Jen and Nate got married. The next week, they started their first-ever farm share. This is the nerdy story of their marriage and their vegetables. With a focus mostly on the vegetables.
I hate the mail. Every time I check the mail (which is about five or six times a year) I am disgusted and infuriated by the garbage that comes in. Jen has put the only key to the mailbox on her key ring and it hasn't bothered me at all. The less time I spend sifting through all the time-wasting annoyances that come in the mail the better. Every so often, however, something truly great comes in the mail. Recently I got a package from Frank, a friend of Jen's and reader of the blog, who sent us this nice bottle of home made cider which he describes as New England Farmhouse style.
I was really excited to try this and finally had an opportunity tonight to open it. It ended up being crisp and acidic and it reminded me of Granny Smith apples the most with a distinct taste of the apple skin. Very nicely done.
The last time I had cider was when we were last in France. We went out to eat and were deeply disappointed with our crepes. Jen ordered some sort of pork crepe that ended up having boar taint, a flavor that comes from pigs that have not been castrated. This is palatable to some in Europe but found basically foul and disgusting by North American palates. It was such a disappointing experience that I needed to take a nap and we later regrouped to go out for redemption crepes that were not disgusting while Jen washed them down with a Tequila flavored beer and I had green tea.
It's comforting to know that we were super lame even before we had kids.
Tonight we made crepes to accompany our cider with leftover Christmas ham from the freezer and shredded Gruyere.
The babies joined us at the dinner table and had their first taste of edamame.
It had a mixed review.
Jen also made a delicious salad with mozzarella, grapefruit, onion, hearts of palm, and avocado with vinaigrette.
It went well with an unconventional bedtime routine, doing dishes, making the babies' food for the following day, and cleaning up soggy bits of Baby Mum-Mums off the floor.
More cider may have made that last task a little more enjoyable.
As is tradition my parents were headed down this Easter to pay us a visit. At least as is tradition for the past couple of years anyway.
When they got here I put out a simple brunch of smoked salmon, toasted poppy seed bagels, rye bread, cornichons, cream cheese, greens, and sliced red onion.
Jen took the first shift in the kitchen and put together some hot cross buns. This came with the normal amount of lament and regret that generally accompanies her baking sessions. The result was also the same as her normal baking sessions: delicious results.
And no one even noticed that there were only raisins and not raising and currants! I am still suspect of any recipe that requires both raisins and currants. That seems a bit redundant.
I showed my parents the best of what New York State has to offer in terms of cheese. I made up this slate of Toma Celena from Cooperstown Cheese Company in Cooperstown, NY; this Eden from Sprout Creek Farm in Poughkeepsie, NY; and this washed rind Point of Origin, also from Sprout Creek Farm.
The lamb I bought had an excessive amount of fat on it. After trimming it all off I decided, rather than throwing it away, to just mix it in with the vegetables I was going to roast. I threw some potatoes, spring onion, crushed garlic clove, and quartered artichokes into the pan along with some olive oil and threw it in the oven while we snacked on the cheese.
Today was the exact day my twin batch of beers was ready for consumption so I served up the first batch, this Tea & Toast from Brooklyn Brew Shop. It came out very nicely despite the fact that I had to use my mouth to start the siphon when I bottled it, something I had been worried about at the time. Apparently washing my mouth out with vodka ahead of time actually worked!
After enjoying the cheese and searing the lamb rack and asparagus on the grill outside I took out the vegetables which had cooked up beautifully with the extra lamb fat and meat added.
I topped the grilled asparagus with some shaved Bella Lodi, lemon juice, and lemon zest.
I smeared the outside of the seared lamb rack with goat cheese and then crusted it with crushed pistachios. This is a dish I made at a restaurant I worked at years ago and Haven't made in about a decade. I think I made it for Jen in 2002 when we first met.
Structurally it didn't hold together all that well due to me being a little too hasty about my pistachio crushing but the flavor was there.
My mother brought some Italian egg biscuits that she'd made which were delicious. Even Jen, a longtime hater of all things anise, was quite taken with them. The best part is that my mom made a giant bag of them which are just in time to replenish the depleted banana muffin supply in our freezer.
