Sweet Onions, Sweet Life

Elliott seemed to lose his mind in the very early hours of the morning last night. After tag team matches of feeding him and snuggling him I eventually took him out onto the couch to sleep thus giving Jen the chance to get some sleep. She must have been really tired because she seemed to have no idea that it even happened by the time she woke up in the morning.

It quite cold today with temperatures in the thirties so I suspended any hope for spring cooking and got to work this afternoon making something warming since temperatures were going to plunge into the twenties this evening.


To warm up Jen after a long walk home in the cold I made this sweet onion soup. I cooked down some garlic, shallots, and sweet onion in butter and olive oil then added the braising liquid from our lamb shanks a couple of weeks ago. At the end I tossed in some fresh chopped rosemary.


For the first time in the history of the blog I somehow forgot to take a picture of the finished product. Imagine this bowl filled with delicious onion soup and topped with a slice of stale ciabatta and a mixture of shredded Parmigiano-Reggiano, Cantillon, and Meule de Savoie cheeses. Imagine the cheese perfectly browned under the broiler.

It looked and tasted that nice!


Martin woke up this morning with extremely rosy cheeks and nose. This of course meant that we Googled what it could be and returned all sorts of horrible childhood diseases that he could be suffering from. Occam's razor would dictate that he was just teething but thanks to Google no one ever draws the most likely conclusion.

It is most likely that he has Fifth's Disease. No need to consult a doctor.


To go with the onion soup I opened this Smoked Porter from Epic Brewing which Jen brought home from her Utah trip back in January. This was a really nice porter. It was very subtly smoked and, despite the claim on their website that they only brew high alcohol beers, only came in at 5.8% ABV. It was very easy to drink the bomber with dinner and not fall asleep on the couch. Well, at least not instantly anyway.


Today was a momentous day because Martin learned how to clap about a month after Elliott started doing so. He was quite pleased with himself clapping all the way to daycare this morning, then in his crib, and at the dinner table as we ate our soup. It's amazing to imagine how great life would be if just clapping your hands together could give you the sheer, unbridled joy that it seems to bring to a baby.

The life of a baby is a sweet one indeed.

Good Sleepers and Poor Sleepers

Tonight I got home from work and was able to do lots of fun things like play with the Wombats and do a massive quantity of dishes. It seems unfair that I had to do so many dishes after spending about an hour doing dishes yesterday and seeing that Jen had clearly spent a great deal of time doing dishes this afternoon.

It's enough to consider paper and plastic plates and utensils. If only it wasn't so wasteful to do such things.

That stupid environment.


When I got home from work Martin had discovered a new game: trying to eat his mother's nose. He enjoyed this game thoroughly. Mummy did not enjoy it quite as much as it was a little gross.


In an effort to save her face from baby drool Jen and Lauren decided to distract the babies with the sweet, warming glow of an iPhone screen. This is the most hypnotic thing a baby can encounter in life.


To make Jen's plum pudding this year she needed two 28 ounce cans. This meant I had to find the cheapest item at the supermarket and buy two cans of it so we could empty them and she could steam her plum pudding in the empty tins. This ended up being whole peeled tomatoes. Since I felt bad about just throwing them away I kept them until tonight when I made them into a creamy tomato soup. I used the leftover onion, garlic, corn, and green pepper from the clam corn casserole as well as a little cream and pureed it with a little fresh basil. I served it with a dollop of ricotta and some grated Parmigiano-Reggiano.


Lauren informed me this afternoon that she doesn't eat hot tomatoes. Even after ten years I still find four or five new strange food aversions that she has each time we meet. She let me know that she'd like a big bowl of boiled potatoes so I served just that with some chopped green onion, grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, olive oil, butter, salt, and pepper.

Jen seemed to eat her soup as a formality so that she could also help herself to a bowl of potatoes. I probably should have saved myself the trouble and just made a giant pot of potatoes.




For beer I opened this White IPA from Two Roads Brewing Co. This brewery only opened a few weeks ago and I've been hearing a lot of buzz about it in the Connecticut area. After tasting this beer I am going to be watching this brewery very closely. The only thing that could have made this beer better would have been drinking it on a hot summer day instead of a cold, drizzly night in December.


Elliott thought it was perfect for a cold winter's night.


For dessert I used leftover eggnog, bread, currants, raisins, pecans, caramel sauce, nutmeg, eggs, and cinnamon to make this eggnog bread pudding. I'd made a similar pudding last year but I think this year's turned out a bit better.


