Homemade

Prompte et Sincere

2011-10-05T21:39:00.007-05:00

By the end of August I'd figured out that if I didn't rekindle something of a creative life, I was going to die, beautiful baby, handsome husband, and stable-if-not-exciting job or no.

By the end of September, I'd made no headway, but I did suppress my panic about leaving said baby with her loving and competent Da long enough to spend 48 hours in Grand Rapids at Art Prize with a couple of my oldest friends, MLP and C. This turned out to be an excellent thing to do, not just because these are very good friends, but because Art Prize is a very, very good event. I knew not to underestimate Grand Rapids after Newsweek proclaimed it the 10th most dyingest city and the city retaliated with this, but the level of the submissions and the realization that there are regular people out there, thousands of them, doing beautiful and singular and passion-driven things every day made me almost giddy, all in all.

Within hours of getting home, MLP had picked 30 minutes of raspberries and turned them into 3 pints of jam, and C had taught herself to popcorn crochet, churning out the little top in the pictures for her very own sweet V. pretty much as quick as she could get her hands on the yarn. Cabe destacar that neither of these women has anything approaching an easy life or a lot of time on her hands, but they get shit done, and they love me. They love me! And so, although this post and the last had to be prompted by an email from M, I have prompters and am prompted. Here is my heart. Cor meum tibi offero. Talk at you soon.

For the record

2011-10-05T20:58:00.004-05:00

I did make the five little Oliver & S outfits for V. and her cousins for Grandmafest this summer. I cut them out in April, putzed around with the little dress bodices in May and June, and then basically powered through the rest in the first couple of weeks of July, finishing at 2 a.m. on the last night available for sewing. Other than the time pressure, particularly during the hours from 9-2 on that last night when I discovered that I'd attached the back of the size 5 to the size 6 shirt and vice versa, a mistake I'd have to remove four sleeves to fix, it was enjoyable work; the outfits were appreciated by the respective mamas, who were ultimately the ones I was doing it for; and V., at least, got a good amount of wear out of hers through the end of the summer. But given the ratio of creative manifestos to actual output recorded on this blog, a bit underwhelming. Which leads me to the next post....

In which she bites off perhaps a bit more than she can chew.

2011-02-26T12:29:00.010-05:00

Well, I'm not quite the mama in creative overdrive I'd planned on being, but I've made a few things: a sundress that I worked up in peacock blue with cream dots just about 10 minutes before it got too cold for V. to wear it; a party dress in a very old-timey blue lawn that I worked on in the week of V's birthday but finished in January; and a poncho that I knit from variegated, hand- loomed and painted wool V's Tia A. brought back from a trip to Wales. Also, I've successfully navigated the transition back to full-time work and I sometimes read books.

But now the sew-o-rama begins. I just got Little Things to Sew from Oliver & S* so I could make this for V. to carry her beertje around; that might actually have to wait behind this and this, which I'm making up in various colors and combinations of this, this, and this for V. and five little cousins for Grandmafest this summer at the end of July.

Wish me luck.

*Do you notice a theme? Besides liking to support the business of an old acquaintance, I love these patterns! The construction is impeccable and the instructions are great. I am improving my technique with each pattern I complete.

In which she embraces e-books

2010-01-12T17:06:00.008-05:00

I got a Kindle for Christmas, thanks to my parents and inspired largely by the largeness of Infinite Jest, th'usband's favorite book, which I'd been trying to read on the subway for about the past year.

If you're not familiar with the novel, it is over 1,000 pages long, 200+ of which are end notes that carry a surprising amount of the plot, such that it is, and require constant toggling back and forth, all the while not smudging or in any way otherwise besmirching th'usband's first edition hardcover, of which (the hardcover, not these efforts, which he found inadequate despite the fact that I was using Book Bungees and everything) he is very fond. I will say much more about said e-reader, and more importantly about David Foster Wallace, in a not-too-distant post, but in the meantime the point is that the reading is going much better now, mostly in the middle of the night when I'm up nursing the baby. I can jack the font size way up and turn pages or toggle with a single thumb. It's awesome, and I don't think it will mean the end of paper-type books in my possession or anyone else's, despite some pretty compelling essays to the contrary. And the further point is that th'usband and I have borrowed and slightly modified one of DFW's pet IJ acronyms, P.G.O.A.T. (Prettiest Girl Of All Times) to serve as a pet name for V., hereinafter the P.B.O.A.T.

The fittingness of this name being obvious to all who know her, the prettiest baby of all times has already inspired her super awesome Brazilian Tia A. to make the first of what in all rights should be an entire line of excellent babywear, as pictured, except that all the other cute-ish babies who might otherwise be candidate wearers are by definition but pale shadows of the P.B.O.A.T. I can't pretend to take credit for this bit of DIY genius although A. suggested that I might machine-stitch the little boat down to prolong its laundry life, which I just did with a zig-zag so as best to harmonize with the excellence of the original disen~o. I'm posting it here because it's still kind of a big deal that merits celebrating when I turn the sewing machine on.

The P.B.O.A.T. beckons from her swing in front of the Christmas tree. Time for another feeding, and a few more pages on the Kindle.

Here I am, baby.

2009-12-15T20:29:00.006-05:00

So it looks like it's been a year. More than a year. I could go on and on about that, or just trust you to understand that a lot has changed in the intervening time. Most saliently, I am now a mother. My baby girl, V., my most ambitious and promising DIY project ever, was born on November 1. She fills me with all kinds of plans, most admittedly dependent on having all kinds of time that I never have been good at safeguarding but swear I will learn to be now that she's my Everything that's at stake.

To wit, this item discovered by browsing my alumni magazine tonight: Oliver and S., a children's sewing pattern company evidently begun by an old college classmate of mine. That V. is on the receiving end of a hand-me-down supply chain so awesome and intense that the girl may never wear the same onesie twice doesn't mean that I don't want to be the kind of mother who makes her all of her favorite clothes. Who makes her all of her favorite clothes out of custom-printed fabrics, even, although I admit that could be a little obsessive. Who freelances or owns her own business or finds some way to keep her little girl by her side every day. Or even if she can't, who fills the time they do have together with fun they make with their own four hands.

She's napping now. Time to clear off my sewing machine.

After the reading

2008-11-19T22:56:00.007-05:00

Don't think that I don't know that I do this. That I start things. That much, much later, as it turns out (as it will turn out), I will never finish said things. That I cut out pants that I translate from the Dutch that I bellydance on Wednesdays that I can my own sauce that I'm a blogger a knitter a salsera that I'm a crooner and a wife. That I am crooning. That eventually, like just now, between the third and the fourth poem, I'm not even listening anymore, that I've bored of my brewing my apples my half marathon in February. My stockings and my garter belt. The funny thing is that the people I like best tend to do the same things over and over. And over. I know. What can I say except that I'm sorry. Except that I'm here. Again. Now.

still crazy

2008-06-28T16:29:00.006-05:00

Awhile back, I wrote to tell my old friend D, himself known to wrap quiet desperation in some pretty darn elegant pop tunes, that there was a Paul Simon retrospective running that had brought him to mind, as had an accompanying review noting that Simon had tasked himself with using all 12 notes of the chromatic scale in each melody on Still Crazy.

"Ah," D. replied, "this explains why I can never play mid-70s Paul Simon on the dulcimer." (Dulcimers apparently are fretted on a diatonic scale. Now you know.) "This afternoon I finished a 1000-word (precisely, of course) essay on [X ]for our [Y] publication," D. continued. "I once wrote a course description for an academic catalog that was a pangram. At what point does it just become obsessiveness?"

My answer? That darlin', --and this goes for you too, dear reader, if try as you might, all you can see/think/do is one thing, or conversely, you've got yourself some attention deficit or a bad boggle habit--you've got it backwards. It's obsessiveness that sometimes blooms into genius; genius does not devolve, it only transcends. Your obsessiveness and your genius are one and the same real thing.

While I may not actually be doing much to exemplify my own insights these days, I have been enjoying a near-daily reminder in the form of a nearly life-sized coral reef fashioned from yarn and plastic.

Imagine this. Have you ever tried to knit/tat/crochet? Having grown up just one generation after the demise of the dowry, with my own mother's linen closet filled with handkerchiefs and crisp white sheets edged with lace whose makers she'd known all her life, I actually learned my grandmother's pattern and used to give pillowcases to friends on very, very special occasions. It was a labor of love that progressed at a maximum speed of 4 inches per hour.

Now imagine that there are ruffly little anenomes and mildly obscene sea cucumbers in a glass teaser case I pass on my way through the corporate turnstiles each morning, because there are. Think of their slow, practically geologic accretion into the room-sized exhibit we all snorkel past on our way to lunch. I think it's supposed to heighten awareness, but mostly it just makes me happy that that kind of crazy keeps cropping up, even here, even now.

I think maybe we are the Man

2008-05-08T06:23:00.005-05:00

Let me just state that I would get a lot more writing done if it weren't for Boggle, or more specifically, for the online version of the word game found on that social networking site that the kids are all on about these days and that I swore and swore I would never stoop to join because I didn't want my browsing habits traced, right up until the moment that I joined.

Before Boggle it was Scrabble, which just two months ago was blocked by our company servers but which is back now, in apparent recognition that it is far too antique and plodding to pose much of a distraction anymore. But this Boggle thing is a real time suck. My interest dipped after I managed to beat my niece M., who is a monster, in a single, glorious game, but really only enough to make my addiction more furtive. "Did you play your video game?" th'usband often asks after a night when I've once again begged off of some social event to do a little CPR on my inner life. I have no inner life.

To make things worse, I recently took my company up on its offer of a PDA. Now instead of looking out the window before I get dressed in the morning, I can check the weather on my personal hand-held device. Instead of reading a book on the train ride home, I can check to see if any e-mail has arrived since I left the office. When I'm not online, I'm worrying about the extent to which the Man might track my movements. The other day I IM'ed my friend G., who sits a few cubes over from me and who has the same PDA, to ask him if he also worried. There was a brief pause. "I think maybe we are the Man," he typed back.

And so, if you've been waiting for a letter for me, I'm sorry. If you've been waiting for an invitation for dinner or that case of beer or home-baked pie I promised you, I'm really sorry about that, too. I'm sorry about the state of my plans to visit Cooperstown or train for those half marathons or cut out the pants and the little Madmen jacket from the length of roasted pumpkin wool that I take out every few months to repin and set aside again. If you want to help, you could hack into my computer and redirect my browser to the Truth. Or you could challenge me to a word game. If you look hard enough, I'm sure you'll pick up on the white flags and bread crumbs I've scattered on the board.

How to Homebrew event at Vox Pop

2008-04-26T12:02:00.003-05:00

Sorry for the last minute notice, but if there's anyone reading this in Brooklyn, you're welcome to join me and a fellow Brooklyn brewer at Vox Pop at 7:30 tonight for a little How to Homebrew tutorial. Samples will be provided!

Don't rush the chiles

2008-04-10T23:05:00.004-05:00

Q: I was wondering how your chili beer turned out since I am thinking about making a chili beer myself

Asked by Andy

A: Hi Andy,

I've actually just been thinking about that chile beer again. A family emergency brought us out to Fort Collins, CO last week, where after all was said and done we made our way down to Coopersmith's so I could have myself a glass of Sigda's Green Chili Ale--the very brew that inspired me last time. I have to say, it was much better than I remember mine being, and not just because it was properly aged. There was a very appealing smokiness to the heat, such that I think when I try it next I'll roast the fresh chiles first to convert them to chipotles.

