Sit and Spin . . . and GRILL!

One of the things I really love about my new grill is that it comes ready to attach a rotisserie! No sooner had I figured that out than I ordered one and received it in the mail, the thoughts of spit-cooked meats dancing in my mind.



I imagined this would be idyllic like that time Jamie Oliver found a 100-year-old antique wind up spit roaster and cooked a leg of lamb over a trench he dug in the ground and filled with coals. It wasn't quite the same, rather it was a grill wheeled out behind a garage with an extension cord dangling on the side, but it was still one of the meals I've been the most excited about making in a long, long time.



It was not actually that idyllic. This one ran on electricity. Electricity that was not as available outside as I had assumed it would be. I worked around this by connecting two extension cords together and dangling them out my window to power the thing.

I'm glad I made the decision to get the plug in version. While this is not ideal it is better than having batteries die mid roast and having a chicken that is raw on one side and burned on the other. However it was raining today so the chances of being electrocuted were dramatically higher than with a battery operated model.



The end results were impressive. While no chicken can compare to the Cob Cob Chicken I made for Passover, this chicken turned out great. I seasoned it with salt and pepper and put it on the spit for two hours on the lowest burner setting. The meat was tender and moist and the skin crispy and delicious.



I made a salad with blue cheese dressing, cornbread, and this baked potato with sour cream and tons of chopped avocado as an accompaniment.



For a drink I thought this Porter from Founders Brewing Co. would go down nicely with some roasted chicken. I was right. At 6.5% ABV it was one of the lowest alcohol beers I've had in a long time. I could have easily gone for another but I rarely buy more than one of the same beer. This beer had nice roasted coffee notes and a dark chocolate bitterness.

This beer was dark, rich, and sexy, much like the wealthy baroness displayed on the bottle. I haven't had a porter in a while and I'd recommend this one strongly for any meal of grilled meats or rich creamy cheeses.

I'd also recommend it to oil tycoons looking to make an honest woman their wife.

Brewing and Babies (But Not Brewing Babies)

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.



After stumbling across a recipe for Barley & Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars it became clear that this was definitely what I was making.

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.

Wild and Crazy Salmon!

The clock is ticking on a lot of the items in the fridge. While most things are in pretty good shape I've been eying the cucumbers and green onions with a good deal of attention over the past week. The vegetables bave been in the fridge for a while now and the time for our attack has come!



I started by making a pesto using the remaining green onions, garlic, olive oil, salt, and pepper. I combined it with some cooked basmati rice and a little butter.



The remaining farm zucchini got shredded and combined with panko, egg, diced farm red onion, farm parsley, grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, diced mozzarella, salt, pepper, and Old Bay seasoning. I squeezed out the excess moisture from the zucchini before combining this all together and pan frying.



There was a nice piece of wild salmon in the fridge. That sounds like I don't know how it got there but I'm pretty sure it's the same salmon I bought on Friday night. While I'm not a huge fan of wild salmon I got this one because it was on sale and, it turns out, it was pretty good. I made a sauce for the salmon using yogurt, dill, cucumber, salt, pepper, and sherry vinegar.



For beer I opened a bottle of Marauder IPA Cavalry Brewing. IPAs happen to be one of my least favorite types of beer but I do like supporting Cavalry as they are small and close by. This beer ended up being much darker than I'd expected and at 40 IBUs it was far less bitter as well. While most IPAs tend to be closer to 70 or even 100 IBUs this one was like an IPA with training wheels. This means I liked it more than most IPAs but I'm not sure how IPA fans would feel about it.



For dessert we had this cherry ice cream that I made the other day. It made good use of a bag of hastily purchased cherries which had been in the fridge for nearly two weeks without being used. I also made a quick chocolate sauce which I poured over the top before we ate it.



An unfortunate thing happened when I made the ice cream in that our immersion blender began making a super loud noise then actually fell apart as I blended the ice cream mixture. Luckily no pieces of metal or plastic fell into the ice cream though. At least none that we ate this evening. Perhaps there will be deadly metal or plastic fragments that will turn up later and cause us huge dental bills, thus becoming one of the most expensive bowls of ice cream in the world.

Well, the most expensive ice cream might still be reserved for that stupid ice cream with the gold leaf that always wins top billing in one of those stupid "10 Most Expensive Restaurant Meals Ever" lists in some dumb magazine.

What's the point? Might as well just make a fish en papillote using $100 bills.

Ol' Dirty Lettuce

The Monday rush was on as I raced down 95 to get home and pick up the farm share. I've missed the mad rush home to pick up the farm share. I just pray that I don't eventually end up missing a pick up like that one sad, sad day in 2009.



If I do miss it (and I hope I don't) this was not going to be the week. I made it with time to spare. This week's haul consisted of: Butter Head Lettuce, Green Towers Romaine Lettuce, Red Sail Lettuce, escarole, garlic scapes, radishes, summer squash, summer spinach, and a bunch of oregano

There have been heavy rains which have kicked up a huge amount of mud onto the lettuce resulting in the dirtiest lettuce I've ever encountered. Last week was the same which turned the small crack in my salad spinner into a gaping canyon of leaky water. Thus was the end of its life and I had to pick up a new one today.



Old and busted.



New hotness.

Still I had to wash my lettuce more than ten times. On the tenth or eleventh wash (I lost count) there was still dirt in the water. Eventually I figured I just gave up when my fingers had wrinkled as if I'd spent all afternoon in a pool. Eventually one has to accept some level of grits and just get on with dinner.



The Red Sail looked beautiful so I made a salad with that, the radishes, some lime, cilantro, olive oil, salt, pepper, the remaining Zima tomatoes, and feta cheese.



The farm recommended a recipe for garlic scape pesto which sounded pretty good. I pretty much followed the recipe by cutting up the scapes, adding some toasted walnuts, grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, salt, pepper, and olive oil. The only thing I really did differently was adding a lot of extra olive oil and omitting the yogurt.



I served the pesto with some of my homemade gnocchi along with some ricotta. Sadly my gnocchi just don't freeze all that well. Last time I made them I put them into the water still frozen and by the time they were cooked they had bloated to be the size of golf balls. This time I thawed them out and they were soft and messy before they hit the water.

At any rate, the gnocchi was pretty good despite its messy appearance and texture.



For beer I opened this In-Heat Wheat from Flying Dog Brewery. This is a beer both Jen and I could easily enjoy. It has something for everyone. For me it was a nice light summery beer to pair with this late (extremely late) spring dish. For Jen it was a hefeweizen which is the main thing she looks at in a beer: is it or is it not a hefeweizen? It passed this test with flying colors.



For dessert I served up some slices of my rebranded blueberry custard pie (previously known as Blueberry "Napolean") from the other night.

I thought tonight we may carry our Abrahams and Zucker streak into this week with some of the Naked Gun movies. Instead I chose not to recommend this. Jen has been more than accommodating with this week's movies so I didn't want to spoil a good thing.

Besides, it's been nearly ten days since we've watch an episode of Top Gear. Who can live like that?