After dinner Jen and I played a hot round of Mastermind, a game Lauren refuses to play with her because she doesn't like it when she loses. I'd never played this game before but it's quite a fun game. Unfortunately it has six different colored pegs which are nearly impossible to tell from each other. I think I may take them into the backyard and spray paint them to make it a little easier. I guessed Jen's puzzle in ten tries -- the maximum amount of tries allowed by the game. Jen guessed my puzzle in her first try. Now I can see why Lauren doesn't like playing this game with Jen.

Through all of this Elliott refused to go to sleep and we had to entertain him for an additional hour before we finally tricked him into going back to sleep. Lauren required no tricking. She has been upset about not getting to eat dinner at 4:30 PM every day so by the time we do get the boys to bed and have dinner ourselves she usually just sort of sneaks out of the room and we discover that she has put herself to bed.

It's a dedication to slumber that I find highly admirable.

Art & Re-Creation

I am ashamed to say that I neglected to inform our readers of a momentous event that happened this past Tuesday. When I picked up the Wombats from day care Martin had participated in his first artistic endeavor.


Sure it seems weird to celebrate this seemingly involuntary art project but Martin seemed quite proud of it. Also, the people at day care were careful to tell me not to be alarmed if his feet were a little red.


Today Elliott tried his hand (i.e. foot) at painting and made a pretty boss snowman. I mean look at it! The kid's got some skills. Admittedly the colors was a strange choice but his snowman sketch was spot on. And he's not even six months old!


Upon getting home I put the guys in their walkers and attached the weird toy attachments to their walkers that Jen had deemed "seizure-inducing." I thought maybe it would distract them for a moment while I prepared to put them to bed. Martin was entertained for about four minutes.


Elliott lasted about six minutes.


They were super tired, the kind of tired where it's sort of unclear whether they're tired or hungry. I fed both of them with my patented dual feeding skillz then gave them their rice cereal, washed their grubby hands and faces, then put them to sleep. Then Martin lost his mind and I had to feed him again and put him to sleep.


Luckily I had a few moments between coming home and picking them up to start up this soup. I attempted to recreate the sweet potato clam chowder that we had on Monday at The Ginger Man. I used the same basic technique that I use for my normal clam chowder with a few variations. I rendered the bacon, removed it from the pan, tossed in some butter, onions and celery, then added the sweet potato, added the clam juice, cooked it down, pureed it, added skim milk and heavy cream. Then I tossed the bacon back in, added some chopped parsley, and some chopped clams before serving.

The result was quite good. It was a bit lighter than The Ginger Man's version probably because I used skim milk as opposed to 100% cream with additional butter that they used. However, I think I would gladly make this version again. I'm very glad I stumbled upon their take on clam chowder.


For beer I poured this 2XMAS from Southern Tier Brewing Company. It went with the soup far better than I would have imagined. It was fairly malty which works well with cream. The fig, orange, and spices were probably not the best accompaniments but the overall package was pleasing.

After dinner it was time to watch National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, drink a little eggnog (though, sadly not out of a moose-shaped mug), and pretend not to fall asleep fifteen minutes into the movie.

Deck the . . .

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Poopsplosions™ & Soupsplosions™

Days off have been pretty eventful as of late. Today we had a lot on our agenda. Luckily having two babies leaves little time for sleep so there are a lot more waking hours to potentially get work done. Most of that time is not spent being able to get work done but instead is used for the care and feeding of babies.


Luckily there is also a good amount of time spent playing which reminds us about how great it is having babies.


Then the unthinkable happened, another Poopsplosion™. This one came only minutes after we had finished bathing, drying, and dressing both babies in anticipation of a meeting with prospective nannies. There's a point during the Poopsplosion™ where one contemplates the possibility of cleaning a baby simply using wipes. Jen was going strong with this philosophy until I stepped in -- after hearing her howls of disgust from the other room -- and strongly lobbied for a hose down. I won and Elliott got his second bath of the morning.


For dinner I made this soup using the broccoli from the farm. I rendered a little bacon, cooked down some onion, chopped up sunchokes, and broccoli stems. When it had cooked down I threw in the broccoli florets, some chicken stock, a little milk, and added in some shredded cheddar before pureeing it. It made for a very tasty soup but, unfortunately, not very photogenic soup.


I looked for something malty to serve with the soup but I didn't really have anything around so I opted for this Hop-A-Lot-Amus from River Horse Brewing Co. While hoppy it ended up being far maltier than expected and went better with the soup than expected. This beer was way better than it needed to be with a name like Hop-A-Lot-Amus. If I was running a brewery and I came up with a name that good I would totally half-ass the beer with cheap ingredients for maximum profits. Let's face it, with a name that good you're going to push a lot of product regardless of quality.


