Winter in Spring in a Hot Apartment

This afternoon Jen boarded a plane to Portland, Oregon, leaving me all alone. Those familiar with the blog know the wild exploits I get up to when Jen is away. There was that time I made an egg sandwich, that time I made some pasta and had some shiraz, that time I had a kale salad, that time I had some pickled herring, that time I mimicked the Dominoe's Bread Bowl Pasta, that time I cut my finger and had some leftover chicken, that time I made catfish with zucchini crust, and who could forget that time I made a weird chicken salad.

Yeah, I've had some wild times when Jen's been out of town. Now you can see why she's such a jealous woman. We have major trust issues and I take full responsibility for my part in that. We're working on it though. Our counselor says that every relationship is like a garden. We're just watering ours, brother. We're just watering ours.



Given my new passion for budgeting I opted to do no grocery shopping at all to make tonight's meal. I made this salad with leftover kale, kalamata olives, feta cheeses, and a vinaigrette made with whole grain mustard, lemon, Lyle's Golden Syrup, and olive oil.



I used up some old bread to make this grilled Gruyere sandwich with Sweet Smooth Hot mustard from SchoolHouse Kitchen. This is my all time favorite mustard and it turned what would have been a boring sandwich into a boring sandwich with delicious mustard!



As temperatures have plummeted down into the 30s this evening, I figured I'd warm up with this Backburner from Southern Tier Brewing Company in Lakewood, New York. I purchased this about a year ago and it's been just hanging around in my beer cellar waiting for a good excuse to be enjoyed.

It turns out our building, as is often the case, had issues with the heat turning temperatures extremely high throughout our living space even with windows opened on this wintery night. If I sat close enough to the open window I could pretend it was cold enough to really get the maximum amount of enjoyment out of this wonderful winter beer.



I made some granola the other day using the leftover grains I'd had from my last two batches of beer. I dried them out in the oven then added Lyle's golden syrup, Canola oil, crushed almond, and crystallized ginger. I also put in some dried dates which ended up hardening considerably in the oven in a turn reminiscent of last year's chestnut granola debacle. Luckily I don't think the dates have achieved quite the same tooth-cracking density as the chestnut pieces in that ill-fated batch of granola.

Next time I make granola with any sort of dried fruit I will just toss them in at the end.



I used a little of this granola on top of some yogurt with a little honey, flax seed, and sliced Ataulfo Mango, my mango of choice. I would have used this Atualfo Mango for our Week 19 pregnancy theme meal but they were sadly unavailable.

At times the granola is a bit too aggressively crunchy but at the end of the day it's tasty enough to give it a pass. Sure, I have to pick out bits of toasted barley malt out of my teeth at the end of eating but that's just the cost of saving money.

That amount of savings is going directly toward putting our boys through their first half-second of college.

Italian Cheese, Dutch Beer, and Budget Cooking

Tomorrow, despite my objections, Jen is taking our babies and going to the west coast on a work-related trip. This will leave me alone for the rest of the week where I will undoubtedly entertain myself by preparing foods that require minimal cost and maximum probability of being things Jen will not be sorry she missed at all.



But tonight, for her farewell, I continued along with my budget theme by making this pasta dish. I cooked down some red chard stems and fennel in a little olive oil and butter, then tossed in the chopped leaves with some salt and pepper. I cooked this down for a bit, added a dusting of flour, and then poured in some milk to make a thick cream sauce.



After a little bit I tossed in some cooked fresh fettuccine and some shredded fontina along with some of the pasta water. This was a very nice creamy pasta dish that was still a bit on the light side considering I used skim milk and pasta water in the sauce.



I didn't really have anything that I thought would go with this so I opened this Black IPA from Emelisse, Restaurant en Brouwerij in The Netherlands. This was another Valentine's Day gift from Jen and it ended up working surprisingly well with the fontina cream sauce. The roasted malt gave it a very toasted chocolate and coffee sort of flavor which meshed well with the cream sauce.

I think this is the only beer I've had from Holland other than Heineken. I have to say that despite my experimentation with fresh Heineken last summer, this is probably the best Dutch beer I've ever had.

Isn't that weird?

Pork Sabbatical

This afternoon Jen announced that she did not want "any more bacon or smoked pork items for a while." Naive readers may think that this has to do with her being pregnant. Experienced readers will recognize that this declaration could just as easily have come several years before Jen began to carry our twins.



For starters I threw together leftovers to make this kale salad with cantaloupe, pumpkin seeds, and feta cheese. I just added a little olive oil, salt, and pepper. Was it boring? Yes. Was it essentially free? Yes.

