Ham and veggie frittata, toast with homemade grape jelly, and grapefruit. January’s meal plan called for several soups, but it’s been so warm that we’re improvising with some of the soup ingredients to have warmer weather meals, because who wants soup when it’s 70 degrees outside??
01.08.12 Dinner
Corn chowder and honey brown ale beer bread (don’t worry, the cheap beer wasn’t very good on its own). Word to the wise: don’t add a couple of grated potatoes to a big pot of soup if you don’t intend to let it cook for a good long while. The uncooked potato will turn what you had hoped to be two more nights’ dinner into stinky black mush.
01.06.12 Dinner
Homemade Pad Thai. I was pretty impressed with myself for getting it pretty close! Also, the internet taught me that if you put the white part of a green onion in a cup of water, the green part will grow back given some time. No more buying green onions for us!!
Trying Out A New Toy
For mid-January, yesterday ended up being a pretty gorgeous day for brewing. The sun was shining (occasionally) and the temperature held in the mid-40s for most of the afternoon. Thus, with Brooke and Meg out of the house, I opted to make the Chinook IPA Mom and Dad got me for Christmas.
This time, however, I also got to try out one of our new immersion wort chillers, so I figured I’d take the time to explain what this thing does and how to use it. Generally, you boil your wort (i.e. unfermented beer) for about an hour, and you add hops and other components during that period. However, you can’t add the yeast until the beer has cooled to below 100 F, though preferably closer to 80 F. You need to cool it down as rapidly as possible, so you can hopefully get it into your sealed fermentation vessel as soon as possible, including yeast.
For previous batches, we’ve always just put that big 5 gal. pot in an ice bath, though we’d have to add additional ice and cold water throughout, frequently taking well over an hour to cool down. Here’s where a wort chiller comes in: you run cold water through its copper tubing to act as a heat exchanger, removing heat from the wort quickly as cold water takes it away.
As this was my first time using said device, I had to do a few things first, namely, clean it.
In the process of manufacturing, the copper tubing tends to have coatings of various oils and oxidized gunk that you don’t really want in your beer. Reading from John Palmer’s “How To Brew,” I found that before you use the chiller for the first time, you need to clean it with some kind of industrial copper cleaner, or alternatively, just use distilled white vinegar. The oils and oxidation products tend to come off the tubing in acidic solutions, and as beer is slightly acidic, all that stuff would end up in the beer. Thus, bathing the chiller in diluted vinegar (the stuff from the store is 5% acetic acid) shines it up nicely.
After soaking for maybe 20 min in vinegar, I rinsed it off well and let it air dry while the beer was boiling. When there’s about 10 min left in the boil, I then put the chiller in the brew pot, so the act of boiling would help sanitize the chiller. Though I’d just cleaned it in vinegar, there could still be some “bugs” on the outside of the tubing, so the boiling should take care of it.
Once I’d reached the end of the boil, I carried the pot and chiller down to the basement and hooked it up to a sink using an old washing machine hose.
Cold water going in and through the tube, then coming out the other end. I didn’t have a hose that fit that end of the tubing, so I just make sure to only keep the water pressure at something manageable, so it would stay within the sink.
The wort cooled down in about 20 min. Good deal!
Now that the chiller’s been cleaned before, I shouldn’t have to soak it in vinegar again, though forum posts on the interwebs will tell you that some people insist on cleaning it every time. In theory, all you should have to do is rinse it with water, then put it in the wort for 10 min while it’s boiling, then rinse it once you’re done.
All in all, it was remarkably easy and cut down on some of the total time spent brewing. Now, we’ll just have to wait another month or so to see how the beer turned out!
12.31.11 Breakfast
Egg in a hole, more leftover Christmas ham, and pineapple. The pineapple was a dollar and tasted like it, so it made it’s final appearance New Year’s morning in a smoothie.
12.29.11 Dinner
Tomato soup (even with nonstop canning in August and September, I’m still going to run out of tomatoes before summer), grilled cheese on homemade bread, and pineapple.
12.27.11 Dinner
Leftover Christmas ham, california blend, and noodles in casserole form. This made a good dinner and an even better lunch for a couple of days! Sorry the applesauce doesn’t look particularly appetizing, but Meg sure likes it (“appo…saw”)!!
