Homebrew Beeriola

Last week we brewed but I hadn't had a chance to post about that yet. Our beer consumption has definitely slowed down as Chris is working evenings and we've been going to the gym more often, and sadly we've slowed down the production line as well. Last week we bottled the Beeriola, lovely label made by Chris. He actually made 2 or 3 different designs but I voted for this one.



This is the first time we've repeated a brew. I am really looking forward to tasting it in a few weeks and comparing it to the original Duke Alt. This kit was a gift from my stepsister. I think our brew techniques have improved since that batch, and I can't wait to compare the two! The beer was really delicious in the first place, so it will hopefully be even better.

The beer we brewed this week was ISA, Imperial Skitt Ale. This one is our hoppiest brew ever! We put approximately 4-5 times as many hops into it as we would in a normal batch. It smelled great - hope the results are tasty!

Yesterday we tasted our MIPA. It isn't quite ready to add to the rotation yet, but it sure was good! Not as hoppy as I expected, fairly mild actually, but still very good. Looking forward to tasting the Sweet Home Colorado in a week or two! Hopefully we'll be able to bring some Fat Tire home with us from Colorado in a couple weeks and compare the two.

Food part 2

I made a couple of breakfast dishes that I sort of remember from Guatemala. One is a volcano - a piece of toast (Chris made bread a couple weeks ago and it has been great to use his homemade bread in all these dishes) as the base. On top of that, stack in this order:
black beans (blended smooth
guacamole (I made the guac, see below)
fried egg (Chris made them and left the yolks soft, yummy)
salsa
melted cheese (I melted it by putting it under the broiler after everything is assembled)
I should have taken a picture. It was really tasty.

Guacamole:
2 avocados
1/8 medium onion, chopped finely
2 cloves of garlic
fresh cilantro
jalapenos, chopped
a little jalapeno juice
squirt of lime juice
Just add the stuff to taste, i like very spicy and lots of cilantro. Yum!!

I also made french toast. I made it by slicing the bread on the thin side, then I put jelly between two slices to make one piece of toast. Then I dipped it in frothy egg whites before cooking it. That was pretty tasty.

Dessert. One of the highlights of my recent dessert-eating life is discovering Milk Bar.





This place is awesome. They make the most delicious pies, cookies, soft serve, and other yummy stuff.



One of my favorites is the cereal milk. They make it using real cereal, soaked in milk, and then add sugar and salt. It is so so so good! Is it something I could do at home? Probably. Do I feel guilty for spending $4 on something that I usually eat at breakfast anyway? Kind of. Do I go there to get some anyway? YES. They change their soft serve flavors every month, and last month they were all cereal milk flavors. I had to try one, luckily we made it in on Feb. 28.



I don't know what they have this month. The other most delicious thing there is the candy bar pie. You have to try it. It is so amazingly good.


I also made berry and toffee chocolate treats







and key lime thumbprints.



I am dying to make banana split bombe



but without reading the recipe I didn't save the rest of the banana cake recipe, which is part of the bombe. I'll have to find the magazine at a library or something, I think it is from last summer. Although all the ingredients are probably there. It can't be that hard.

Food - YUM

Chris and I have been eating pretty well recently. I'll start with the weekend before last. We ate at S'mac, a restaurant we've been wanting to try for quite awhile. It is really close to us, but somehow we hadn't made it down there till Friday night. It was delicious! This is a whole restaurant based around different styles of mac and cheese. So brilliant.



I had the Cajun ( cheddar, pepper jack, andouille sausage, green pepper, onions, celery, garlic: awesome) and Chris had the Alpine (gruyere + slab bacon: awesome). I pretty much want to try everything on the menu, so we'll definitely be going back there.



We've been working on a project for awhile of scanning in all the old recipes that I've been tearing out of magazines. Last year, I had frequent flier miles with an airline I never use that were about to expire, and I was able to use them to get magazine subscriptions. Some of the ones we picked were Gourmet, Bon Appetit, and Martha Stewart Living. You can guess that there were a LOT of recipes. We've got a lot done but there are still many more in various piles. Anyway it is very inspiring to see all these recipes. I have been cooking a fair amount this past week. On Monday, I really wanted to make Rasberry Duck.