Still and all, while I'm a big fan of flavored, spiced, and/or fruity beers in general, I think the single most important thing I've learned so far is that you've got to give them time to mellow or that flavor will hit you in the face and you won't even taste the beer. That chile beer was a relatively early effort, back before th'usband and I had learned some moderation and we were doing well if a given batch was in the keg for 10 days before we tapped it. I think we might have even wound up with pumpkin ale on one tap and the chile beer on the other, which embarassed me initially because both were very unbalanced when they were young. I know I whined about it to a brewing friend of mine, who consoled me with the story of a juniper beer he'd made one September, thinking it would be a great winter warmer for the holidays. In fact, it tasted roughly like turpentine that first year, and disappointed, he left the bottles under the steps or some such out of the way place, where they sat undisturbed until--I want to say nine months later, but that's probably just baby on the brain talking--I think he actually must have cracked them the next year, by which time he assured me they were great.

I still haven't done any bottling, though I picked up the stuff to do it and am working on a Belgian ale tonight that could probably really benefit from a nice long sit. I've also got the fixings in the house for a Shakemantle Ginger Ale clone (not that I've tried one--it just sounded interesting) and should get that started now if we want to drink it this summer. Fortunately I also recently was given a fifth keg by BrewUnc #1, and if I manage to keep them all full, I'll have a bit more lagering time built right in.

Good luck with your chile beer. It's definitely worth a try. Proost!

Ask The Huisvrouw a question.

Taking a stab at Bridgeport

2008-03-16T21:13:00.006-05:00

Q: Hey Huisvrouw, welcome to Askablogr! I'm a lapsed homebrewer, but if you have one, I'd try a really good recipe for a small batch (5 gals) IPA in the spirit of Bridgeport Brewing Co's. Have one?

Posted by Chris DeVore

A: Hi Chris! Thanks for the link to your Askablogr widget and for this first question!

I'll do my best to answer, though I'm not a big hop head myself; you might have noticed that I'm most partial to yeast, and to fruity and/or spicy adjuncts that tend to make the big boys cry, or at least shake their heads. (I recently read an article about brewesses in Bust magazine supporting my theory that these preferences are typically pretty gendered.) I also must confess that I haven't tried Bridgeport IPA, though in my defense, I'm out of their distribution area.

So what did I do? I first consulted Beer Captured, my favorite recipe book of the moment, and then--both to get a second opinion and to respect their copyright--incorporated a couple of alternate ideas from another homebrewtalk.com member who shares your love of the stuff. Finally, I made a tweak of my own to keep the total number of varieties to five, as per the description on the Bridgeport site. Since you said you're a lapsed brewer, I'm assuming that you are looking for a recipe using malt extracts as opposed to that all-grain hoo-ha. Here you go:

Mash (steep) 1 lb. 40L Crystal Malt for 30 minutes in 1 gallon of 150 degree water.

Strain this water into your brew pot and sparge (rinse) the malt with another 1 1/2 gallons water of the same temperature.

Add 4 lbs Alexanders Pale Malt Syrup and 3.5 lbs. Munton's Extra Light DME. Stir well to dissolve, then add 1 oz of Cascade hops and .5 oz of each of Williamette and Mt. Hood (substitute an equivalent amount of Chinook if any of these aren't available due to the hop shortage). Most recipes tell you to wait until the wort is boiling to add the hops, but this method--called first wort hopping--is purported to produce "a fine, unobtrusive hop aroma...(and) a more uniform bitterness."

Bring your wort to a boil and keep it there for 50 minutes. Throw in a Whirlfloc tablet to aid with clearing the beer and boil for another 8 minutes. Then add 1/2 oz. each of the following aroma hop varieties: Cascade, East Kent Goldings, and Crystal (or Hallertau Hersbruck or Liberty, depending on what's available).

Boil for two more minutes before you take the pot off the heat. Set it in a sink or two of ice water to chill it down to about 120 degrees in about 20 minutes. In the meantime, add 3 gallons of cold water to your sanitized fermentation bucket. Strain the chilled wort into this, snap the lid down, and shake it until your arms hurt to help aerate the wort. Rest for a couple of minutes and repeat the process.

(This shaking business is a refinement I've only recently learned to do myself, after watching a friend brew an all-grain batch a couple of weeks ago. I'm not ready to go all-grain or even convinced that it's worth it, but while I'm thinking that over I've been trying to improve my existing technique in a few key areas, mostly by making better use of the specialty grains through the mashing and sparging process I described above, and by working harder to ensure that my beloved yeasts have the oxygen they need to do their job.)

Hydrate and pitch some American Ale yeast--Safale 05 should be fine. Dry hop for 7 days with 3/4 oz. Cascade hops and either transfer to a secondary fermenter or bottle the stuff.

Good luck! Let me know how it goes!

choose your poison.

2008-03-06T21:58:00.008-05:00

OK, here's the deal. I have to post every once in awhile if I expect folks to read this. I get that, I really do. But you all need to throw me the occasional bone. Smile and nod your head. Ask me a question. What do you want this conversation to be about?

According to the blog cloud, it's mostly about beer, brewing and food...all well and good, except that I don't get the impression there are too many brewers among you. If I am wrong about that, or if you are at least favorably disposed towards brewing, speak up. I could have some rhizomes for you. Keep quiet and you risk more posts like the following, which basically amounts to What I Did Yesterday.

Wednesdays are my New Yorkiest day, hands down. I work from home, which is pretty New Yorky in and of itself, and sans the commute, I've usually got more time to walk the puppy to the park. While official sources say that "many consider Prospect Park to be the masterpiece of (Frederick Law) Olmsted and (Calvin) Vaux," the way any Brooklynite will tell it, that rating came straight from Olmsted himself as a comment on the relative poverty of Manhattanites who must content themselves with Central Park and who secretly take it hard. It was raining this Wednesday, big fat driving drops once we'd gotten to the farthest point from home without an umbrella, but then later there was long light stretched over the East River as I crossed it by Q train at 6 pm or thereabouts, and who can stay mad about something like spring?

I was headed to Union Square, where lately I've been taking belly dancing classes from a friend of a friend at a Japanese cultural center. Just last week I finally got a little hip skirt fringed with coins which swing and tinkle and are a tremendous help when it comes to telling my zigs from my zags. Imagine me there, an enormous white Calvinist, blocking the sight lines of a half dozen lithe and lovely Japanese women, swiveling my hips as hopefully as I can to the songs of the Near East. Can you do this in Akron? I didn't think so.

It's only because my friend Y. and all the others are so absurdly nice that I've persisted as long as I have, but finally this week I did something right. My arms were doing this kind of swan dive, spiraling in from the wrists and crossing my face defiantly like a bull fighter's, first one and then the other, a little something I picked up from a previous foray into flamenco dancing. I was bad at that, too, and before that in college at tap dancing, which I actually took two semesters of, the first one for the PE credit and the second one because I'd shown early promise that completely evaporated once it was revealed that our teacher could speed up all of our records with a twist of a knob on the phonograph. But last night there was hope for me again and my accumulated despair receded for a few glorious measures when Y. told me to keep dancing and the tiny, beautiful Japanese women to stop and observe my arms, which they did and then even graciously asked me later how I'd done it. That's how nice they are.

After that it was on to knit with the freaks a couple of blocks over towards the East Village. We've been meeting at Professor Thom's lately, and although their website advertises Bingo nights on Wednesdays, the real action is upstairs, where a group of boozy knitters casts on and catches up. This week a few among us had actually taken to hand spinning yarn with little weighted tops and great fuzzy hanks of wool and would have had the unspoken geek competition nailed down if it weren't for the Wii bowlers down on the other end of the bar. While I might otherwise have been tempted to scorn the hilarity of a whole bunch of women and two or three metrosexuals with specialized sensors strapped to their wrists that allow them to simulate a game that is tapped out in Milwaukee, they too were New York and New Yorky, swinging their arms at the projection screen and yawping for virtual joy.

That's it. That's what I did yesterday. What's new with you?

I feel flinty.

2008-02-05T22:09:00.000-05:00

So let me tell you about where I'm at with the whole brewing-as-creative-outlet thing.

A couple of months ago (and you'll forgive me, please, if I repeat myself--it's been awhile since I've written here) I bought two brewing books, Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels (the former Zymurgy editor and frequent For Geeks Only columnist), and Beer Captured by Tess and Mark Szamatulski, owners of the Maltose Express brewing supply store in Monroe, CT. I thought of these books, not-so-secretly, as Brewing for Poets Who Always Liked Chemistry and Brewing for Lazy Asses, respectively. I thought I knew where I'd shake out. I thought wrong.

Designing Great Beers is a beautiful book in theory, with the first half given over to chapter-length discussions of the basic elements of beer, and the second to detailed profiles of different styles of beer, from bock to bitters. The idea is that with a solid understanding of the elements and how they interact, and a clear picture in your mouth of the characteristics of the beer your wish to create, you don't need to rely on recipes.

My problem with Daniels, as it turns out, is one of intellectual orientation. Basically, he is a judge at the Westminster Dog Show and I am a girl who likes mutts. Or rather, I may happen to like a Weimaraner or an Apricot Poodle, but then mostly for reasons that transcend their adherence to breed standards. Daniels--who, to be fair, wrote this book as a distillation of what he learned from a formal diploma course in brewing, and often does serve as that judge at the Westminsters of the craft beer world--cares a lot not just about water quality (as in: what do I need to add to my tap water to most closely approximate the mineral profile in Burton-on-Trent?), but also about precise calculations of target gravity (chapter 6), Maillard browning reactions and Factors That Can Reduce Color Formation in Pale Beers (chapter 7), and Hop Varieties That Show Changes in Hop Aroma Potential During Aging (chapter 10). It's not that I don't care about these things so much as that I keep breaking my hydrometer and/or forgetting to take a reading on brew day, you know? And when it comes right down to it, how much more do I need to know about the alcohol content of my brews beyond what a sip or th'usband will tell me, i.e. that's a boozy one or a little anemic, hmm?

Anyhow, it turns out that I'm using Designing Great Brews mostly for reference, while my real go-to these past months has been Beer Captured, with its 150 good-to-go recipes that closely cop the moves and mojo of well-known craft beers. The truth is, I don't brew beer out of a burning desire to express the heretofore unexpressed. I just like the process, the smells and the stages and the suspense of that first taste. I like it when friends stop by for a pint and I like having one myself whenever I feel like it. It all makes me feel flinty and resourceful, like a pioneer. It is low-tech and elemental. If the world blows up and I survive it, I may not be able to help the next generation build a toaster, but I will see to it that there is beer.

I am still skill-building, though. These past 4 brews, I've paid particular attention to getting the full benefit from the grains I use in addition to malt extracts in the basic wort. I've been heating a gallon or so of water in a smaller pot on the side, and making sure that the grains spend at least 30 minutes steeping ("mashing") at 150 degrees before straining this water into my brew pot and rinsing ("sparging") the grain with enough 170 degree water to bring the total volume up to the standard 2.5-3 gallon range I use for brewing an eventual 5-gallon batch. This liquid smells nutty and has the rich color of sun tea before I even add in the DME (dried malt extract).

I'm also getting comfortable with improvising. I wound up buying a whole pound of this and two pounds of that on my last stock-up run because I didn't want to wait around for pre-measured kits to be made on my behalf. And due to the aforementioned hop shortage, I came home with what was available, as opposed to what each recipe might have specified. On brew days, I've bumped up or substituted quantities of malt or hops as whim or necessity dictated, and have found that I am as comfortable doing so as I am when cooking. I think that means that I've gotten the hang of it.