To wrap up the evening we had a little Coconut Macaroon ice cream from Chozen. It was tasty but not quite as good as the Chocolate Gelt flavor from last night. It matters little how good the ice cream was because a few episodes of Psych could make dirty dish water ice cream taste heavenly.



Now it's just a waiting game. Last night, after waking every two hours to eat, they went over five hours in the evening pushing our bedtime past midnight. Now the clock is ticking as we watch these little angels strike their silly cute poses in their sleep. Only time will tell how long they sleep tonight and when the next round of feedings shall begin.

Game on!

Seafood Stew and the Pain of Volunteering

I love the farm share. I love getting random vegetables every week. I love the adventure of trying to run out the clock by using them all up by the next pick up. What I hate is the mandatory volunteer shift. After four years of farm sharing and getting out of the volunteer component my time was up and, today, I finally had to do it.

It's not that I don't want to help out it's that there really isn't anything to do once you put all the vegetables on a table. Then you have to just sit there for three hours and make small talk with strangers. The only thing I hate more than strangers is small talk.

The first two years I was able to get out of volunteering by offering web hosting services to the farm. Last year I got out of volunteering because a hurricane destroyed the farm. That was probably the only good thing to come out of that hurricane.

This year there was nowhere to run. The time was upon us. It was time to pay the piper.



This week I got to set up the vegetables and had first pick, putting my vegetables aside under the awning so that they didn't get soaked in the immediate pouring rain that drenched us as we handed out the vegetables.

This week we got two pounds of summer squash, six garlic scapes, one head of red leaf lettuce, a head of romaine lettuce, a head of escarole, one bunch of arugula, Bright Lights Swiss Chard, summer spinach, a cucumber, and oregano.



After getting home late from a long day of volunteering (which mostly involved sitting around, greeting people, and telling them to have a nice night) I had to act fast so I made this quick salad with leftover green leaf lettuce from last week, arugula from this week, sliced peaches, tomato, feta, Marcona almonds, olive oil, salt, and pepper.

Even Jen, the recent hater of salads, ate her entire salad. I figured if I piled enough ingredients she loves on top of the lettuce I may have a better shot at getting her to eat her greens.



For the main course I made a soup by browning up some garlic scapes in olive oil, Chinese cabbage from last week, onion, fennel, red pepper, chopped arugula stems, chorizo, sea scallops, shrimp, halibut, and calamari. For broth I added in the remaining clambake broth (from the freezer), and last night's steamer broth. The result was pretty tasty and the chorizo in the soup made for a very special occasion:

Portuguese Hat Trick!



After dinner I had my favorite dessert: beer. With temperatures dipping into the 50s tonight I opted to have a delicious beer for dessert. I chose this Scotch Silly from Brasserie de Silly in Belgium. It's been in the fridge for four or five months and I've been saving it for a very special night and with the cooler nights behind us this was the perfect evening to enjoy this beer with an episode or two of the final season of Eureka.

Ahh, Sheriff Jack Carter, you are my favorite way to end the day.

Soup and Salad . . . in ONE!

Today was the first day off of work in a month where I spent less than an hour monkeying around with Ikea furniture. I did, however, spend some time tidying, cleaning, doing six loads of laundry, and installing the bases to our car seats. That last chore was made a little more annoying when I foolishly remembered that I need to pick people up from the train station tomorrow evening, meaning I'm going to get some practice at uninstalling and reinstalling them very soon.

I'm an idiot.

The most annoying task of the day was our new bi-weekly task of spending an hour at the hospital with Jen and the babies hooked up to all manner of monitor so we can listen to their hearts beat for an hour. The doctors are hell bent on diagnosing Jen with some life-threatening pregnancy complication but for them it's a race against time. They only really have about six weeks left to have their alarmist dreams come true. So far the babies have not been cooperating with their doctors' Chicken Little predictions.

Sorry, docs.



After driving home from the hospital it was time for week two of this year's farm share pickup.

This week's delivery consisted of six garlic scapes and one bunch each of red lettuce, green lettuce, arugula, Swiss chard, summer spinach, mustard greens, mizuna, and Chinese cabbage.

One of Jen's recent pregnancy anti-cravings has been salad. This is an incredibly unfortunate turn of events at the beginning of a farm share season but I've been trying my best to accommodate this craving by making a minimal number of leafy green dishes.



Tonight I turned the salad into soup by browning up all of last week's garlic scapes, some vidalia onion, and most of last week's leftover greens including the Chinese cabbage, red leaf lettuce, green leaf lettuce, and mizuna. I added a little salt, pepper, chicken stock from the freezer, and milk before pureeing the mixture and serving it in a bowl with some Italian bread.