This truly was an amazing Easter weekend. It started off with the greatest chicken we've ever consumed and ended with a freezer full of cookies.
Months ago I brewed my first ever batch of beer. Then I bottled it. My first two, small, all grain batches are currently fermenting in the closet so I figured it was well past time that I get to talking about the results of my first batch. Since there are only a few bottles left I should probably get to recapping this experience.
Most of my family and friends, whether they wanted it or not, were the recipients of at least a bottle or two of my first brew.
The first bottles were consumed on Thanksgiving Day with my father-in-law who, despite its Belgian style, gave it a good review. A week or so ago I decided to actually taste it critically and take some notes. This particular pour looks a uncharacteristically clear toward the bottom of the glass given the time the bottle had to settle. You can see a little murky haziness seeping down from the bottom toward the end of the pour.
It ended up having a large head about three fingers high which hung around for a while. There was a small amount of sediment in the glass but I've had more in previous bottles. This one must have just settled for a longer amount of time.
In the flavor I caught a little over ripe peach or strawberry on this particular bottle. I don't recall this in previous bottles but I wasn't really paying as close attention before. I'm not sure if age could have brought this out.
It was a light bodied, thin textured beer with lively carbonation and a slight chalky finish. There wasn't much sweetness or bitterness to speak of but a little bit of acidity to it.
It measured in at 6.7% ABV and 20 IBUs.
There's nothing that I intentionally did to cause it but the beer had excellent lacing. It's probably the best feature of this beer. There wasn't much of a hop aroma, not surprisingly. There was a slight malty biscuity taste with a little toffee. From the yeast I got a slight soapy smell. If I hadn't smelled this on so many other beers I would have been worried that I didn't allow the sanitizer to evaporate enough. No one has died (yet) from consuming this beer so either I did a passable job or the effects of its poison are very slow moving.
While the beer was fermenting I decided to name it after a childhood memory of fighting kobolds in Dungeons & Dragons. In honor of its attempted Belgian style I decided to name it Kobold Monk. It ended up turning out a little more like a French farmhouse style ale in my opinion but the name was already decided.
Now I just needed to find someone to draw a kickass kobold for the label.
I met a man in a back alley who gave me a tip that lead me to meeting Anna at Shoot The Sea, an artist who specializes in drawing kobolds. While I'd asked for a monk, I had not specified the pious, brewing sort of monk. She interpreted it as a warrior monk a la Shaolin.
This was a happy accident and thus Kobold Fighting Monk was born.
And now only a few bottles of this limited edition brew remain.
Jen has twin buns in the oven and I have twin brews in the closet. It's like my version of a sympathetic pregnancy except it's easier for me to get on and off the couch.
Unless, that is, I consume too much of my own creation.
It's probably about time that we let you all know something: Jen is pregnant. That's right. However, since we always make more than we need we've decided to have twins. Yes, we decided to do it that way. It was in no way a surprise to us at all.
However, since no one is interested in reading a blog about babies or parenthood (you can find virtually none on the entire internet) I had to be creative about how I could related this development to food. This was easy given that there are about four hundred web pages devoted to comparing the development of your unborn baby to produce.
While Jen uses a different chart I am fond of the Baby Size Fhart from TheBump.com. According to this chart Jen, at eighteen weeks, is currently the proud carrier of two sweet potatoes.
Naturally it seemed like a good idea to make a themed meal around our announcement of this occasion. Sweet potatoes didn't seem particularly seasonal given that the weather forecast predicted temperatures in the 70's today. However, since it was only 41 degrees this afternoon I found it would be a safe day to have some sweet potatoes and run the oven.
I took advantage of the entirely seasonal cold snap to also brew two recipes from the Brooklyn Brew Shop recipe book Jen got me for Christmas. I brewed the Tea & Toast and the Chocolate Maple Porter. I'm tired of all these large scale breweries I've been enjoying beers from. They're so commercial. These recipes will both yield between nine and twelve bottles each. Any batch of beer that produces more bottles than that is just out for profit. My first batch of beer made 55 bottles! Back then I was only in it for the money.