And finally, I'm trying new varieties of yeasts that have forced me to try new approaches. Daniels' book confirms that while packets of dry yeast typically yield bigger colonies of yeast cells than the liquid suspensions do, these aren't available in as many varieties. (I just saw that I even could have used NBB's proprietary yeast strain for my recent Fat Tire cloning attempt--dang it!) I got my first Wyeast smackpack when I brewed my Saison d'Etre last summer, and continue to be struck with each batch at how very differently yeasts behave, so I guess I just want to try as many kinds as possible. I've also started filling up Tupperwares with the magical sludge ("trub") left after primary fermentation and storing these in the fridge. What trub amounts to is a lot of fat, sleepy yeast cells that drifted to the bottom of the bucket when exhausted from their orgy of eating sugar and pooping CO2 and alcohol and reproducing like a bunch of drunk bunnies. They're sleepy but they're not dead.

Motivated again by a necessary substitution--I could only get the yeast I needed for a British pale ale recipe in a mini "propegator" pack instead of the full-sized "activator" pack--I made a starter today by boiling about 100 g of malt extract in a liter of water. After it cooled, I poured it into a sanitized growler (read that link--it's cool) and added the yeast. It's fermenting away on the kitchen counter, judging from the bready smell that's filling the apartment, and by tomorrow the colony should have grown enough that I can pitch it into my next brew. I consulted with BrewUnc #1 today, who assured me that I could make a starter from my sludge samples in just the same way. That's how breweries develop and maintain their own signature strains, and it's another very cool and elemental thing to love about brewing. I'll let you know how it goes.

voor wie ik lief heb wil ik heten

2008-01-29T22:32:00.002-05:00

I've been brewing, four batches since the New Year.

I've been reading.

I've made it to the park with the dog 5 mornings in a row.

The other morning in the shower, I even knew what I would say here. What story I would tell. I was smiling at the time. I forgot.

I can't put off writing this any longer.

On January 6, my beloved grandmother died. We were very, very close.

I've told the story a hundred times already, and winced at how I keep telling it the same way. How she was 98, but still beating us at Scrabble. How she'd only just the day before got a hankering for Chex Mix, and made three ice cream buckets full with my uncle, her youngest son, who happened to be there visiting. How she had a little stomach bug, but urged everyone to go to church without her, then sat at the table while everyone had a little soup at noon because she'd be damned if she missed out on anything. How when they finished and she was too weak to walk, her youngest and her oldest carried her to the car, where she drifted off past Sedan, halfway to the hospital. How a letter came from her the day after she died, as I'd hoped and deep down knew it would, and how I laughed despite myself when th'usband read her words out loud to me, and finished with her blessing.

What I've really wanted to say is something about how she lived, but those words haven't come to me yet. The best gift I've received? A friend listened to all of the above and then asked me, so tenderly, "What was her name?" And let me say it. Her name was Helena Hillegonda Segaar TeBrake, and I loved her.

Make our love and talent manifest

2008-01-01T20:28:00.000-05:00

Th'usband and I are just back from Fort Collins, CO, where we visited family and toured the New Belgium Brewery. If you live in NBB's mostly west-of-the-Mississippi distribution area, you are probably already familiar with Fat Tire, their flagship brew, and perhaps even with a bit of their story. It's a pretty inspiring one, particularly if you like it when conventional wisdom about the values and priorities that undergird a successful business turn out to be wrong. Just fifteen years after a talented couple of homebrewers took their beer to market and the resolve to "Make our love and talent manifest" to heart, New Belgium has grown to be the nation's 3rd largest craft brewery and 9th largest brewery overall. I particularly enjoyed learning about the ingenious ways they've made the brewing process more efficient and environmentally sustainable--from laying out the pipes to foster heat exchange between cool city water headed towards the brew kettles and the hot wort coming of them, to using methane captured in their own water treatment facility to offset their consumption of wind energy--and walking around in a space where the twin powers of form and function beautifully combine. I brewed a Fat Tire clone today, and will raise a glass in a proper salute a couple of months from now.

Looking for a few good hop growers

2008-01-01T18:19:00.000-05:00

...actually, I'm looking for a whole bunch, preferably from an array of climate zones. There's a shortage of hops this year, one that will hit craft- (over 15,000 barrels per year) and microbrewers (fewer than 15,000 barrels per year) hard, and homebrewers the hardest. Maltose Express in Connecticut, where I went on Christmas Eve for a much needed stock-up, has had to impose a strict 4-oz. per customer limit, and is frankly out of the more popular varieties. In the coming batches, I'll be substituting Challenger for Yakima Magnum hops, Hallertau for Northern Brewer, and Willamette for almost everything. I'm not really that much of a hop-head (that Bust article I mentioned recently claimed that aggressively hopped beers are more of a guy thing than an American thing per se), but there's no getting around the fact that they are a key ingredient. According to uber brewgeek Ray Daniels,

(Hops) provide bitterness to counteract the sweetness of malt, thus making the beverage more palatable. They also provide some antibacterial properties that at one time increased the safety and potability of beer. Today this quality still aids in the preservation of beer....Hops contribute to head stabilization...(as well as to) appealing flavors and aromas.

Most recipes call for the addition of high alpha acid varieties, also referred to as bittering hops, at the beginning of the one-hour boil to establish the basic sweet/bitter balance of the brew; medium alpha acid varieties, or flavoring hops, about 15 minutes before the end of the boil to contribute to the beer's distinctive flavor profile; and medium-to-low alpha acid varieties, or aroma hops, in the last couple of minutes. Aroma hops can also be tossed in dry and allowed to soak for a week or more as the yeast ferments the wort. This technique is called dry-hopping and produces particularly pungent aromas. Using different varieties and strengths of hops and adding them at different times layers their impact and plays a key role in a beer's complexity.

Anyhow, that's why I need them--and while hop vines are reportedly quite hardy, their root systems are necessarily too big for me to try to grow them in planters on our fire escape. That's where you come in. If you have a fence, trellis, or pole and a place in your garden that gets at least a couple of hours of sun per day, have I got some rhizomes for you. Or more precisely, if you have a good heart and that sunny patch and are someone whom I know, drop me a line and I'll see to it that some suitable plants are delivered to your door in early spring. Some growing tips here. We'll figure out how to ship the cones later.

P.S. I'm serious.

crazy, the sequel

2008-01-01T18:08:00.000-05:00

Yep, it was her--the Minneapolis girl and my alter ego. We've decided to keep each other.

crazy

2007-12-21T22:01:00.001-05:00

Here is a story.

In my early-to-mid twenties, I became aware of another person with the same name as mine. I ordered a new pair of frames, and when I arrived to pick them up, the optometrist handed me the other girl's glasses. I'd call for a haircut appointment, and the receptionist at the salon would say, "Weren't you just here last week? No, wait, that must have been the other one." Once in a shi-shi stationery store, a saleswoman urged me to "sign the guest book"--and when I bent to comply, I saw that the name inked just above mine was, well, mine.

I got pretty paranoid about it. This was in Minnesota, where my family is from and where my parents had returned after a detour to the East that had taken up most of my kidhood. Minneapolis isn't a huge city, but it is funky and offbeat, and I thought of myself as funky and offbeat; and I'd just be there for a brief visit, seeing what there was to see, and not only was there someone running around with my name on, but we appeared to have similar tastes and habits. What if she's not as cool as I am and she's giving me a bad name? I worried. Or worse, what if she's way, way cooler than I am?

What our name is is not important. It could have been, it might have been you, you understand. Don't pretend you were any more secure back then. That's just not what those years were about.

Anyhow, time passed and Google was invented. If you type in our name today you get 5,910 hits. About 150 are for a real estate agent in Seattle, a chemist who works in the same general field as my brother, or a romance novelist. When th'usband and I first met, he dredged up maybe three or four that were about or by me; the other 5,756 or so are all Her. She's a well-known photographer with a show this week in the West Village. She's the type of artist that critics call a Beautiful Young Thing or a Glamour Puss when they're trying to be withering. Mostly they just can't stop talking about her.

I still get mistaken for her every once in awhile, because we are about the same age and both live in Brooklyn and although I'm no longer making art, I still really like the stuff. After I read--in an interview in my favorite magazine ever, naturally--that she suspects her "completely un-feminist" tendency to conflate the beautiful with the broken woman traces to the back brace she wore in junior high and high school, I knew I really wanted to meet her. "I think that that had a lot to do with the outside isn't what the inside looks like," she explained in the interview. "I didn't have the kind of brace you could see, it was under my clothes, but it was hard...." I nodded reflexively as I read. Me, too. That's how the one I wore was, that's the way I am, too.

I'd actually forgotten about the back brace thing when a package intended for her showed up at our apartment this week. It was full of DVDs about the 10th Mountain Division, soldiers who'd fought on skis in the Alps before coming home to found resorts like Aspen and Vail. The documentary makers shared our family name. "This is beyond coincidence," said th'usband, who is a aspiring documentary filmmaker and a World War II freak. He'd just been telling me about the 10th Mountain Division the other day.

I had to do a little bit of digging, but I found her number and gave her a call. The filmmakers were her parents, who live near my inlaws in Colorado. It turns out that she did live in Minneapolis for a little while, and that we live just a couple of neighborhoods away from each other now. "I know you're much cooler than I am," I told her, "but I'm OK with it." She laughed, protesting. Come to think of it, now I'm not even sure that's true--not because she didn't seem incredibly cool or because I'm still an insecure little wanna be, but because she seemed instantly familiar, like someone I've been friends with forever. In any case, we'll find out tomorrow, when we meet at last.

Ask the Huisvrouw: Hello? Hello?

2007-12-18T07:06:00.000-05:00

so what's the deal? no time to blog while basking on a beach in mexico? or have you been stuck in a hotel room the whole time? we the readers need a beer, book, baking, beast update. at least copy in a letter to grandma so we know what's going on over there . . . .

No, no, I'm back. I'll get right on that. Soon. In the meantime, here are some things to read:

1. A long interview with my friend Alberto Blanco published serially. It's about poemas. I've been reading a new bilingual edition of his work put out by Bitter Oleander, and thinking a lot about the act of translation again: what I like, what I don't. So that's one thing.
2. Dorris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech. Those are always good. Thanks, jvan.
3. Oh, yeah, read jvan's blog. It's pretty impressive, and besides, if we wear a groove into the links between the two pages my technorati rating might go up.
4. An article in the current issue of Bust about female beer makers that someone passed along to me and that doesn't seem to be online. Damn. I'll have to summarize that.
5. Further evidence of the unstoppable power of this wave we're on.
6. ....except that we postponed the How to Homebrew event, drank that whole keg of saffron tripel and I haven't been brewing. Gotta get on that. I think I'm going to check out these folks. Or these. Have I mentioned how ridiculous it is that there isn't a dedicated supply store in NYC? Gotta get on that, too.
7. We did go here and got whacked with oak leaves by Russians. Thanks, J.
8. I'm trying to do a Zen mental flip on a difficult acquaintance. It's, well, difficult, but she did point this out to me yesterday, which was great.
9. OK, and to make sure you don't get anything done at work today, check out this teapot video and feel your own dry, clenched little inner flower unfurl.

That oughtta keep you busy. Meantime, I've gotta go to work.

Ciao, bella/o

Love chocolate? Thank beer!

2007-11-13T22:48:00.000-05:00

I need to write a status update on the current batch, which I hope to keg tomorrow. In the meantime, there was an article in the NYTimes today reporting that research suggests that MesoAmericans probably first made beer from cacao pulp, and only later discovered the yumminess that could come from fermenting cacao seeds. It stands to reason that if you follow the family tree of good things back far enough, they'll prove to all come from the same place.

Free rice, for real

2007-11-12T20:44:00.000-05:00

A couple of weeks ago th'usband sent me a link to a little vocabulary quiz site that promises to earmark 10 grains of rice for U.N. food programs for each obscure, scrabble-grade word you can correctly define.

I thought he was just trying to see if I could be distracted from my newfound corporate zeal, but I got so addicted to trying to push my "vocab level" up past a high of 43 or 44 that I managed to feed a village anyhow. A virtual village, I figured. After all, this is the same husband who is always finding my latest item of credulity listed on some killjoy urban legend-buster site, so I was careful not to let myself be too taken in.