I have to admit that it was very strange eating soup out on the patio but it came out pretty good. Hopefully tonight I will not leave the pot on the stove with the remaining lettuce soup like the last time we had lettuce soup. Of course that was about four years ago. Jen made it and I foolishly forgot it on the stove top which resulted in a stream of four-letter words being strung together over breakfast the following morning.



Since we're a little low on anything but lettuces I skewered a chicken and threw it onto the grill's rotisserie.



To accompany this odd dinner selection I chose this Summer Blonde Ale from River Horse Brewing Company.

Summer is not really my favorite season for beers. Summer beers just generally are not really that exciting to me. However, having all these summer beers when it's in the low 70s may not be experiencing as they were intended. If I had this beer on a day in the 90s after mowing the lawn I think my opinion of it would be considerably higher. There aren't many beers that would disappoint under those circumstances.

Of course since mowing the lawn is one of the worst tasks I can imagine I may opt to go for hard liquor should we ever be "fortunate" enough to live somewhere with a lawn that requires regular mowing.

Or maybe straight heroin.

The Cauliflower Experience (Part 2)

I really thought we'd struggle to eat two entire heads of cauliflower but (!! spoiler alert ahead !!) after two nights they are almost gone. That just goes to show you that anything is possible if you put your mind (and belly) to it.



Jen is winding down her 27th week of pregnancy and the babies are the size of two heads of organic cauliflower. The organic really matters. It's like one of those recipes that specifies the brand of oat flakes you use. No other brand will work!



I took last night's roasted cauliflower, pepper, asparagus, and onion and tossed them with some chopped lettuce, grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper for a starter.



For the main course cooked down some cauliflower, garlic, and onion in butter and olive oil. I put in some chicken stock from the freezer, reduced it down, then added a little milk and pureed in the whole thing with my immersion blender. The whole dish could have used a little sprinkling of chives or green onion or something but I was somewhat limited by the contents of our fridge and my newfound love for saving money.



Since I am always hesitant about pairing beer with soup I settled down with this Old Chub Scotch Ale from Oskar Blues after dinner. This was an extremely well-brewed Scotch Ale and I enjoyed it immensely. Pouring beer from a can into a tulip glass still feels strange. With the way craft cans are going I guess I will get used to it in time.



Since the NHL refused to take our offer of $30 a month to be able to watch the playoffs we have resorted to websites that will stream the games. The quality is actually remarkably good and it's $30 less a month than we were prepared to spend!

Thanks organized professional sports for being so stupid and short-sighted! It's saved us a ton of money!

Go, our favorite sports team, go!

Sweet Potato Chowder and World War, Too!

After flying back from a work trip to Austin I was ready to get a-cookin'! I had left a whole fridge full of groceries and I wasn't about to let any of it go to waste.



I started by making this sweet potato and kale chowder. I rendered a couple of strips of bacon, added some crushed garlic, chopped leftover onion, red pepper, torn kale leaves, some turkey stock from the freezer, salt, pepper, milk, a little half-and-half, and thickened it with a little roux.



To accompany the soup I served this nice pumpernickel rye with butter. I mostly did this because we had it but it ended up accompanying the soup beautifully.



I purchased this beer because it was World War II themed. If there is one thing I like it's beer. If there are two things I like it's beer and World War II. (Just for the record, if there's three things I like it's beer, World War II, and anything having to do with space and galaxies).

After picking it up I learned that it was voted one of the top beers of 2011 so it turns out that it wasn't all just the gimmicky packaging of this fine-looking box. However, I wouldn't really have cared if it tasted like Coors Light after seeing this amazing packaging.



While brewed under the 21st Amendment Brewery name, this is actually a collaboration between 21st Amendment in California and Ninkasi Brewing Company in Oregon.

It's pretty great that they did this collaboration with another brewery but I think they really missed a golden opportunity to collaborate with an English and Russian brewery which would have also tied in nicely with the Photoshop job on the can and on the case the beer came in.

Even though they missed this obvious Grand Alliance theme the beer itself was extremely good.

Perhaps when my home brewing really takes off I'll hook up with an English and Russian brewer and do my own World War II themed beer playing off this concept.

And it will taste much, much worse.

Split Pea Saturday

On our recent Lentil Lundi I was in a lentil sort of mood so I also put together a split pea soup because I knew Tuesday would be busy and this would be a nice quick dinner.



I started by cooking some onion, garlic, celery, and carrots in a little butter then tossed in some yellow split peas, a bay leaf, a smoked ham hock, the remaining chicken leek stock, and let it cook for a couple of hours.

