Fruit and Flowers and Beer

Friday was our fourth wedding anniversary. We had kind of made a pact not to get anything for each other. We did this last year except that we got each other a two week trip to Switzerland and France. This year we broke our promise again on an extremely small scale.



Jen got me three fruit-themed beers as the fourth anniversary is supposedly the "Fruit and Flowers" anniversary. I got Jen flowers and also some apricots and peaches to round out the theme. It's probably our lowest key anniversary to date. This would be a tremendous savings if it weren't for the enormous expense of rapidly approaching twins' birth.

We had a guest in town this weekend, Jen's friend Amanda. For our anniversary we ate dinner at a local pub. This was every bit as romantic as our anniversary dinner last year and about ten times better an experience. Last year we waited 45 minutes to get our drink order taken at a restaurant we had previously been eager to visit. While it was an awful experience it has given us plenty to complain about over the past year and that is something I am very grateful for.



Tonight I grilled up some corn and made a version of Mexican street corn with a sauce of Cotija, sour cream, mayonnaise, lime, chili powder, hot sauce, smoked paprika, salt, and cumin.



For the main course I made enchiladas. I haven't made enchiladas since one of our first blog entries in 2008 where I made potato kale enchiladas. Tonight's were notably less vegan as they were made with garlic, onion, cabbage, ground beef, chili powder, cumin, salt, and corn tortillas. I topped them with Cotija and fresh cilantro.



One of the fruit beers Jen got me for our anniversary was this Black & Blue from Dogfish Head. It's a Belgian-style beer brewed with blackberry and blueberry puree. I can't tell if she got this for me to fit the theme of our anniversary or simply to annoy her father. Either way it satisfied both of those objectives nicely.

This was pretty standard for Dogfish Head in that it was not standard at all. It was very tasty though I don't think a very good pairing for Mexican food. That being said I enjoyed a glass thoroughly. This beer packed an incredible punch. After one glass I was feeling it two hours later. It was 10% ABV that drank like 4% ABV.

That's six whole percent of sneaking up on your ass!



After dinner we walked to Longford's for dessert. With no hockey on tonight we were left to recline in our apartment and pause briefly before returning to the tremendous amount of work left to be done to get ready for the babies.

Tomorrow I get back to work on finishing up the apartment and the long-awaited return of the farm share.

For a few weeks anyway we'll try to use the farm share vegetables creatively before the babies come and the vegetables wilt and rot in the fridge while we sleep on the couch.

It's gonna be great!

Jicama Mama

I'm getting a little sick of this. The people who compile these baby-to-produce size charts should really be ashamed of themselves. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason to how these charts progress. Nevertheless, Jen entered week thirty-two today and since I started this idiotic pursuit I might as well finish it.



Today, according to babycenter.com the babies were the size of jicama. According to thebump.com they were the size of squash but since that's exceptionally vague I chose to go with jicama even though jicama are much smaller than cantaloupes which they were purportedly the size of three months ago!



It may not make any sense but I do enjoy jicama so I quickly turned this jicama into a salad with avocado, tomato, lime juice, olive oil, hot sauce, salt, and pepper over mixed greens.



I purchased some leeks to caramelize for dinner but there was something wrong with them and my knife was unable to penetrate their woody core. I guess I could have used them for something and not have been so wasteful. Maybe they could have been stitched together to fashion a mean walking stick.



After throwing the leeks away I made a quick change of plans by serving this seared pork loin steak over slices of cornbread with a scoop of quince spread on top. This was probably better than it would have been with caramelized leeks anyway but I was still annoyed by their wooddy betrayal.



For beer I had this Torpedo from Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. I've been looking forward to this one for a long time ever since I learned that the basic process was them passing beer through a torpedo filled with hops to achieve the flavor. It was extremely aromatic and tasty, nowhere near as bitter as I'd expect after being passed through a hop-filled torpedo.



Since berries are in full swing already I served up some sponge cake with whipped cream, strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries. In the past couple of years I have continuously dropped the sugar levels in my whipped cream until I reached my current recipe which involved only cream.

I wonder if the jicama-sized babies will grow up to find this level of sugar adequate. In my younger days I would have required approximately a one-to-one ratio of sugar to cream. Now I find sugar-free whipped cream an excellent accompaniment to cake and berries which are already sweet enough.

It would probably be beneficial for the babies to eat slightly less sugar than I did as a child. I guess we'll have to see if their palates crave sugar naturally or if they are able to cope with a more sensible level of sweetness.

Only time will tell. Luckily in one week's time they'll have blossomed back to the size of honeydews, approximately the same size (and sweetness) they were twelve weeks ago.

Ah, the miracles of expanding and contracting fetuses.

Ikea at Home

I can tell that Jen has been sad every since our ill-fated attempt to eat dinner at Ikea last week. She has lost her taste for the Swedish meatballs but still retains a healthy urge for their broccoli cheddar cakes.



Since I had to make another trip to Ikea today (hopefully the last for a while) I decided to bring Ikea dinner to Jen. I made these little cakes with broccoli, fontina, potato, egg, cream, salt, and pepper. I baked them in the oven in muffin tins and served them with a light salad. They were pretty tasty. I asked how they stacked up to the Ikea versions and Jen said these were even better.

I know she's lying but it was still pretty nice.



I have not really been looking forward to this Tweason'Ale gluten free beer from Dogfish Head, but I figured tonight would be a good time to enjoy it seeing as how dinner was gluten free.