It turns out that the rice game is for real, though, and generated enough rice to feed 50,000 people for a day in October. That's pretty cool, but I know we can do better than that. If me and you and everyone we know (to borrow a phrase) can just spend 5 concerted minutes a day slacking off with the rice game, I figure we can feed the world.

Onion Soup

2007-11-08T22:18:00.000-05:00

I'm making onion soup. That's an excellent thing to do when you feel that there is nothing to eat at home, and it's the closest thing to feeding the masses with loaves and fishes that we mere mortals may ever know. All it takes is a pound or more of onions, sliced thinly and sprinkled with salt and sugar and left to brown in butter and oil over medium heat while you root around for the other things.

If you're like me, you've got all kinds of useful things stuck away in the freezer. Take out that old bread now, the loaf that was dry and just short of molding when you threw it in there for safekeeping or breadcrumbs, whichever came first; slice it into baguette-ish slices and brush each side with melted butter. Line these up on a baking sheet and stick the whole business in the oven, set at 350 degrees. Check back in 10 minutes to flip them, and take them out 10 minutes after that. When you do, have a garlic clove peeled and cut in half on hand, and rub it on the cut sides of your toasts. Leave the oven on for browning purposes later. Anyhow, baby, it's (finally) cold outside.

In the meantime, keep adding lots of salt. You'd be surprised how much it takes, especially when you're using homemade stock, which has no salt in it and which by this time you've taken out of the freezer too if you're lucky enough, like me, to have a husband who makes it and concentrates it and freezes it into little cubes for just these kinds of occasions.

When the onions are looking good and brown and nigh unto burnt, you can switch to flour and sprinkle a good couple of tablespoons over them. Then stir like crazy. After 3 or 4 minutes, pour in a half cup (ish) of a sweet, dark rich alcoholic little something-something. It's supposed to be vermouth, but if you happen to brew chocolate stout and have that on tap, I'm sure you won't mind if you do.

With the hooch to loosen things up, you'll be able to scrape most of that brown goodness off of the bottom and into your soup. To which you should now add about 6 cups of stock, more salt, a bay leaf or two, and any spices that come to mind. The dried thyme is good, and the fresh Italian parsley you bought for the dinner party but then forgot to use is perfect. Put a whole handful of stems in there, and crank up the heat. You're going to boil it first, then cut it back to a simmer and keep it there, covered, for a half hour.

Here's where I've gotten to now: I've just shut off the burner and ladled soup into two bowls and picked out the parsley stems. Th'usband is spending the evening with a friend whose father just died, so he won't be home for awhile and his bowl can wait. Mine I top with the aforementioned toasts and a good stiff layer of grated Gruyere left over from last week's fondue, even if Gourmet--on whose basic recipe all this is based--says I ought to feel relieved for the chance to escape the tyranny of overcheesed restaurant onion soup; I pile it on and stick the bowl in the oven. Whoops. I forgot the Worcestershire and the brandy. I just recently bought a quality bottle of brandy so you'd think I'd be putting it on my breakfast cereal. Oh, well. I pour th'usband's soup back into the pot--we've really got to stop eating so late, but I don't believe that he'll make it back from Long Island in an hour anyhow--and dose it with two capfuls of the Worcestershire and a huge salad tong-type spoon of brandy. This means that his will be better than mine later on tonight, and of course whatever is left will be even better tomorrow. That's the way soup is.

But by now, the cheese on mine has got to be melted and all that's left but the shouting is for me to put it under the broiler for a minute to brown it. Then lift my spoon to you, dear reader, and bid you smakelijk eten.

Brew day walk through

2007-10-28T20:02:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday, I came home from work to find the smack pack of yeast I'd whacked on Sunday finally swollen to the requisite 2 or so inches, thick enough for the pouch to stand on its own. I haven't been working with liquid yeast for very long and my impression of it is that it's a little fussier and more fragile than dry yeast is--I'd probably still be choosing dry if it were as readily available in specialty varieties like the Belgian Ale yeast that this recipe requires--so I figured I'd brew right away rather than try to put it on hold in the refrigerator. I also figured this would be a good time to find out exactly how long the brew process takes. I estimated 3 hours, but called it about an hour and a half short. Then again, in an effort to continue improving beer quality with each successive batch, I spelled out a couple of steps that I'd abbreviated for many of my previous batches.

I have been brewing for about 8 months now at the rate of 2 or 3 batches a month until the recent career-induced slowdown, and have grown impatient with the kinds of kits that are available at homebrew supply shops. Some are definitely better than others; the good ones identify the hops, malts, and additives that go in at each stage of the boil, and although they rely on dried extracts for most of the malt sugars, they include specialty malts in the form of cracked grains that get soaked in the brewing water prior to the boil. That makes them "partial mash" recipes, and I've learned a lot about what contributes to the flavor profile of a given beer by paying close attention to those ingredients.

You can make very good beer from kits; and because of the exploding interest in brewing and consuming craftbeers, you can probably find a kit to approximate pretty much any beer you've ever heard of. But for me, there are a couple of problems with them. First of all, the whole DIY premise that underpins the hobby seems a bit shaky if someone else is doing all or most of the thinking for you. It's not that the not-so-great kits don't make fine beer--it's just that they have a nasty habit of packaging everything in unmarked foil bags so that when someone raves over your beer you are about as knowledgeable about what's in it as in that cake you made from a mix and frosted from a can. Second, I have the nasty habit of comparing myself to the kind of folks who contribute thousands of posts a year to their favorite brewing community: I don't actually want to be so obsessed with achieving the optimal fermenting temperature that I set up a mini AC system in my closet on brew day, and we'd have a rough time finding room in a New York apartment for the equipment that a truly "from scratch" all-grain operation would require, but secretly I am a bit of a geek. I want to ponder the nose and the optimum timing of the aroma hops, calculate the bitterness and characterize the hue of my finished beer; I want to lower my eyelids and smile modestly when that someone raves about my beer. I want to be able to give it a name, and in order to do that, it has to be mine first.

So I've begun the process of making my beer my own by moving into recipes found in Zymurgy or online and tweaking them ever-so-slightly with the addition of chocolate malt (as in the case of the stout currently on tap) or grains of paradise (as in the current batch I'm about to describe). I'm also trying to improve my technique, whether by adding a second fermenting vessel where the beer can hang out a little longer and clarify, or by adding in a mash phase on brew day, as I did this time.

Here's how brew night proceeded: at 9 p.m., I filled my 5 gallon brew pot about half way up with water and put it on the stove. (Geek option #1: you can get pH testing strips and a set of four chemicals and knock yourself out trying to approximate the well water favored by an ancient brew house. Brooklyn water is fine with me). While it was heating, I snipped open the bags of malted grains--in this case, 2 lbs. of Pilsner, 1 lb. of Cara-pils, 1/2 lb. of Belgian Aromatic, and 1/4 lb. Light Crystal--and poured them into two large muslin bags, knotting off the ends when filled. Malt is grain (usually barley) that was moistened so that it would germinate and the conversion of starch to sugar would begin. Before the seeds could actually sprout, the water was drained off and the barley was heated to dry and toast it. Light beers are made from lightly toasted malts that taste "biscuity," or more or less like grape nuts when you eat them raw; dark beers are made from super heated and caramelized grains that can taste like rich, bittersweet chocolate, caramel, or coffee. In an ideal all-grain world, you'd get all your malt sugars from these grains, crushing and breaking them first, then "mashing" them in a big vat of water maintained at about 150 degrees for an hour or more before "sparging" them with even hotter rinse water to extract every last bit of sweetness from them. Then you'd take the spent malt outside and feet it to your livestock, which would look adoringly at you and reward you with sweet butter and happy-tasting eggs.

Lacking the big huge mash vessel ('tun') and the barnyard, I just put these big muslin tea bags into the 150 degree water and let them soak there for about 30 minutes. I did get fancy and scoop out a 4 quart pot's worth of water, which I heated just short of boiling and used to sparge the bags as I lifted them out of the brew pot. These weighed considerably more than 3.75 lbs. following their soak, and the fact that my efforts to hold them with tongs while I poured scalding water over them didn't land me in a burn unit is something of a miracle. In the past I've just dumped these in at the same time as the malt extract and removed them when the water reached a boil, but higher temperatures can apparently cause bitterness or other off flavors. We'll see if this added step makes a discernible difference in the finished product.

Next came the extract sugars. I turned off the heat under my pot for just a minute to add them in and get them dissolved before bringing the water to a boil and throwing in the first addition of hops, which at this stage of the process add the bitter element that will balance the beer's sweetness. This recipe actually included 3 different kinds of sugar--4 if you make a distinction between the powdered and liquid malt extracts--and I'm hoping that these will add depth of flavor as well as boozy heft to the beer. These sugars are pictured along with a pound of Belgian candi (a.k.a. rock) sugar, a pound of honey, and an ounce each of Cascade and Hillertau Milfreu pellet hops.

After the future beer ("wort") had boiled for 30 minutes, I added a half ounce of Fuggle hops, which will have more of a flavoring effect due to their abbreviated brew time. At 45 minutes, I added some grains of paradise and sweet orange peel. I also put the strainer I'd need in the next step into the pot to boil and sterilize. At 55 minutes, I threw in a Whirlfloc tablet to help clarify the beer (the recipe called for Irish moss, but I've heard that Whirlfloc is more effective) and Czech Saaz hops to give the beer its bouquet. After an hour, I took the pot off the heat and transferred it to a sink of ice water.

I'd already sanitized the pot lid in the iodine solution I was using to prepare the fermenting bucket and a couple of other tools. This went on to the pot at this point to protect the cooling wort from airborne yeasts that could otherwise colonize it. (Note that the Belgian monks who invented the type of beer I was essentially trying to copy relied on wild yeasts alone, but while I'll vouch for Brooklyn water, I'm less sure about the quality of Brooklyn yeast.) For the same reason that you don't want to allow enough time for anything to grow in your nicely sterile pot of boiled wort, you want to cool it as quickly as possible (Geek option #2: you can buy or create a chilling system using a series of chest-sized coolers).

After about 40 minutes, when the wort was cool enough for me to touch (Geek option #3: you probably should use a thermometer a bit more assiduously than I do, but I've baked a lot of bread and know what temperatures make yeast happy), I strained it into my fermenting bucket. With the exception of the bittering hops that went in at the beginning of the boil, I didn't use little mesh bags for my hops this time, which was a mistake considering how messy and slow it made the straining process. I then topped off the wort with enough tap water (which comes pre-sanitized by the city of New York) to make 5 gallons, and would have gone so far as to measure the amount of suspended matter with a hydrometer at this point (so that I could have participated in Geek option #4, which is to compare this figure with the amount of suspended matter left after the yeast has fermented away all the sugar and calculate the percentage of alcohol from this difference) except that I'd managed to break my hydrometer on the counter while struggling to shift and strain the pot. Oh, well.

The last step was to snip open the bag of yeast, pour it in, snap on the lid and fill the attached airlock with enough water to make the little inner cap float. It was by this time about 1:30 in the morning, so I left the whole business in the sink and flopped into bed. In the morning, I tested the lid and saw that pressure was building, and by the time I came home from work that night, the air lock was bubbling and heaving like a lung. My beer was alive and well, and the primary fermenting stage had begun.

consider this a placeholder for the brewing update that is to come....