But the recipe calls for duck breast, and the only duck they had at the grocery store was whole duck. I didn't want to deal with that. I decided to do the same thing with chicken. We have lots of chicken breasts as we buy them at costco and freeze them - super handy. But then I couldn't find demi-glace. I don't know what this is but I've heard of it, and I was surprised I didn't see it with other sauces at the store. Fine - instead I made chicken breasts with ginger chili sauce. I love that stuff. It came out fine.



I also made potato coins, pictured above with the duck. These came out awesome, and were really easy. The longest part was slicing the fingerling potatoes but if you had a slicer it would be super easy. They were silky and didn't have the starchy texture that potatoes usually have.



Another night we (actually mostly Chris) made buffalo chicken pizza, one of our favorite dishes. I use the recipe from allrecipes.com as above but we shred the chicken instead of cubing it. And C has his own fancy mix of sauce he makes that makes it DELICIOUS.

Last night I made mushroom consomme with puff pastry hats.





Mine definitely did not look like that. It was kind of a long process, not a ton of work but lots of waiting between steps, and basically what you get is mushroom soup. It wasn't bad, but I don't know if I would go through all that work again. While making the broth, you simmer finely chopped mushrooms and onions in water for an hour and a half, and then it says to squeeze all the water out through a filter and throw away the solids. But that stuff was good! I saved it and I'm going to use the extra puff pastry to make little pockets and put the mushroom stuff in there.

I also made pierogis. They came out pretty good, but kind of bland. We dipped them in the ginger chili sauce.





It says to buy egg roll wrappers but I couldn't find them so I made them. Surprisingly, it wasn't that hard. I'll have to do it again sometime and use them for egg rolls. Authentic Chinese Egg Rolls

Tonight I'm making these fish stick thingies - don't tell Chris, I like to surprise him.








Lilly would like me to add that she ate two delicious pieces of bread off the sidewalk today.

Happy Spring

I took this picture a couple of weeks ago. My two favorite sweeties.



Today is the first day of spring! When I woke up this morning, this is what I saw:



That is snow flurries on the corner of 1st and 18th. It was rainy and cold yesterday and now we're welcoming spring Colorado-style!

I have not been posting very much lately. Mostly because I've been working a lot, I worked 94 hours last week but only 45 or so this week, since I'm off this weekend I should be able to get another entry or two. I also haven't been taking many photos and posting pictures is what makes it fun to post on this blog. But hopefully I'll be able to post more in upcoming weeks.

We joined a gym yesterday! This was really exciting. I have been wanting to join a gym for months, and we got a good deal through one of the hospitals I work at. We went yesterday and worked out for the first time in a few months. Both Chris and I felt great afterward. I have to say that this was the highlight of my week.

We didn't get to brew this week, probably this weekend we'll do a batch. We are getting close to ordering new kits, which is always exciting. But here's a pic of the peaches in our Seven Pound Wheat:



We'll bottle that in a couple more weeks. Can't wait to enjoy it this summer.

I have to confess that I've been wasting a lot of time on one certain pursuit lately. Even when I try to stay away, I am drawn to it like a dog to a piece of hamburger on the street. My current addiction is... The Sims.



Okay, to be more precise, The Sims 2. We've owned it for a couple of years and I played it a lot when we first had it, but I tore myself away and hadn't gone back. But I needed something mindless to relax after I took my test a couple of weeks ago. I am not too big on TV, and just thought I'd go back to Sim-land for a couple of hours. HA. There is no couple of hours in this game. Now both Chris and I have been spending much of our free time parked in front of the computer playing this game. For those who are unfamiliar, it is a simulation game where basically there are characters and you control their activities. They go to work and then get to buy new stuff. They have relationships with other characters in the game. Chris and I created a neighborhood where we made ourselves and many of our friends - you might just live in Lost.