For tonight's main course I made this sweet potato gnocchi which I boiled and simply tossed with olive oil, butter, salt, and pepper.
To make the gnocchi I started off by baking the two sweet potatoes in the oven along with one Russet potato. When I removed them I felt an incredible sadness when I remembered that they were supposed to be symbolic of my unborn children. "What have I done?" I cried. "My beautiful boys!"
After taking a few minutes to remind myself that these were merely tubers I got to work in peeling them and passing them through a food mill.
I topped the gnocchi off with this Bella Lodi which is kind of like Parmiggiano-Reggiano except it has a black rind and is slightly cheaper. That's $1.00 a pound less that's going straight into the college fund. That's $1.00 per pound per baby!
It was a sad day, however, in that our trusty salt mill (given to us by Jen's Mom) was broken. Actually it broke about a week ago.
I ordered a replacement in and was excited to finally get back to grinding until I realized something depressing.
The one I ordered was intended to run on batteries. Yes, that's right. Batteries!
While pondering why anyone would want such a device I was further enraged by the fact that it took six -- six! -- AA batteries to operate this salt grinder. I'm going through enough batteries in my battery-operated forks in knives. I don't need to add to that expense for a salt grinder.
Now if they came up with a battery operated pillow then that would make sense. I'd definitely pay money for that.
I figured, to keep with the baby theme for tonight's dinner, I'd go with a milk stout. I couldn't decide between these two milk-themed beers so I figured I'd just have both!
The first was the Milk Stout from Left Hand Brewing Co. in Longmont, Colorado. I was very happy with this stout. It was rich and creamy with a very faint liquorice flavor and a quality that I like to call "imaginary chewiness" which is one of my favorite characteristics in a beer.
The second beer was this Mother's Milk, a slightly more local stout from Keegan Ales in Kingston, New York. I had this beer once before, on tap, on my birthday last year. This was extra fitting considering how my birthday just happened to fall on International Stout Day.
This beer scored extra points for having the word "mother" in the name of the beer.
After brewing beer with all grains you have a tremendous amount of spent grains at the end. Even with these small one gallon batches I had all this grain. Luckily there were some really nice recipes on the Brooklyn Brew Shop website.
I made a crust out of the spent grains, some pretzels, a little granola, some brown sugar, and butter. After it was done I topped it with a mixture of peanut butter, powdered sugar, melted butter, and chocolate chips then topped it with melted chocolate and milk.
This recipe is actually remarkably similar to my peanut butter chocolate bars, the first recipe I ever wrote down from my Aunt Vivian as a teenager.
The bars were predictably delicious. After drying out half the grains in the oven all night I put the second half in before bed in hopes that we would awake in the morning with all of the grains completely dried and ready to use for more recipes. My only hope was that we would not burn the building down in doing this. If we could overcome this fear all would be well.
Now we only have to get over the fear that one day Oprah will eat our babies.
After careful planning, and lots of mild panic, today was finally the day to bottle my first batch of home brew beer. There were quite a few debacles including one where I accidentally used a bleach that, somehow, does not sanitize and disinfect to prepare everything for my batch. Thanks go out to all the dedicated home brewers who came out of the woodwork to offer advice and keep me sane.
I woke up plenty early and got to work cleaning, sanitizing, cleaning again, and spending about 10% of my time doing things that related to the beer itself. After a few hours I'd bottled and capped 36 regular bottles (both 250ml and 12 ounce) and 5 larger bottles (both 500ml and 16 ounce). At the end I had a motley assembly of different sizes and shapes all filled with a beer that I hope does not turn out to be disgusting.
By 1:00 PM all bottles were cleaned, washed, and dripping dry. Afterwards I tossed them all back into the closet where they will ferment over the next 3-4 weeks.