2007-10-25T21:42:00.000-05:00

You know, one of the most popular referrals to this blog is a google search for "straightjacket," "homemade straightjacket," "mohair straightjacket," or "straightjacket sewing pattern." What's wrong with you people?

a little green goes a long way

2007-10-21T18:24:00.001-05:00

I also want to share my joy with you about the fact that th'usband and I have a fully functioning toilet, just a year and a half after our original renovation was completed. It turns out the old bowl had a casting flaw that interfered with the air intake necessary for the thing to flush reliably. Th'usband persuaded the manufacturer to send us a replacement, and the old one is now in our living room, sporting a little clump of what looks like bamboo but is secretly a palm. It's amazing how a few plants can brighten a room, we agree--but the main thing I just can't stop grinning about is that we have a working bathroom!

How to Homebrew date slated

2007-10-21T17:47:00.000-05:00

Hello, hello.

It's been awhile. I'm still adjusting to working a regular job after 4 years as a freelancer. Taking the train into Manhattan every day has made me feel much more like a real New Yorker, but it's eaten into my blog time a bit.

I haven't been brewing much lately, either, but all of that is about to change. I just smacked a smackpack of liquid Belgian ale yeast, releasing the contents of a nutritive pouch into a purported 100 million dormant yeast cells, and hope to be able to brew the Saffron Tripel you chose as this year's official holiday ale tomorrow. I've also been browsing a couple of awesome books with an eye towards lining up the next several batches. It may still be 80 degrees out there, but they tell me winter's coming, and that's the weather our little apartment is made for. I need to get busy if I'd like to have beer on tap throughout party season. And if you had my bar, wouldn't you want to?

Here's the cool news. I recently met S., chief instigator at neighborhood joint (for lack of a better all-encompassing word) Vox Pop, who invited me to dream up a homebrewing how-to talk, to presented con cerveza and a little manual, written by yours truly and produced on the Vox Pop printing presses. I figure I'll sketch and develop the contents of said book right here on this blog, which means I'll definitely be posting more, too. Mark your calendar for December 15 if you live in Brooklyn or thereabouts. If you are far, far away, we'll have to muddle along without you--but I'll welcome your comments and suggestions. Go ahead and Ask.the.Huisvrouw (@gmail.com) anything you ever wanted to know about homebrewing but were afraid to ask.

Make that a Tripel...and then a Quadrupel

2007-10-03T20:15:00.000-05:00

Well, the masses have spoken. As there was a tie between candidates for my forthcoming holiday brew, I'll just have to make both the Saffron Tripel and the Caramel Quadrupel. I found a promising base recipe for the Tripel and the ingredients are already on their way; I'm not sure exactly what makes a quadrupel a quadrupel other than more sugar (caramel, anyone?) leading to a greater alcohol content, but I'll figure that out this weekend when none other than my three BrewUncs pay me a collective visit. These are going to be some boozy brews, so I need to get them bottled and aging as soon as I can. Ho ho ho.

What's Fresh Now: Tomatoes

2007-09-25T22:09:00.000-05:00

We are having the most heavenly growing season out here in NYC. Last week I showed up at my CSA pickup and was handed a 20 lb. box of tomatoes, which over the weekend turned into sauce. I then canned this sauce, because there was no way I was going to fit 6 quarts in the freezer.

The tricky part was that I don't have a canner--a big deep pot fitted with a wire rack so that the jars don't jostle and break as they're boiling--so I devised one out of my brew kettle and an old rubber bathmat that I scrubbed with bleach first. I actually wouldn't recommend any of this, because even when I'm not using bootleg equipment I worry about getting sloppy and flirting with death. Anyhow, I've decided to invest in a dedicated canner what with apple season just kicking in.

Th'usband rolled his eyes a little at this news given that this project took the better part of my weekend and saw me verging on a panic attack until he helped me figure out how I was going to get the finished jars out of the canner; if I was doing it to spare the cost of 6 industrially produced quarts of sauce, clearly I had lost my mind.

Fortunately for me, th'usband is himself a re-enactor, and understands that this kind of doing has its own satisfaction, and that even when I'm reaching into the boiling water wearing silicone oven mitts, what I'm really doing is a flawed but earnest impression of my grandmother, or yours, ca. 1940. I'm sure that they never saw a day coming when sewing, knitting, canning and suchlike would amount to costly acts of indulgence rather than necessary acts of thrift.

First I peeled the tomatoes (with an extra set of hands lent by J.) by immersing them in near-boiling water for about a minute, then transferring them into a waiting bowl of ice water. This made the skins crack and slip off like gloves.

Prior to canning, the jars and lids get sterilized in boiling water. I took this photo before turning on the gas so that you could appreciate the bathmat action.

I quartered the peeled tomatoes and used my thumbs (can you tell by looking at my pristine hands?) to open and empty the big pockets of seeds, then chopped them roughly. These were perfectly ripe and red to the core and required very little trimming.

So here's the drill: using sterilized equipment, you ladle the sauce into the jars, leaving about 1/2 inch for expansion. Then you put on the lids, screwing the rings down tight so that the sauce doesn't ooze out when you carefully lower the jars into boiling water. You let them boil for 10 minutes, long enough to get the sauce inside the jars boiling again to kill off any pathogens that might have sneaked in there. Heated stuff expands, so when you pull the jars out of the water at the end of the processing time, they look full to the brim; a few minutes later, though, you'll hear a noise as the contents cool and contract, drawing the lid down to make a tight seal. The rings will seem loose at this point, and you can certainly screw them down--but really, nothing's going in or out of that jar until the day you slide a knife blade or file under that metal lid to release the pressure.

The only problem with canning is that the finished jars are almost too pretty to open.

Brewing by committee

2007-09-20T17:04:00.000-05:00

Someone did th'usband and me a tremendous kindness, and although we can't repay that individual, it was pointed out to me that beer is always welcome. Then it hit me that right about now would be the time to get some holiday brews going anyhow, and the next thing I knew, I was planning a big step backwards, as it were, from the spiffy keg system I started with into more portable and gift-worthy bottles. Now all that's left is to choose my recipe.

I've posted four possibilities for your polling pleasure, selected from a list of a delectable dozen holiday beers dreamed up by one Randy Mosher. If you'd be so kind as to vote (look up to the right for the poll) for the one you'd theoretically be happiest to receive a couple of months down the road (I'm not making any promises, but if you live & move in my world it's not at all out of the question), I'd be much obliged. Here are the descriptions and how-to's for the finalists:

1. Caramel Quadrupel. Gravity: 1100; color: deep reddish brown.

A caramelized sugar and malt mixture imparts a lingering toffee-like quality. Mix a pound each of light malt extract and white sugar in a heavy saucepan. Heat until the mixture melts; stir only enough to mix together and continue heating until it starts to darken. Use your judgment about when to stop. Once it starts to brown, things happen quickly, but it can get fairly dark before it will make the beer taste burnt. When done, remove from the stove and cool by lowering the pan into a larger pan of water. Once cooled, add brewing water and reheat to dissolve the caramel, then add to your brew in progress.

2. Saffron Tripel. Gravity: 1090; color: orange-gold.

Pick your favorite Belgian tripel recipe as a start. If there’s no sugar in it, substitute 20 percent of the base malt for some unrefined sugar, such as turbinado or piloncillo. Jaggery (Indian palm sugar) is lovely. Add the zest of one orange at the end of the boil, along with a pinch of crushed grains of paradise or black pepper. Ferment with Belgian ale yeast, and add 1/2 teaspoon saffron threads after transferring to the secondary.

3. Crabapple Lambicky Ale. Gravity: 1050; color: pale pink.

Crabapples add not only a festive touch, but tannins and acidity as well, which makes it easier to get that tart, champagne-like character without extended aging. Brew a simple pale wheat recipe. If mashing, go low (145 degrees) and long (2 hours). Ferment with ale yeast, Belgian or otherwise. Obtain 3 to 4 pounds of crabapples (cranberries work also), wash well, then freeze. Thaw and add to the beer when it is transferred to the secondary, along with a package of Wyeast mixed lambic culture. Allow to age on the fruit for two months, then rack, allow to clear, then bottle. Lambic character will continue to increase with time.

4. Spiced Bourbon Stout. Gravity: 1050; color: India ink.

Take your favorite stout recipe and dose it with a vodka infusion. Into 6 ounces of vodka and 2 ounces of bourbon (more if you wish), add 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract, 1/4 teaspoon allspice, 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon, 2 tablespoons crushed coriander, 1 whole star anise (or 1/4 teaspoon ground), 1/4 cup crushed juniper and a pinch of black pepper. When beer is ready to package, pull off some 1-ounce samples. Use a pipette or syringe to dose the samples with the strained infusion, increasing until you find the right dose. Then scale up and add an appropriate amount, plus a little extra to account for aging.

social climbing

2007-09-19T08:09:00.000-05:00

I just realized yesterday that I never posted the picture of our puppy (who's not really a puppy) at his grandfather's house with Biscuit Mondale. We went to a family reunion and left him (the puppy) behind with my friend M., who just happens to dog sit for the former vice presidential pooch. The two are now BFF, which would represent a significant social achievement for most dogs, I'd say; it's an even greater testament to his charm when you consider that just over three years ago, our little hooligan was waiting out the afternoon rain under a bench and subsisting on restaurant scraps in a (very nice, but still) Mexico City park.

What's Fresh Now: [Mostly] Local Meals

2007-09-14T13:15:00.000-05:00

As I've mentioned before, September is this year's official Eat Local Challenge month. The organizers of this event, which is now in its 3rd year, are an incredibly encouraging bunch. If what you need is a good rational reason why eating locally produced food matters, they'll give you ten. Tips and guiding principles? Here are a nice even seven. Testimonials? Loads of them. Help with sourcing ingredients? Well, the Bay Area is this movement's spiritual home, but you might find a link to closer compadres here. Enough already and you'd like to sign up? Suit yourself.

While I hesitate to call th'usband and me full-fledged participants--on account of the fact that we haven't done anything in September so far that we didn't already have underway in June, July, or August--the good news is that simply by trying to make frugal use of our CSA produce, we've enjoyed one or more [mostly] local meals each week. I'll give you a few examples.

The Red Meal: Th'usband and I are both going to start new jobs on the 24th. Cooking is going to have to get a lot more programmed without someone at home to run last-minute errands or speed-thaw something from the freezer, so we've cracked out the crockpot again. I had a roommate once who used one to make split pea soup, and th'usband is justifiably proud of his own slow-cooked barbeque chicken, but all I really know how to make it in so far is corned beef. Fortunately, I like corned beef a lot. This meal started out with a red onion, a bunch of red carrots, and some juicy red beets from our CSA layered under the corned beef and nice little red potatoes. Four or five hours later, after the meat was cooked, I took it out to make room for a red cabbage, cut into wedges. Nothing could be easier--and while it seems like wintery fare, when you use a crock pot, you don't even heat up the kitchen.
Roast chicken and applesauce: Our friend A. was having a bad day. After we walked the dogs, I suggested that he come over for dinner and homebrew. That's the great thing about roasting a whole chicken--you can just spontaneously ask folks over, and there will be plenty to go around. I got our chicken from Dines Farms, of course, and brined it for a couple of hours in a mixture of salt, sugar, cinnamon, cardamom, and maybe a few other things like red pepper flakes, but don't quote me on it. After drying it thoroughly and hitting it with salt, I crammed whatever fresh herbs I had on hand--thyme, I think, and some basil--under the skin and popped it into a 450 degree oven for about an hour. In the meantime, I peeled some apples recently procured from my uncle's tree and sliced them into a pot along with a pinch of salt, a shake of hibiscus sugar that an acquaintance in Minneapolis makes (and that I imported to the state on my person when I moved here), a twist of lemon to keep everything from getting too brown, and some of that world-famous Brooklyn tap water. Covered and simmered for a half hour or so, this turned into applesauce, and freed me up to steam and saute veggie sides--a mess of green beans and some more of those red potatoes--courtesy of our very own Farmer Bill.
Mmmm. Montauk: I really wish I'd taken a picture of this one, but our hunger got the best of us. Th'usband and I like to pick out fish when we go food shopping, and look forward to a fast, healthy meal just as soon as we get the other groceries put away. This week, we wound up with yellowfin tuna steaks, fresh caught on Montauk. As soon as we got home, I started heating up a half-inch or so of (non-local) canola oil in a cast iron skillet, and sliced six or eight medallions of (non-local) polenta to fry in it. After that was sizzling away, I turned to cleaning green beans and peeling and slicing some gorgeous little carrots that I had to clear out of the fridge to make way for this week's batch. I steamed the beans, but softened the carrots in butter while I made up a little marinade/sauce in another skillet. It's a favorite of ours ever since we came home from Vermont last fall with a very large and yummy jug of maple syrup. I start by melting a little bit of butter, then adding equal parts (non-local) soy sauce and syrup. When all was blended, I brushed a goodly amount onto the tuna steaks and popped them under the broiler. The rest of the sauce went into the carrots, and I smacked a lid down on top of them so as not to lose the moisture. Five minutes later, everything was done and so beautiful that I pulled out my favorite rectangular, terra cotta rimmed plates. I laid down a grid of 4 crispy polenta medallions on each plate, then topped this with a tuna steak. I heaped the carrots on top of the steaks, letting the sauce flow freely down, and finally, filled out each place with a great green swath of beans. I ain't even saying, I'm just saying: heerlijk!