Overall: win.



For the main course I made this pizza with four cheeses. A quattro formaggi pizza if you will. Will you? Fantastic!

I used mozzarella, Emmenthaler, Gruyere, and Bella Lodi, a nice mix of Italian and Swiss cheeses. This pizza was intended to be a money-saving budget meal using only ingredients we had around the house. It turned out to be be quite delicious! The crust was paper thin and crispy, just like they like here in New York.

Thick crust pizza? Fuggedaboutit!



Yesterday we went to the Brooklyn Brewery where I had their new Oishi ale, a low alcohol (3.8% ABV) beer that was mild and extremely refreshing. It almost made up for having to spend time in the company of the world's most insufferable hipsters.

One sad fact about loving beer is that sometimes you have to be around other people that love beer. As a rule this is not a group I am terribly fond of.



Since Jen is not drinking I chose to make up for Jen's anti-swine stance by having a pork-themed beer, this Vapeur Cochonne (Cochonnette) from Brasserie à Vapeur.

This was part of my Valentine's Day gift from Jen, a beer that she was expressly warned against purchasing by the clerk at Beer Table Pantry. She purchased it anyway against his wishes because she knew, if there was one thing I enjoyed immensely, it was a beer that someone else has deemed too strange or unusual for consumption.

It turns out this was just a really, really nice Quadrupel style Belgian Strong Ale. Incidentally it also had the most lively carbonation of any beer I've ever had. After pouring it you could hear it from across the table. It sounded like a bowl of Rice Krispies.

While it was not a suitable accompaniment to pizza it was fantastic as a sort of beery dessert after the meal. This beer was far better than I'd expected given the poor review by the guy at the beer store. I would conclude every meal with a beer like this if I were a rich man.

Since we're on a budget you're going to have to settle for my upcoming reviews of beers like Coors Light and Milwaukee's Best.

Budgeting For Twins

The harsh reality of having twins on the way is knowing that we are going to have to curb our grocery spending by a bit. This is probably not too bad as we live much more extravagantly than necessary in this department. Without getting into the numbers for 2011, we spent roughly double what your average family of 2.5 would spend on groceries. Then again, we spent a considerable amount less on eating at restaurants than the average American family of 2.5.

But since we're about to become the average American family of 4.0 we will need to be a bit more judicious in our spending.

Expect big things from us in legumes going forward!



I started this mission of savings by only purchasing one cantaloupe for tonight's dinner. The babies are the size of cantaloupes right now. Well, the length of cantaloupes. It's a little misleading. Normally I buy two of each fruit, one for each baby, but times are going to be a little more lean.

This had nothing to do with the fact that one cantaloupe is plenty large enough. This was simply a measure of savings.



I started off by using the theme ingredient in a salad of kale, mozzarella, cantaloupe, and avocado. All I topped it with was a little olive oil, salt, and pepper.



To tide us over until the main course was ready (a grueling five minutes) I put out this Asiago Fresco with some fresh bread.



I got some super nice looking flounder on special today at the fishmonger hut and I pan-fried it with a little olive oil, butter, garlic, lemon, parsley, salt, and pepper.



To go along with the flounder I made a strange and controversial dish: shrimp and bacon colcannon. Again, in the spirit of our budget, I looked at all the leftover corned beef and cabbage ingredients in the fridge from St. Patrick's Day and decided that I had to somehow turn this into a bizarre accompaniment to the flounder.

I rendered a few strips of bacon in butter and olive oil, tossed in all the chopped vegetables from our boiled dinner, mashed them up, and tossed in some chopped shrimp at the very end.

The flounder was fine but I ended up really liking how the shrimp and bacon colcannon turned out. Had I even consdiered this dish while I was at the fishmonger I would have kindly told him to piss off, saved my money, and just had the colcannon dish.

Hey, the customer's always right! Right?



I found out about a few cantaloupe beers but they are very obscure and hard to get ahold of. Unfortunately I didn't have them in my beer cellar for tonight's meal. However, in keeping with the theme of our twins, I decided to have this Double Trouble from Founders Brewing Co. My hopes are that the twins, when born, do not resemble the horrific man on the label of this beer.

This was a very nice beer to cut through the bacon fat and butter in the colcannon. It had a wonderful grapefruit rind taste at first which turned to fresh grapefruit juice as it warmed up.

And so passes week 20 of the babies' development with another meal based extremely loosely on their development fruit.

Ah, development fruit. It's the most delicious fruit of them all!