After the kitchen and apartment had been thrown into turmoil we had to clean our ways back into the kitchen and from there I started putting together a dinner of leftovers. I started with this salad of baby greens, golden beets, tomato, and crispy chickpeas (which after several days had reverted back to regular chickpeas). I served it up with a little olive oil, salt, and pepper.
I took the leftover pumpkin and crimini mushrooms from the other night, threw them in a pan, added a little milk and cream, and added some fresh fettuccine. After tossing it together I added a dollop of ricotta and some freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano.
After a long day of brewing that I would celebrate by having a beer that would be much better than the one I spent all day toiling over. After having the 6 and the 8 it was finally time to have the 10 from Trappistes Rochefort. This was a delicious dessert treat after my long day of cleaning, bumbling, and sanitizing. I cherished every drop of this beer and I'm going to try to keep it in perspective that I am only one man and not a collection of Trappist monks.
Jen's reward was to watch half a dozen episodes of Murder, She Wrote, her new obsession. Her reward was a bit cheaper than mine but it was okay because we both feel we got the better end of the deal. Jen hopes to someday be as stylish as Jessica Fletcher.
I hope to someday be a collection of Trappist monks.
Today was a day I've been waiting for for a long, long time: brew day. In my normal lazy manner of pursuing my goals I finally got around to beginning my own home brew beer. After well over a decade of wanting to do it, and two months after purchasing all of the gear, I finally started on my own batch of home brew.
The day started by unpacking, washing, and sanitizing all of the beer making equipment I'd purchased back in August. This proved to be extremely difficult. Trying to hold a giant, slippery, glass carboy on the edge of a sink while washing it with the extremely short hose sprayer was more difficult than I'd imagined. I took extra care to soak everything in a bleach solution as to hopefully avoid any bacterial infections. Unlike our home canning and jarring experiments I was less on edge knowing that the worst outcome of bad brewing would be a bad-tasting beer. That beats death by botulism any day.
After putting the 1.5 gallons of water into my largest stock pot it became quite obvious that there really wasn't going to be any chance I could fit anything else into the pot. I put everything on hold, ran out to the local beer shop, and picked up an incredibly poor quality pot that seemed to just one gauge thicker than standard kitchen aluminum foil.
It was, however, big enough for everything and fairly cheap. Soon the smell of breakfast porridge (or cream of wheat) filled the kitchen.
I watched the pot like a hawk, expecting it to foam up and boil over. This was about as bad as it got. Everything I read, everything I've seen, lead me to believe that this boil up would be the worst thing I'd ever encountered. It was nothing compared to scorching milk or making caramel sauce. I was disappointed. I feel like I was cheated out of an overflowing pot and smoke-filled kitchen as part of the brewing process. Either my culinary skills came in handy or I was doing something wrong. It's probably the latter.
After a lot more boiling, adding hops, boiling, adding sugar, funneling, adding cold water, chilling, adding yeast, waiting, mixing, waiting, and finally sealing the carboy up my brew day had come to a close. I had to chill it in front of a fan by the window for a while until it was at a low enough temperature to throw the yeast in.
I set the carboy full of wort into a dark closet where I would allow it to ferment for the next few days.
After doing all of this I have a new found appreciation for people who don't know how to cook. It must feel a lot like this. Having never done this before it was a scary and confusing process. I didn't understand some of the directions and wasn't sure if I was doing it properly. I was reading and re-reading steps in the instructions a half dozen times. There were times where I was just looking at all the ingredients and equipment unsure of where to start. I'm sure I took far too many precautions and I had to search message boards for really dumb questions I kept having. I look forward to a few batches from now where I'm just winging it like I do when I made dinner every night. That will be a glorious day.
After adding the yeast it was almost 7:00 PM so I had to put something together quickly for dinner. I cooked a little crushed garlic in olive oil with onion, red chilies (I was feeling brave), celery root, red potato, and pumpkin. I added salt, pepper, sage, thyme, and a ladle full of the turkey stock I'd made the other day. When that had cooked down I put in some ground lamb from Pineland Farms in New Gloucester, Maine.
