out of the tomatoes. This would have been a lot better had the lettuce not been disgusting dirt lettuce.



For the pizza we took a rare departure from our normal tomato-based pizza. I made this pizza with pesto, drained tomato, red onion, mozzarella, and Bella Lodi. This was far tastier than the salad as it contained virtually no dirt!



For beer I poured this Hop Notch IPA from Uinta Brewing in the great state of Utah. This was another really nice beer from Uinta. Much like their Wyld Pale Ale this had a very nice floral hoppy taste to it, though I think I liked the Wyld a bit better. This was a very nice beer but the Wyld was something extraordinary as far as I am concerned.

Also, as far as I am concerned, "Ooooh, rock me, Amadeus!"

Chocolate Rain

Today was the rainiest day I can remember. Well, maybe the second rainiest day I can remember. It could be argued that that time last year when our neighborhood was destroyed by a flood was slightly rainier. Also it may be the reason I am now scared when it rains.

I battled against my fears and spent most of the rainy morning out doing errands in a panic realizing the babies could pretty much come at any time now. My panic about babies almost overwhelmed my panic about rain.



Being cold and rainy I settled in to make something warm and nourishing for dinner. First, I started off by cleaning some local watercress and cilantro and mixing them together with lime, olive oil, and feta cheese with salt and pepper. I also made these rutabaga cakes with leftover rutabaga from when the babies were the size of rutabaga if you can remember back that far. I added some shredded Manchego and panko to the mashed rutabaga, coated them with more panko, then fried them in a pan. They were pretty tasty considering it was just an excuse to use up leftover rutabaga, Manchego, and panko.



I decided to make posole for our main course tonight. This was mostly because I still had some leftover pork from my dinner at The Breslin last week. I started by browning some garlic and onion then adding a little chopped jalapeno, leftover butternut squash, and chopped cabbage. I cooked this down a bit then added the leftover pork (skin and all), chopped tomato, dried thyme, dried oregano, cumin, and bay leaf. I let it cook on the stovetop for a while with some thawed out chicken stock and then added some hominy toward the end.



I served it up with shredded cheddar, fresh cilantro, sliced radish, chopped green onion, and sour cream. I would have had some sliced avocado too but unfortunately that wasn't to be. I went to one of our local stores this afternoon to grab some of these accompaniments and I asked the woman there (who half the store is named after) and she told me that the avocados were behind the counter. I found this a little strange but I collected the rest of my stuff, got the the register, then forgot to ask for an avocado. When I was getting ready to plate dinner and remembered about this I was furious. A geyser of curse words erupted in our kitchen, mostly directed at the strange security measures in place at our local store.

I then trekked back out into the rain to go to another local store who also sold avocados (in a more normal location) but sadly they were all rock hard and wouldn't be ripe for at least a few days.

It wasn't meant to be.



Jen liked the soup. Sort of. She claimed that the pork tasted of boar taint. It definitely did not but I think her pregnancy-induced sense of smell was picking up something from the pork. If it had been boar taint I would have noticed because we had a
very unfortunate boar taint experience this summer in France.




Since I was cooking a dish which dates back to the Aztecs I decided to pair it with a beer of roughly the same era and civilization, this Theobroma from Dogfish Head. This is based on a recipe found on an Aztec pot from 1200 B.C. Supposedly this drink was consumed for special occasions in Azetc society and is one of the earliest known uses for cocoa.

I had been expecting a "chocolate" beer to be much darker but generally the use of the word "chocolate" in the name of a beer denotes chocolate malt which is, of course, not chocolate at all but rather dark roasted malt. In this case actually cocoa was used and, therefore, the beer maintains a very light color like one would expect in a beer.



This beer also happens to be the subject of one of my favorite Sam Calgione videos where he claims he's getting ready to go on a fox hunt.

The beer had a very nice, but subtle, cocoa taste to it with a slightly spicy finish. I've been sitting on this bottle for a while in the beer cellar and it was nice to finally pair it with an appropriate meal. I'm often very hesitant to try to pair a beer or wine with soup but this beer actually went perfectly with the posole. This was merely a happy accident and had nothing to do with any sort of planning on my part.

After dinner we kept it authentic by watching the ancient Aztec sport of ice hockey.

Go Tenochtitlan Rangers!

Saving Lives, Annoying Neighbors

We spent this afternoon taking a class in infant CPR. We never got any sort of confirmation that the class was happening so when we showed up we could sense the panic in their voices as they scrambled to get someone to teach the class to us. At the end we emerged from the local YMCA ready to save some babies.

So far we haven't met any babies that have needed our assistance. You may think that's a good thing. After watching the Red Cross videos where some guy is just wandering along wearing surgical gloves and stumbles upon an unconscious baby on a pedestal I felt ready to leap into action.

Today has been something of a disappointment in that regard.



When they mentioned things that young children or babies may choke on they mentioned hot dogs so I figured I should make them for dinner tonight since we're not going to cook them again until the kids are eighteen.

No, the babies are not the size of hot dogs this week.



We were a little short on buns so I asked Jen if she'd like potato chips or potato salad as an accompaniment. She answered: "Both."

I boiled some Red Bliss potatoes and Yukon Gold Potatoes, added a little cider vinegar, whole grain mustard, parsley, hot sauce, SweetSmoothHot mustard, red onion, salt, and pepper.



Since I have had hot dogs many times in the past I felt like I wouldn't be missing out on anything if I couldn't taste them. That's why tonight I chose the Palate Wrecker from Green Flash Brewing Company. At over 100 IBUs this beer was like someone punching you in the mouth with brass knuckles but instead of being made of brass they're made of hops.

Hop knuckles.

It was enjoyable but I don't know if I'd rush out and have a second bottle. It's more like something you experience once to see what it's like. Kind of like licking a battery.

At any rate we got in another outdoor dinner before a week of rainfall that is scheduled to start tomorrow. I'm sure our neighbors will be saddened not to have their evenings interrupted by the sound of clanking plates and picture-taking.

We're the best neighbors.

Butternut Squash Babies and Beer Grannies

We're smack dab in the middle of week 29 in Jen's pregnancy. You know what that means! Can you feel it? Can you smell the absurdity hanging in the air? That's right, it's time to compare the size of our unborn children to produce as selected by a website which may or may not have any concept of what different produce actually looks like!

Week 29 means that the babies are the size of . . .



. . . butternut squash! It's actually pretty annoying that the larger vegetables are all fall vegetables. If we'd had any foresight we would have planned on having the babies born sometime in December. That way it would have followed these bogus baby size charts much more closely.



As it was another lovely evening I loaded up our Rubbermaid tub with all the essential dinner ingredients and walked it behind the apartment to set up for dinner. I made this salad with red leaf lettuce, red onion, grape tomatoes, feta cheese, lemon garlic olives, and some mustard vinaigrette that Jen had made.



I peeled and thinly sliced the butternut squash and grilled it with olive oil, salt, pepper, and chili powder. I also grilled some lightly seasoned lamb loin chops and served them on the top.



For beer I chose this My Antonia by Dogfish Head from the beer cellar. This was a really nice pilsner and went down nicely with some grilled lamb.

This beer features one of my all time favorite Dogfish Head Quick Sip Clips where Sam Calagione smuggles some of this beer in to his grandmother's nursing home so she can taste it.



It really makes me wish I'd thought of smuggling some home brew in to either of my grandmothers when I went to visit them. It would have been great.

Kids, don't miss out on this opportunity. Smuggle beer into your grandmothers' nursing homes and get them liquored up. It's the right thing to do.