New Brewing Toys
While I received quite a new wonderful gifts for Christmas this year, I thought I’d mention a few of the brewing-related ones here. Firstly, as you see above, my talented sister was kind enough to design beer bottle labels for us! Two different versions, both of which look quite good (though the “hop”-containing green one is probably my favorite), and labeled “Andy & Brooke’s Linsenbrew.” How exactly we never thought of “Linsenbrew,” I’ll never know, but I certainly got a kick out of these. I’ll probably only use them on beer batches I save for aging, and for those I take places or give away (these three are destined for my cousin, for example), but I’m very glad to have them!
In other brewing news, we got some additional equipment that I’m looking forward to trying. We got two wort chillers, which are essentially just “radiators” that pump cold water through copper tubing that you put into the wort after you boil it for an hour. It’s important to cool the wort down as quickly as possible before adding the yeast, and up until now, we’ve usually filled the sink with ice and cooled it down that way (frequently taking 2+ hrs…). Now, we have a means of cooling it down much more quickly, which will cut down on brewing time considerably. We’ll probably use one of them for beer, and the other we’ll use for Brooke’s yogurt, which also requires a cooling step before you’re done. Each chiller has slightly different fittings, so we haven’t decided which one will be used for which purpose, but regardless, we’re looking forward to giving them a try.
I also got a bottle drying rack, similar to this one. Usually, I just clean each bottle and let them dry upside-down in laundry baskets. This is a “functional” solution, but isn’t exactly ideal. I usually need around 45 bottles cleaned, with the remaining beer going in 1 L or 2 L bottles. This drying rack should take up far less space and leave the laundry baskets available for…you know…laundry…
Finally, we got a Chinook IPA beer kit. This is a kit I’d considered doing awhile back but hadn’t tried it yet. The key reason I wanted it was because it only takes around 6 weeks to make, while other IPA varieties like to have 2 months fermenting, followed by bottling and conditioning. The last IPA I made got quite a bit better with an additional month of aging so, while I thought it ended up fine, it sure took a long time to be “drinkable.” Hopefully, this recipe solves that issue.
So yeah, got some new toys for Christmas to feed the beer brewing needs. I may get a chance to brew this one on New Year’s Day, but could push it off a bit, yet. Then, we need to start thinking about what the next batch will be, likely either a Cream Ale or a Czech Pilsner. We’re trying to get a recipe that’s radically different from the others we’ve made, as the Dunkelweizen that just finished tastes pretty similar to some of the others we’ve made.
Potato Candy!
I had a potato candy revelation this year. In the past, I’ve made plain candy, mint, cherry, chocolate, coconut, and nut. Why I never thought about peanut butter, I’ll never know. So, this year, I went with peanut butter candy. Andy usually does the chocolate dipping because it frustrates me when the candies don’t look perfect. But, we just dipped the bottoms this time and then drizzled more chocolate on the top. I think they look super pretty and taste even better. The new and improved method/recipe is below!
Ingredients:
- Medium potato (about the size of an adult’s fist)
- 2 pounds powdered sugar
- 1 cup peanut butter
- 1 tablespoon vanilla
- Chocolate (I used a combination of semisweet, milk, and baking, just to use up some ends of packages)
Method:
- Peel the potato and chop it into large chunks, as if making mashed potatoes. Cover chopped potato with water and boil until tender. Drain and dump potatoes back into your pot to make sure any remaining water evaporates.
- Mash potato and peanut butter together. If you happen to have a fancy stand mixer, feel free to do this part in there and save your arm muscles.
- Slowly mix in the first pound of powdered sugar. You’ll notice the potato sort of liquefies when you start mixing. That’s supposed to happen, so don’t freak out. Begin mixing in the second pound of powdered sugar, a cup or so at a time. You might not need the whole two pounds for your candy, but it was rainy the day I made mine, so I ended up needing it. The candy should just hold together when you try to scoop it, but not be sticky at all.
- Scoop the candy using a small cookie scoop (or bigger if you want). Line the scooped candy up on a Silpat or parchment lined baking sheet that will fit in your freezer. Freeze for a few hours until firm and dry.
- Dip candy in melted chocolate. If the candy becomes too soft to easily dip, put the tray back in the freezer for awhile. Drizzle additional chocolate on top in a “Z” pattern.
12.13.11 Dinner
Last Tuesday’s Family Dinner. Biscuits and gravy, hashbrowns (made in the oven), and fruit. You can’t really see the food in this picture, but my sisters are usually the most fun part of Tuesday night dinners, anyway, so you get to see them!