I have tried to justify this current illicit activity by telling myself that this is the time I could be spending watching TV, and at least this is interactive. But I think I just need to quit cold turkey. But not until I'm best friends with Katie, and Jasmine gets another promotion, and Hans can buy a telescope, and ...

The worst part is that they are coming out with The Sims 3 later this year. I don't know if I'll actually finish my residency on time if this continues.

Post-test post

I had a test on Saturday. I have been trying to study to get ready for this test, so between the studying and the long work hours I've been doing the past few weeks, I have not had time to do much fun stuff. That's going to change! Now I will be able to work on my projects around the house, including making stuff and cleaning up and organizing and throwing things away, do yoga, work out (we're joining a gym this week!), goof off on the computer, take more pictures, catch up with blogging, reply to emails that I've been putting off (sorry!), wedding planning... I have big plans. I definitely hope to have more interesting posts coming up soon.

As far as brewing goes... (I know you were dying to know!) We brewed a wheat wine this weekend, it is a projected 9-10% ABV. Can't wait to see how it turns out. We also bottled Sweet Home Colorado, a Fat Tire clone. Label created by Chris.



One other brewing mishap to mention. We bottled The Dub a few weeks ago, a double brown. Every time I reorganize the bottles on the shelf (to move them around and make space for a new brew) I say, "I can't believe we have so much of The Dub! It doesn't seem possible!" We tasted The Dub once before, and it wasn't quite ready. The other day, we decided to try it again. When we opened the bottles, we realized that it was very coffee like... in fact, it is Double Buzz. (Our coffee stout porter.) We somehow mislabeled some of the Double Buzz bottles as The Dub. Now, unfortunately, we don't know which of The Dubs are Double Buzz. There can't be all that many left, though - of about 5 that we have opened so far, 6 of them have been Double Buzz. Hopefully soon we'll be able to trust our labeling skills.

Brewing and such

We brewed seven pound wheat this past sunday. This was our first experiment with fresh fruit. We put (you guessed it) seven pounds of peaches into the boil just as we removed it from heat, and let them soak in there as the wort cooled. Can't wait to see the results of this little experiment.

We also bottled Manhattan IPA, or MIPA. I thought that MIPA sounded like the name of a funny little japanese cartoon character.



We have some really exciting brew recipes to try in the next couple of weeks. Plus we'll soon be tasting our Brother in Law Brew and the Royal Mutt Imperial Stout. Most recent tasting is Hoppy Spring Honey Weizen, and it is delicious. It has a complex flavor. We have sampled The Dub Double Brown on a couple of different occasions but it hasn't been ready yet. We're hoping this weekend it will have aged just the right amount of time.

Happy brewing!

Peru - final post

Ok, yes, we got back from Peru almost 2 months ago and I am still blogging about it. It was so much fun! Now I look at the pictures and it is strange to think that we went somewhere so exciting. I had to add one final post, because Chris has been working on putting his journal from our trip online. He's got it just about complete on our wedding website:
http://www.sweetestdayoftheyear.com/goingson/peru/perutrip.html

I included a couple of sporadic travel tips, but I'll try to summarize the major points I took away from the trip:
1. Bring some plastic silverware, plates, and cups, like you would use for a picnic. They can be really handy when you just want to grab some grub at the local grocery store.
2. Along those same lines, our metal water bottles were so handy. We were able to buy huge 2-5 liter jugs of water and just leave them in the hotel room, refilling our water bottles to take with us during our daily outings.
3. Print out itineraries for every flight so you have something official looking even if you have an e-ticket. It almost caused us a huge headache that we didn't have itineraries printed when we had booked e-tickets on two separate airlines on our way home.
4. It doesn't hurt to ask for a better deal.

I might think of more. Post your own favorite travel tips as comments!

And one final note from the trip. I forgot to include this in the blog, but we saw the greatest mullet up at Macchu Pichu. As Chris put it, business in the front, rasta in the back.



Happy travels!