On tap: Saison d'etre

2007-09-13T15:41:00.000-05:00

In the past month, I've made the decision to leave my freelance existence behind and give corporate life a whirl. I'm really excited about it, but all the interviewing and thinking it over and tying up of loose ends has left little room in my head for blogging or beer.

But if you could just taste what I've got on tap--the self-same saison, or Belgian farmhouse ale I cooked up with that groovy heat-loving yeast--you'd have figured out weeks ago that there must be some huge topsy-turvy something going on, or else I'd surely be bragging about it.

Quite simply, my Saison d'etre is perfect. Thanks to two-stage fermentation, it's crystal clear and deliriously amber in color; thanks to that yeast, it's complex and peppery and fruity but still dry. Saison d'etre is also quite boozy, th'usband has pointed out, though exactly how boozy I couldn't say...I only just this week got a hydrometer. Maybe 6%-7%. I might mellow it out a little bit next time to make it a lighter, more summery beer, but for now, I'm glad for anything that keeps us from swilling it down too quickly. I've just learned that my three Brewing Uncles are paying me a collective visit in a couple of weeks, and I'd love to have some left for them to try.

What's more likely is that we'll polish it off before then, and be down to what's been a rather disappointing batch of chili beer. I modeled it on a crisp and frisky brew I'd tried last summer in Fort Collins, CO, but while mine has some appreciable heat, there's really not enough beer behind it to make that interesting. I began scrambling around last week for ingredients for a new, more conventional seasonal beer, but wound up with a kit containing liquid yeast that is taking forever--2 days and counting--to reanimate. Even if I am able to brew tomorrow, the resulting beer will still be too young to drink by the time they get here.

Ah, well. Here's a picture to remember her by.

What's fresh now: apples

2007-09-12T15:36:00.000-05:00

I went apple picking with my friend S. on Sunday. I thought they'd give us a ladder, but instead we each got a long stick with a plunger on the end. S. laughed at me because I was wearing this stupid dress, and because I didn't understand how to use the plunger at first. I showed her, though, and pulled out three apples just as she was attempting to document my ineptitude. It was actually a bit hot and very humid out, which seemed wrong to both of us.

The apples were Jonamacs. Yesterday, I mixed these with some Wealthys I got from my uncle's tree when we went to Maine over Labor Day, and made apple crisp. You always get a better tasting pie or crisp when you use multiple apple varieties. I'm not giving this one rave reviews, but there's really no such thing as bad apple crisp.

Ask the Huisvrouw: Hefeweizen and Hangovers

2007-08-25T18:56:00.000-05:00

Many thanks to a concerned citizen, who by directing said concern my way (see below) nudged me back into the blogosphere:

dear Huisvrouw:

you seem to have a preoccupation with yeast. interesting.

a question: what's this i hear about hefeweizen and its positive prophylactic qualities (in the matter of hangover avoidance)?

signed,
a concerned citizen

Dear concerned citizen:

I do indeed love yeast. I think that ultimately my love comes down to mystification, and that in this I share the awe that brewers, bakers, and vintners must have felt for hundreds and thousands of years prior to 1859, when Louis Pasteur traced the phenomenon of bread rising to the CO2 pooped out by happy, gluttonous colonies of yeast cells.

Think about it: completely oblivious to microscopic life that teemed about them, these people nonetheless trusted that if they exposed a flour-and-water sponge to air, it would start to bubble and they could look forward to a nice loaf of sourdough; or if they dipped a stick into a vat of particularly tasty beer, carried that stick to the next village and swished it around in their own vat, the resulting beer might share many of the same flavor characteristics of that first batch; or to go way back, or way deep into the present-day Amazon, womenfolk could spit into a cauldron of cassava mash and a few days later they'd have a drinkable brew. It must have felt like magic, or at the very least reinforced a belief in the universe as an overwhelmingly friendly place.

Even now that we can see the wizard behind the curtain, it's still pretty cool. Properly understood, the yeasts we use in baking and brewing are domesticated organisms. They're fungi, yes, but I still tend to think of them as little beasties, because the rhyme is endearing and because like us and unlike plants, they can't generate their own food out of solar energy but thrive by breaking that plant matter down.

But I digress. After creating this opening for me to natter on about yeast, you then asked about hefeweizen and hangovers, which makes me suspect you already have an inkling of the most scientific explanation for the hefeweizen effect. Hefeweizen is a style of deliberately unfiltered wheat beer that owes its cloudiness to suspended yeast. Yeast has a strong impact on the flavor profile of beer--which is to say that not all yeast poop tastes the same--and a good bartender will deliberately pour a bottle of hefeweizen to stir it up.

Binge drinking of alcohol--the kind of behavior that produces hangovers--not only dehydrates you, it impedes absorption of B vitamins, including vitamin B12 and folate. The resulting imbalance makes you tired and fuzzy-headed. But as many homebrewers will gleefully tell you, the yeasts contained in hefeweizen and their own imperfectly filtered brews are a great source of B vitamins: hence, hangover protection. This effect actually checks out with some actual studies, though I've heard a lot of chatter about B12, when the only B vitamin reputably traced to beer is folate; if I understand correctly, only meat, eggs, and dairy products supply B12.

[No, wait, hold the phone....I just ran a generic 12-oz. serving of BEER, ALE through My Pyramid Tracker (love it) and came up with 21.6 micrograms of folate, .2 mcg of B6, and .1 mcg of B12. Those are pretty trace amounts, but presumably they would be more substantial in an unfiltered beer like hefeweizen or homebrew.]

Craftbeers also tend to be more conducive to savoring than some of the more poundable commercial giants (and hefeweizen, like many other summery wheat styles, tries to be crisp and refreshing rather than big and boozy), so maybe moderation plays some role in the hefeweizen effect. I'd still drink a nice big glass of water before you go to bed--but then rest easy, because the beasties are your friends.

Sincerely,
the Huisvrouw

Guest post: summer in Denver

2007-08-06T09:24:00.000-05:00

My brother- and sister-in-law, B. & B., live in Colorado where they work as a cook and pastry chef, respectively. This spring, they vastly expanded the garden plot in their yard; since my own attempt to foster a modest herb garden in pots on my fire escape were foiled by one cheeky, persistent squirrel, I garden vicariously through reports like this one from B.

Disclaimer: our mother-in-law M. would like it to be known that her only involvement in the referenced drug bust was as a disappointed landlady. Those kids seemed like they were going to be great tenants....

The vegetable garden has been more of a success than we could have hoped for: we have an abundance of squash, yellow & green cucumbers, squash, cherry tomatoes, squash....I planted the yellow squash with the intentions of harvesting the blossoms. We soon found that squash blossoms are better when prepared by someone else's prep cook. We also learned that B. doesn't care for radish more than once a summer, S. can make radish flower arrangements, broccoli stems are for the cows, broccoli flowers are a waste of time (they rot quickly in salads), and Home Depot hybrid corn contains too much sugar and gets mushy.

My mother-in-law M. recently gave me some fertilizer leftover from her marijuana bust, so I dumped it around in the garden. I thought it was pretty tame stuff 5-4-3, until we returned from our camping trip to find squash and cucumbers the size of my thigh! We have been forced to eat our vegetables, at home with our friends or each other. This has be a pleasant by-product of gardening.

10 Ways to use Yellow squash:
- roast with tomatoes and toss with pesto for a quick side
- Grill
- sliced raw with hummus
- grilled blossoms with herbs and goat cheese
- gifts for neighbors
- alternative peg leg
- Leave it as a surprise gift over the neighbors' fence so they cannot refuse it [ed. note: This was my own dear mother's standard solution when we were little, but she always made us kids actually carry and dump the bags.]
- Saute with tomatoes, toss with pasta, pesto and fresh corn
- use it to scare off birds or neighbor children
- Bocce squash

The garden has had to go vertical. Due to first-timers planning problems, the cantelope, cukes, watermelon and tomatoes have taken over the walking paths. Tours are canceled. So I took an idea from the botanical gardens and have trained the vines to grow up trellis. The watermelon is also using the expired corn stalks as upright support. The unintentional overgrowth has its good points; I find a surprise bounty every time I weed. Just today I found another watermelon fruit, a radish, and a snap bean. We also had a surprise in the front flower garden. We used our compost dirt to fill in the new area, a patty pan squash seed survived and is invading the poppies and snapdragons.

Have any extra gardening stories and pictures of your own lying around? Send them to the huisvrouw! There are city folks all around who are starving for the experience of dirt under their fingernails, the stink of earthworms, and all other suchlike pleasures of summer in the exurbs.

intermission

2007-08-02T19:41:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone.

I was planning another post (or six) but got kind of sideswiped by the news from Minneapolis. That's where I'm from, and where I'm headed for a family reunion tomorrow. (All my peeps are fine.) I'll check back in with y'all in a few days.

Ask the Huisvrouw: DIY calcium intake boost

2007-07-31T11:38:00.000-05:00

Dear Huisvrouw,

I've been reading your blog for a while now. I love the mix you have going on here--crafty stuff like writing and knitting, culture and the arts, and especially all your fantastic food content.

The question I'm writing to you about today has to do with that last, food, and I'm afraid it's a two-parter. It's recently come to my attention that I really need to increase my intake of calcium. Per my doctor's recommendation, I'm taking some very sciency, organic supplement, but she's been really stern with me about needing to incorporate more calcium-rich foods into my regular diet. So, part one of my question is, what should I be eating?

Part two: Here's the deal: I have a partner and a cat, but no kids, yet. I'm in my early thirties, and of modest, modest means. And I'm a bit of a food moron. I'm an awesome waitress, but my back-of-house knowledge set and self-efficacy is nill. I do, however, reallllllllly want to learn. I'm passionate about living healthier for myself and for my partner and the kids we might get lucky enough to have someday. So, and dumb it down for me, Huisvrouw, how do I eat the calcium-rich foods, once I get them home from the store?

Signed,

Waitress Lost in the Kitchen

Dear WLitK,

I'm so flattered you asked. I've had calcium-boosting behavior drilled into me since birth, almost, given how many risk factors for osteoporosis (the brittle bone end game for insufficient calcium intake) I happen to embody: I'm female, white, thin, and have a family history of low bone density (dad, not mom). But I enjoyed doing a little research on the subject, primarily at the National Osteoporosis Foundation and the totally excellent, interactive, customizable new government food pyramid site (It's so nice to feel positively about something the feds have done in the past 5 years).