Then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday got away from us and brought us to tonight where it was finally time to have some of this soup from the fridge. They say that soup is always better the next day. If that was the case then by my calculations tonight's meal would have been 500% better than if we'd enjoyed it on Tuesday!

Math has never been my strongest subject.



The soup did turn out quite well. Despite the lengthy cooking time the peas were quite "toothsome" according to Jen. I was surprised by this as well. Traditionally I suppose I should have pureed half the soup then added it back to give it a little more of a broth however I've never been one for tradition.

I've always been a much bigger fan of laziness.



My local cheese monger recommended this Queso de Vare, a hard goat milk cheese from Spain as an accompaniment for split pea soup with ham. If you are looking for a cheese to pair with split pea soup (the odds are probably low) I'd get behind this one. Great stuff.



I decided to be brave and have my first beer in about a week with this Sky High Rye from Arcadia Ales. Their website is listed as currently under construction and if that means they're too busy making beers like this to update it then that is just fine with me. This beer was extremely delicious, loaded with lots of floral hoppiness and a nice soft bitterness that was a nice complement to the smoky pea soup. I don't think I've ever had a Rye beer before, surprisingly. If this is any indication of how good they are I just may have to start buying them more often.

That is, of course, after I've gone through the fifty-some-odd beers in my overflowing beer cellar. I wouldn't want to be wasteful.

Or get yelled at by Jen. Cheers!

The Return of the Dairy

I've been on a stictly vegan diet for the past three-and-a-half days. This followed on the heels of a horrible reaction to whatever I ate on Thursday. Perhaps it was the abundance of pickled herring. Maybe it was my body rejecting the celebration of excess in Jen's absence.

Serves me right for having a single beer. I need to know my limits.



Speaking of beer, I decided to start the night off with my first beer since the ugly ordeal. I selected this Big Moose Ale from Saranac Brewery. The label states: "We don't call it Big Moose for nothing!" I'm not really sure what that is supposed to mean but the beer is pretty good. It's an American Pale ale with a nice hoppy flavor from being dry hopped.

It's similar to other winter seasonals, most notably, Sierra Nevada's annual Celebration brew. This one, however, features a festive moose tearing across the tundra.

+1 for Big Moose Ale.



At the farmer's market yesterday Jen spotted some cauliflower and had a sudden craving for a cauliflower soup. I obliged this evening by making this cream of cauliflower soup with rendered bacon, butter, garlic, onion, cauliflower, turkey stock, salt, and pepper. I pulsed it in the food processor and served it up with some Gruyere cheese toasts made on slices of fresh baguette.

This soup marked a very nice return to the world of dairy. Jen's idea was a good one and, so far, I haven't become supremely ill.

If I do have a reaction to this then clearly I'm just not cut out to eat meat or dairy anymore and I will return to a diet of thrice-a-day miso soup.

That won't get old.

Cold Remedies & Leftovers

We returned home to New York only to find that I was stricken with a terrible cold, the kind of cold that makes me even more cranky than normal. I had most of the early part of the day to kick around, grumble, and drink ginger, lemon, and honey tea so by the time Jen got home I was only mostly insufferable.



As I've mentioned many times it is nearly impossible to pair beer or wine with soup. Since I'd planned to make soup I decided to have a beer about two hours before the soup to make things easier.

Tonight I selected this Hibernator from Long Trail Brewing Co. As we roll into the near winter months it will be all about Christmas and winter beers. There are probably 400 different varieties that I will see this year so I'll need to be extra selective about what I choose to pair with dinner and what I don't get around to sampling at all.

Given my love for Long Trail I thought this was a good way to kick off the winter season. And by winter season I mean winter beer season, not actual winter.



With my cold lingering I decided soup would be a good move. I took some of the remaining turkey from Thanksgiving and spent most of the day making turkey stock. With some of the stock I made this turkey soup with garlic, ginger, onion, carrot, celery, egg noodles, parsley, and lots of black pepper.

I also put in a dash of Worchestershire sauce at Jen's recommendation and I'm pretty sure all of that added up to clearing out my sinuses nicely.



Jen's not a huge fan of soup as a main course so I also took the remaining stuffing and added an egg, some Gruyere, parsley, and a little milk before baking it in the oven to make a savory bread pudding.



I was going to go straight back to tea and add a little brandy but then I decided that leaving the tea out may be a better idea. I did cut the brandy with a little Bénédictine for the herbal and medicinal qualities of the drink. Then I sipped it over the course of about two hours. Bénédictine is made by monks so it has a long tradition and closely guarded recipe.

Besides, I just like anything made by monks.