I don't know why but this felt very Iron Chef inspired to me. It's probably because it was such a small amount of lamb that it felt very Chen Kenichi to use ground lamb as an ingredient in a pumpkin-centric dish rather than as the main ingredient.
After dinner, to celebrate my first brew day, I cracked open this bottle of Chateau Jihau from Dogfish Head. This beer is part of Dogfish Head's "Ancient Ales" series and is based on a recipe developed in conjunction with Molecular Archaeologist Dr. Patrick McGovern. The recipe was discovered by examining preserved pottery jars found in the Neolithic village of Jiahu. The recipe called or fermentation of rice along with honey and fruit.
I chose this beer for a few reasons. One: we'd been watching some episodes of Brew Masters (or as I like to call it, Bro Masters) over the last few nights. Two: this claims to be the oldest beer recipe in the world (over 9,000 years old) so I thought it fitting to drink Earth's first beer recipe with my first attempt at brewing. Hopefully mine is half as palatable.
To conclude the evening we enjoyed the Chateau Jiahu while watching the thematically appropriate Prohibition, a documentary by Ken Burns. There's nothing better than watching a documentary about one of our nation's most embarrassing episodes. This particular beer enhanced the embarrassment knowing that a Neolithic village in Northern China had more sense than the most advanced civilization in the world 9,000 years later.
Oh, America, do you ever stop coming up with really bad ideas?
Today was a big day for us in terms of culinary achievements. Jen and I both had the day off from work which is something of a rarity. We'd originally intended to spend the day at the beach but a gloomy weather forecast forced us to indoor activities which was a boon as far as I'm concerned.
We opened the day with a trip to a local brewing supply shop. It was located in the basement of a hardware store right outside the employee break room. After a minute they summoned the local brewing expert who was extremely helpful in informing my purchasing decision. I purchased a good amount of supplies so that I can live my lifelong dream of making my own beer at home, however, I'll have to wait until it gets a little cooler so that I can control fermentation. I've been wanting to do this for about fifteen years since I sampled some home brewed beer that a family member had made.
Apparently, I am the world's laziest pursuer of personal dreams.
After this outlay of cash we stopped by to pick up the week's farm share. Here's what we got: three pounds of slicing tomatoes, one basket of Sun Gold cherry tomatoe, two pounds of offensively named Orient Express eggplant, one bunch of edamame, one bunch of leeks, one pound of tomatillos, one bunch of basil, two green Bell peppers, half a pound of okra, a mix of peaches and nectarines, and one basket of donut peaches.
While Jen worked diligently on her pickle preparations I worked on making dinner. I roasted today's tomatillos in the oven. After the tomatillos were browned up nicely I threw them into this stew that I made with farm red and Wala Wala onions, farm carrots, farm peppers, garlic, leftover chicken, leftover beans, chicken stock, olive oil, salt, pepper, smoked paprika, cumin, and red pepper flakes.
I served this summer stew over basmati rice with cotija, avocado, farm tomato, and cilantro.
Meanwhile Jen worked on pickling the excessive amount of okra and lemon cucumbers we've built up. This required a great deal of boiling, sterilizing, and used up all the vinegar we had in our house.
Since we'd gotten a lot of okra and still had a lot of unused cucumbers in the fridge Jen had the idea to embark upon a grand pickling mission. She spent a good amount of the evening pickling the lemon cucumbers and okra we'd built up from the farm and were loathe to use in any of our dinner preparations.
For a long time now, at least six months, I've had this rum cask beer from Innis & Gunn in the fridge. I'm not really sure why I bought it because ever since I made the purchase I've been struggling with the idea of drinking it. I had one a while ago from Innis & Gunn and, while good, it was a bit much. This beer is much the same.
It's quite high in alcohol at 7.4% and tastes almost more like whiskey than rum to me. I imagine this beer would have been great to warm up after coming home on a cold winter night. On a warm day in August when you've been boiling and roasting all day it is not particularly refreshing. It is very interesting, good actually, but not a beer I'd recommend either as an accompaniment to the dinner I made or in the summer at all. However, that is one less beer in the fridge to make way for my eventual home brew.