Let's talk first about the role of calcium in the body and what's behind your doctor's concern.

Calcium is an important structural component of healthy bones and teeth. In addition, calcium ions play a messenger role in all kinds of other cellular business, from the firing of muscles to the firing of synapses. A small amount is also excreted each day, mainly through the kidneys, and when women are breastfeeding, they secrete enough to meet the considerable needs of the little bone-growing machines that depend on them. If there doesn't happen to be enough calcium in circulation at the time that it is needed, your bones dispense it like an ATM. It just gets harder and harder to make compensatory deposits once bone growth has ended, so over time the bones can get porous and weak. A person with osteoporosis not only might fall down and break a hip, but she might spontaneously break a hip and fall down.

Women suffer from osteoporosis at higher rates than do men (20% of white and Asian women over the age of 50, vs. 7% of the corresponding demographic of men; for non-Hispanic blacks, 5% of women vs. 4% of men; and for Hispanics, 10% of women vs. 3% of men) not only because of the potential breastfeeding component, but because we generally have smaller, finer bones, which are the effective equivalents of smaller starting bank accounts. (The same thing goes for us skinny folks.) Also, estrogen levels drop precipitously with menopause, while testosterone production in men declines more gradually, and it turns out that these sex hormones help the body to retain calcium. It is possible for women to lose 20% of their bone mass in the first 5-7 years after menopause.

Smoking further leeches calcium out of your bones at whatever age you do it, as does an inactive lifestyle. On the positive side of the equation, stretching and weight-bearing exercise helps to build bone strength, as does an ample supply of vitamin D, which has to be present for bones to absorb and store calcium. Your skin actually makes vitamin D out of sunlight (which might have something to do with why pale whiteys like me who have to stay out of strong sun are at greater risk for osteoporosis than people of color are), so more and more doctors are starting to recommend that we allow ourselves 10-15 minutes of sunscreen-free exposure to the sun 3 or 4 times a week.

Now I know that you didn't really ask me for a whole science lesson, but I always find it easier to figure out the kinds of changes I'm willing and able to make when I also know the hows and whys involved. If you look in the paragraphs above, you can already see a number of things you can do to make maximum use of the calcium you're already taking in: stretch, exercise, spend a little time outside each day, and try to give up cigarettes if you smoke. The next step is to consider what kinds of foods you can eat to average about 1000 mg of dietary calcium a day.

We'll start with the easy stuff: dairy products. Everyone knows that milk has a lot of calcium, and now you know why; nature intended that milk for calves, which also need to build bone as they grow. One cup of milk provides about 300 mg, or 30% of your recommended daily allowance. You can get the equivalent amount of calcium from 1 1/2 ounces of hard cheese, 1/3 c. shredded cheese, 1/2 c. ricotta cheese, or 2 c. cottage cheese; or you could enjoy a single 8-ounce serving of yogurt. And here's another sneaky thing: there are about 52 mg of calcium per tablespoon of nonfat powdered milk, and you can add it into homemade baked goods at the rate of 2T per cup of flour.

But what about the majority of the world's population that is more or less lactose intolerant? (As a group, only Northern European peoples seem to retain the ability to digest milk after childhood.) And what about a balanced diet? Well, consider these other options:

Fish (especially whole or canned ocean fish with bones): A 3-oz serving of salmon, which realistically speaking is about half of an entree-sized portion, contains 180 mg of calcium. The same 3-oz. serving of trout has 146; sardines, 325 mg; ocean perch, 116; and even shrimp have 102.

Pretty much any fruit or vegetable you pick up contains 40-60 mg of calcium. The real heavy lifters, though, are dark green veggies. Consider how much calcium there is in one cup of each of these foods, and load up your plate: Spinach, 291 mg; collard greens, 266 mg; turnip greens, 246 mg; okra, 176 mg; broccoli, 188 mg; bok choi, 158 mg; okra, 176 mg; rhubarb, 348 mg.

Beans: A lot of the sources I consulted specified dried or canned beans; I doubt the preparation method has anything to do with calcium content. More likely this is just a reflection on our overall impatience with foods that take a long time to cook. At any rate, you should feel free to crack open a nice convenient, easy can now and again--just make sure it didn't come from China, and it's not on the current botulism recall list. One cup white beans, 192 mg; cowpeas, 212 mg; kidney beans, 80 mg; refried beans, 90 mg.

Soybeans are beans too, you know: 1 cup edamame provides 176 mg calcium, and there's also good calcium in soy derivatives: 3 oz. tofu, 150 mg; tempeh, 82 mg.

Miscellaneous: Nuts (1/4 c. almonds, 89 mg); Blackstrap molasses (1 T, 172 mg); and a few other things you can look up yourself at the sources I cited above. (If I could sneak in one more plug for the MyPyramid site, it would be that you can use the Tracker function to get both a broad view of the quality of your diet over time, and the specific nutritional content of almost any food you can think of.)

Whew. This is getting really long, so I'm just going to wind it up with a baker's dozen or so of calcium-rich meals or snack ideas to get you going.

Spinach lasagna, made with tons of spinach, ricotta, and mozzarella cheese; you can really get a lot of servings out of a pan of lasagna, so this is a good, cheap meal
Salmon steaks with something dark green on the side; season the fish with salt, pepper, and a little dill if you want to get fancy, then stick it under the broiler for about 5 minutes
Raw broccoli dipped in a yogurt-based dip; add some instant onion soup mix to plain yogurt for an easy savory dip, or make a sweetened yogurt dip for fruit, which is always good, too
Stir fry with bok choi and tofu; there's a Dutch saying (or maybe something that I just always have said) that is central to my stir fry logic--hoe kleurrijker hoe gezonder. The more colorful, the healthier it is. Saute a bunch of seasonal veggies on high heat, starting with the hardest vegetables and working your way down to the tender ones. Just make sure you've got one or more dark green things in there
Plain yogurt on your baked potato (similar effect and much more calcium than sour cream)
Molasses cookies, made from scratch with blackstrap molasses and powdered milk sifted into the flour
Fruit parfaits made by layering yogurt, almond granola, and fresh fruit
Keep almonds and cheese around for grab-it-and-go snacks
Spinach salad
Steamed soy beans with coarse salt, aka edamame; you can buy these frozen and then all you have to do is heat them up, sprinkle salt on them, and sit back and look fabulously cosmopolitan
Soul food! Say yes to collard greens and baked beans, okra, and (yep) sneak some powdered milk into the flour you use to batter the chicken and/or green tomatoes
Haute bourgeois tapas with sardines, garlicky white beans, and a wedge of Manchego cheese; considering that you can get the beans canned and just jazz them up a minute with some garlic and whatever fresh herbs are plentiful in the moment, this is remarkably easy, and with the possible exception of the cheese, pretty cheap. Actually almost anything, even the fancy looking stuff, is cheap if you are willing to do all or part of the preparation
Caesar salad with fresh dressing: go heavy on the anchovies and parmesan cheese
Rhubarb cobbler with ice cream

(botulism free) Chile beer: a recipe

2007-07-27T10:08:00.000-05:00

Most of the cool farm wives and frugal huisvrouwen these days freeze rather than can, but I've always been fascinated with jars of preserves.

It's complicated. It's about going down into the dank, slightly scary basement at my grandparent's house in earliest memory to pick out a quart jar of beans or peas, and how much I would give to be standing there now. It's about the home ec barn at the Minnesota State Fair, where the colors and patterns of backlit preserves rival those of the quilt display. It's about a kitchen 10 miles out of Athens, OH, where A. and I put up apples and tomatoes, lining up the jars on shelves by a window that framed frosty laundry and a defunct pump in the yard.

And it's about botulism toxin, the stuff that stills the palsied and spastic and makes so many New Yorkers look smooth and impassive, that grows in oxygen-deprived spaces and that is lethal in in doses above one microgram. And that is potentially lurking in tens of millions of cans of chili sauces, hash, beans, and other meat- and chili-containing products made by Castleberry Food Co. for major store brands like Meijers, Krogers, Piggly Wiggly, Food Club over the past two years. (For a complete recall list, click here.)

All the more reason to cook up your own tasty chile products at home. Here's my recipe for chile beer, adapted from Shawn Davis and Fred Colby's 'Hot Chihuahua' Jalapeno and Santa Fe Chile Blonde Ale (Zymurgy Sept/Oct 2005) and originally inspired by Sigda's Green Chili Beer. I just cooked it up yesterday so I can't speak for the results yet, and honestly, several critical recipe alterations were the unintended consequences of mistakes. It is bubbling furiously right now, though, and you know how much I love that.

for 5 gallons/19 liters:

7.5 lbs. (give or take) Cooper's Light malt extract
.5 lb 80L crystal malt
.5 lb clear candi sugar
1 oz N. Brewer pellet hops, added at the start of the boil
1.5 oz. Cascade flower hops, added with 15 minutes left on the boil

[This would also have been a great time to throw in an oz. of ground coriander seed to give the beer a little citrusy something something, but I forgot. On the other hand, it's deep summer and our apartment is never in the temperature range (70-75 degrees, tops) recommended to prevent 'fruity esters' from cropping up in my beer, so I guess I can just leave it to the little yeasties.]

Irish moss added in the last couple of minutes to clarify

[Usually I use Whirlfloc tabs, but dried seaweed seemed much more sporting.]

After the wort was cool, I pitched Windsor yeast. This was a mistake; I was supposed to use Doric Ale yeast, which apparently I must have thrown in my Irish red batch a couple of weeks ago, also by mistake. I haven't found a really detailed description of the flavors imparted by either one, but I have no complaints about the work ethic of the Windsor strain in this batch.

Primary:

Dry hop with 3 oz. of dried Guajillo chiles and 3 oz. of dried New Mexico chiles.

Secondary:

Dry hop with .5 oz flower hops; I'll probably use Saaz.

Kegging/bottling day:

I plan to chop up 3 fresh serrano chiles--I like them better than Jalapenos and anyhow that's what's in Sigda's--boil them in 2 c. water, strain out the chiles and throw the cooled water in the keg along with the priming sugar.

The Revolt of Guadalajara, installment 5

2007-07-25T21:15:00.000-05:00

A couple of months ago I began the serial translation of a 1937 novella by Dutch writer Jan Jacob Slauerhoff called The Revolt of Guadalajara. I'm going to try to be more disciplined about hashing it out but would be grateful for any insistent clamoring you could muster to that effect.

Finally in today's installment, we get some characters:

Chapter 1, pp. 11-15

Besides the churches and banks, Guadalajara also had a Gobierno Central, a representation of the federal government, a municipality, three hospitals, a Supreme Court, a tax office, four convents, an Episcopal hall, some ten big houses belonging to rich landowners and industrialists that could be called palacios with a bit of good will, and beyond that the city that, other than a number of stores and warehouses, consisted of low huts. Almost all larger buildings lay on the Avenida Central and formed the drab stretched-out skyline that was visible from the far horizon above the bald brown or grey-red plain and most resembled the back of a prehistoric animal, a crocodile or iguanodon.

In keeping with an obvious and unspoken agreement with the authorities that dated back to the era of slavery and continued in effect long after emancipation, other than the livery-coated or uniformed or priestly garbed servants of church and state, the Indians never came into the Avenida Central, such that it almost always lay dead and abandoned both in the heat of the day and in the dusky night. Only in the brief twilight hour did the carriages of the more distinguished residents pass to and fro, or a few men walk and sit on the terraces of the two cafés. Only for processions and a few national holidays did the Indians enter the Avenida too. Processions took place quite often, as the church authorities knew from centuries of experience that every people, however humbled and oppressed, must have occasional opportunity to push themselves up, to experience themselves en masse, hearing each other’s shouts, filling their noses with each other’s reeking. Coming together in the Avenida didn’t stir up any kind of mass consciousness of power; to the contrary. Devoid of will, the stream flowed in a single direction between the lines of the big buildings and was dissipated by the gendarmes once the parade had run its course. Contented, tired and sleepy they go back to their houses and rest or drink the rest of the holiday away, and rebellious thoughts never take root: they are tired and hoarse from screaming.