The beer tasted a little like a white wine spritzer, and kind of like ginger ale. I think I've had better gluten free offerings. Since it was Dogfish Head they chose to flavor it with strawberries and ferment it with honey. I think I'd prefer my gluten free beers to be a little more beery.

I guess I'm just glad I don't have to be gluten free.



Tonight we're watching game four of the Stanley Cup Finals where I hope to watch the L.A. Kings complete a sweep of the New Jersey Devils. To celebrate I continued the salty-and-sweet trend started last night and made these chocolate covered potato chip clusters. They were pretty tasty but I don't really thing we needed anything for dessert.

Watching the Devils lose will be sweet enough.

Baby Home Improvement

Typing this blog entry is difficult. Not emotionally difficult, mind you, physically difficult. I've spent a large portion of the last five days running around, moving furniture, cleaning rooms, painting, and assembling new furniture. The assembly has been the roughest part as it has required a great deal of screws being turned leading to my forearms feeling like they are on fire. It was kind of like that World's Strongest Man competition where they had to twist a pulley to lift a weight in a race against each other.

Well, maybe it was a little less grueling.



We had to move tons of stuff from one room to another so we could paint, then we had to shuttle stuff back and forth between rooms to allow for our new floor plans (done up courtesy of Jen's uncle Gregg) to be realized.



In the midst of all of this the plumbing for our shower broke which meant we had to have plumbers here for 8-10 hour days for the past two days to repair everuthing to fix the water which was exploding about. They had to break through the wall on both sides leaving one closet unusable and adding a tremendous amount more dirt and disarray to a room that was already in rough shape.



After they left I was able to clear up enough stuff to almost make our apartment liveable. Since I was able to clean all the lamps, guitars, and desks out of the kitchen I was able to make my way to the stove to throw together something simple but home-cooked for dinner.



I started by putting together these little treats with leftover bread that I grilled with butter and olive oil then topped with truffle mousse, Spanish cheese, and grape tomatoes. This was mostly to use up the leftovers in the fridge but it turned out to be quite delicious. It's been in the fifties and raining so the week of grilling so far has not gone according to plan.



For salad I again threw together some leftovers with mixed baby greens, avocado, tomato, feta, and tabouli.



I was just going to sear and roast a beautiful piece of cod that I picked up but I pretty much mangled it beyond repair when I flipped it. In an effort to distract from the destroyed fish I threw in some tomatoes, olives, and artichoke hearts. Pay no attention to the wrecked fish in the center of the pan.



For beer I had this Staropramen from Staropramen Brewery in Prague. This beer was pitched to me as being better than Pilsner Urquell. A Czechoslovakian woman at the store had not tried the beer before but she did give me a kiss when I located a stray six pack of Pilsner Urquell for her.

I had not been expecting that.

I also had not been expecting this to actually be better than Pilsner Urquell but it probably was. I've had Pilsner Urquell pretty recently and this was just a little darker and complex in flavor. Apparently Michael Jackson reviewed Staropramen
in the 1990s but it didn't make it into his awesome show The Beer Hunter.



When Jen's mother and sister visited us this weekend for her baby shower they made a large batch of caramel corn. I saved a large amount of the leftover sauce which had bits of popcorn and Marcona almonds in it and used it as the basis for this ice cream sundae with some vanilla ice cream, whipped cream, and maraschino cherries.

The sundae was a triumph, the perfect balance between sweet and salty. The only issue is that I have about a quart of this sauce left. I need to figure out what the heck I'm going to do with all of it other than having four or five of these sundaes a day. Maybe instead I will figure out an alternative use for all of this.

Perhaps it would work well as a spackle to seal up the giant hole in our wall!

1 Shower, 2 Pizzas, 3 Floyds

Today Jen's sister and mother arrived for the second round of Jen's baby showers. This gave me a slight break from lugging furniture around and the dreaded task of putting blue painters tape around every inch of molding in our apartment. Putting up painters tape makes me long for more cerebral tasks such as peeling potatoes or watching someone else put up painters tape.



Lauren displayed her trademark patience when after placing her hands on Jen's belly for upwards of six seconds and they still hadn't moved.



For dinner I started off making this salad with mixed greens, garlic lemon olives, tomatoes, and Marcona almonds. Then I did a terrifically poor job of diving this salad up. Jen's mother got all the lettuce, Jen got all the olives, Lauren got all the almonds, and I got all the tomatoes. It's like I'm a salad rookie.



For dinner I started off by making this pizza with ricotta, asparagus, and fontina cheese.



After that came out of the oven I made a second pizza with broccoli, roasted yellow and red tomatoes, and mozzarella.



Lauren, in an attempt to get mentioned on the blog, brought me this Zombie Dust from 3 Floyds. This was an excellent move on her part as this brewery is not available in New York and I've been wanting to try their stuff for a while.

As a note to all you readers out there: if you want to get mentioned in the blog this is a great way to do it! Just bring me a beer that is not distributed in New York and you're ar guaranteed a mention!

This beer was every bit as good as I had heard. It has a wonderful aromatic hoppiness. I had been expecting something much more hardcore based on the badassery of the label but I'm glad it was what it was. It was not something trying to kick my mouth's ass like so many extreme IPAs are these days, instead it was a very complex beer with lots of hop character reminiscent of the Wyld by Uinta.



After dinner things took a turn for the worse as the three of them cooked and Lauren tried to stab my mother-in-law.

This is a day that is going to change our family forever.