With the examples of Christian humility borne on litters and flagstaffs before them, they could vent their suppressed lust for life through shocking dances done to a music gone gradually over from the plodding tempos of the church to a dance beat. The hubbub of the city, the high gables on either side, these overpower them and then suddenly it is all over, the parade disbands on a silent square and they head docilely for home.

The high church authorities made the occasional remark about what they termed the degenerative influence of processions in the otherwise tranquil Guadalajara. But Monseigneur Valdés, who’d sat in the bishop’s seat over Guadalajara for twenty years, took up the defense in an articulate hand. Monseigneur Valdés wrote gladly and copiously. How otherwise could he employ his great gifts of spirit and heart?

What was this talented priest still doing stuck out in Guadalajara? Was it because of a foreboding that precisely here, in this city, something big was sure to pass? Or had he simply been forgotten? Or does the consistory of cardinals secretly have it in for great talents? Or was Monseigneur Valdés not who he took himself to be?

He took the first solution to be correct. God’s ways were inscrutable, surely something big was going to happen in Guadalajara. He never spoke about these expectations with the dean or the canons of the diocese. They believed only what they saw happen. But he did with a young Indian priest, Tarabana, who served in the little church of the Sagrado Corazón, in the middle of the old Indian neighborhood, and who wrote with a very legible hand.

Tarabana was not a pale, docile, stunted youth, like so many of his associates, he was lively, walked tall, secretly believed in the rebirth of his race.

Really it was a wonder that the authoritarian and priestly Valdés could stand this young man; or did he see reflected something of himself that never had come into its own? In the end a certain kind of intimacy had developed between them. Tarabana could listen for hours to the orations of the bishop. Usually they began along these lines:

‘Don’t be unhappy, Tarabana, with your little wooden church, any more than I am with my meager and remote diocese, that really should have had its seat on the council by now, long before González and Machado, who are less talented than I am. Something big is going to happen in Guadalajara, otherwise I wouldn’t still be here, it must be for something. It should have happened a long time ago, but we never know what obstacles stand in God’s way. He also likes to write destiny along crooked lines. But something’s coming! Just look once at Saint Iago, who has the most prophetic spirit of all the saints. Hasn’t he on the occasional rainy day ever had an ominous feeling?’

In this way he got the young priest all wound up. Tarabana often really would have liked to ask just exactly what was going to happen but he didn’t dare; when he had it on the tip of his tongue the bishop looked vacantly past him or suddenly began writing as if in midstream on a sheet of parchment that always lay ready. He’d been working for years now on a church history of Mexico, on the description of miracles witnessed in the area. If nothing happened in Guadalajara, at least in the time that he was still there, then his name would still become famous through the publication of these works. The Holy Father would reproach himself for having left Valdés moldering his whole life in Guadalajara, instead of giving him a place where he could shine.

Tarabana then stood wavering at the other end of the table. Should he go away or stay? Sometimes Valdés looked at him with boredom and confusion, in which case he knew for certain. Sometimes he stopped looking up altogether and then he off he went, swearing to himself never to return. After these visits he didn’t go to his church, where malice and brooding made it hard to hold it together, but to the hut where his parents still lived. It stood on the outskirts of the Indian quarter by the steeply pitched river that dribbled one day and ran dry the next.

Tarabana’s parents were among the poorest, but they had the good fortune of having only had one child, and a son at that. For this rare dearth of offspring—most averaged ten or more children—they thanked the gods and saints regularly.

the importance of secondary fermentation: the jury is still out

2007-07-25T16:35:00.000-05:00

This morning I moved the Irish red ale from my new secondary fermenter, a glass carboy, into a keg, and then the Saison that was the source of all that ruckus a couple of weeks ago from the plastic primary fermenting bucket into the glass carboy. This involved a considerable amount of washing and sanitizing, not to mention an episode of spatial impossibility when it came to extracting a muslin bag of hops from the carboy's 2-inch neck. It was floating at the top like a big tea bag, so it wasn't hard to snag it and pull the first couple of inches through, but eventually I had to cut the bag open and pull out successive wads of hops until finally I could wrest the rest out; it brought camels and eyes of needles to mind, and the certainty that there has to be a better way...right?

Two-stage brewing purportedly makes for clearer beer; sure enough, only a small amount of trub had collected following transfer from the primary fermenter, and it was easy to leave this behind when I siphoned the beer into a keg for the final conditioning phase. Worth the hassle? I'll let you know when we tap it.

The Saison continues to be a mystery. Fermentation had slowed but not entirely stopped, judging from the 2-3 lazy bubbles per minute still visible in the airlock this morning, 10 days after the batch was brewed. I wanted to get the beer into glass, though, to prevent it from oxidizing. I don't really know what that means in a beer quality sense, but it sounds bad; anyhow, I want to be able to keg it by the end of next week, when we're headed away for a few days, so there was no more time to delay. I heaved the bucket up onto the kitchen cabinet at the beginning of the whole process so it would have time to settle before siphoning. When I finally pulled off the lid, though, I saw evidence of the most cataclysmic fermentation my bucket has ever known. There was trub blown all the way to the top of its walls, trub caked and dried on the underside of the lid, trub creeping up the airlock's central tube, impossible to remove. I'm not sure what this means, if anything; I just know that it's as different from the scant inch or so of mayhem that I usually scrape off the fermenter as the 10 days were from the customary 2, and I'm really curious to taste the results in about a month.

If I have time tonight, I think I'll finally make that chile beer.

What's Fresh Now: CSA week 8

2007-07-25T14:57:00.000-05:00

green beans
shelling peas
cabbage
scallions
Swiss chard
cucumbers, lots of cucumbers

A few related comments:
1. I love beans.
2. No more lettuce!
3. This time I'm not screwing up the Swiss chard. At my brother-in-law-the-chef's advice I'm going to blanch it in some really salty water for a couple of minutes, then saute it (though I patently refuse to blanch or saute it "off" as current chef speak dictates--no offense, B., it's just my own little losing usage battle) in olive oil with a whole lot of garlic.
4. I will make some nutritious use out of the cucumbers. I will probably slice one up for a snack in a few minutes, for instance. But mostly I will make Cucumber Drinks, my summer cocktail of choice for 5 or 6 summers running, ever since my friend J. from Leipzig-by-way-of-Zipolite introduced me to them.

Cucumber drinks (snazzier names welcome):
If you're like me, you grew up thinking of cucumbers fondly enough maybe, but ultimately as vehicles for vinegar and/or salt. One sip of this cocktail will turn you on to a subtle but sensuous pleasure that's been right under your nose all this time.

1 bottle of seltzer
1 bottle of ginger ale
1 cucumber
ice

Peel your cucumber if it's waxy; if it's not, leave it alone because it will make the finished product taste that much more green.
Next, using a slicer or a sharp knife and a steady hand, cut paper-thin cross sections. You'll need a quarter cup or so per serving. I like making up a whole pitcher at a time, but you can do it glass by glass if you don't mind having to keep going back to the kitchen as people try them and decide they want their own.
Combine the shaved cucumber with (per serving) a couple of fingers of vodka, ice, and more or less (depending on how sweet you like it) equal amounts ginger ale and seltzer.
Steep for about 5 minutes and serve. If it's really hot and you're worried about the ice melting and the fizz fizzling before they're ready to go, you could steep the cucumbers in just the vodka ahead of time. I'm just never that organized.

in which she reasserts the enjoyment of naming

2007-07-22T20:08:00.001-05:00

We took the Circle Line today. The loop around Manhattan took 3 hours, and our guide had very little to say about the Bronx, for instance, so parts of it got a little boring. But it is good, I think, or at least good for me, to cultivate a sense of being new to these parts, of wonder at wherever I happen to be.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. Recently I passed my 4-year anniversary of becoming an ex-expat*. I have basically lived my adult life in 4-year chapters, so what this means to me looking out across the open sky of year 5 is that I have no idea how to proceed. In the past, I've staved off boredom by up & moving to a far-off land where I would proceed to expend my very last breath trying not to be an outsider, which I interminably was.

Still, I remember laughing once at a breathless someone who imagined my life to be incredibly exotic. I laughed because most of the time my life was a bag of papers that had to be graded by Monday. It was not exotic, I protested, not at all, but while that was true, it was also true that the littlest things that surrounded me all had different, new-to-me names, names that I was prone to repeat and savor in my mouth**. It simply was not possible for me not to pay attention.

New York is like that for a lot of people, I know, th'usband included. Everything that happens here is a bit more laden and/or fraught with meaning by sheer virtue of it having happened in New York. In subsequent retellings, the stage directions always specify the neighborhood(s) involved. There are accents and pushcarts and zany bystanders and local color. Everything is lit with heartbreakingly New Yorky light.

*Attempting to appear Interesting, I suppose, I commented to someone I've never met that I am an ex-expat. I said this because I'd been thinking about all of this, and feeling a bit beige, and because my earlier admission that I was an ex-poet had generated excitement and inspired a whole new del.icio.us category. It inspired; with it, I'd carved out a whole new plane of existence for myself. For a second there it was almost like up & moving. But this ex-expat business, while kindly received, turned out to be a statement of the obvious. "of course poets are ex-pats so an ex-poet would almost have to be an ex-expat," sed ryan.

Ouch. He's right, of course. An ex-pat is always finding out the word for something for the first time and cannot afford lapses of attention. At first it is about understanding and being understood and being able to participate in serious conversations without sounding like a six-year-old. Later it is about the pleasure of those words in your mouth, and that is poetry. **Gertrude Stein put it this way:

What is poetry.
Poetry has to do with vocabulary just as prose has not....
And what is the vocabulary of which poetry absolutely is. It is a vocabulary entirely based on the noun as prose is essentially and determinately and vigorously not based on the noun.
Poetry is concerned with using with abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is....
I have said that a noun is a name of anything by definition that is what it is and a name of anything is not interesting because once you know its name the enjoyment of naming it is over and therefore in writing prose names that is nouns are completely uninteresting. But and that is a thing to be remembered you can love a name and if you love a name then saying that name any number of times only makes you love it more, more violently more persistently more tormentedly. Anybody knows how anybody calls out the name of anybody one loves. And so that is poetry really loving the name of anything and that is not prose. Yes any of you can know that. (From "Poetry and Grammar," one of Stein's 1934 Lectures in America)

Look, all that happened today is that we took the Circle Line and I took about fifty pictures, and when we got off and we were walking towards our car on 46th St., a guy spotted the camera around my neck and asked if we needed a cab. And although my immediate response was to get all I'm-from-Brooklyn on him (because I am still always all about expending hasta el ultimo aliento trying not to be an outsider), in the seconds that followed I realized that it was a good thing to be taken as a tourist. If my project for year 5 is to learn how not to up & move it behooves me not to make myself too much at home. I need to look up from the sidewalk in front of me, ask people for the words for things, hear the accents, linger in the New Yorky light. I need to carry a camera and pay attention. That's all I'm saying.

What's Fresh Now: CSA week 6 or 7

2007-07-19T10:06:00.000-05:00

I've lost count how many weeks it's been, but we are now officially, as a newly favorite blogger of mine commented, in "a new spot in the summer....deep summer." It's made for a lot of bitching about the humidity, which I actually enjoy to a certain extent (the humidity, not the bitching), as well as for a whole lotta tasty veggies. Here's a picture of this week's haul (red lettuce, arugula, basil, broccoli, snap peas, carrots, squash).

I should also mention the deep summer flowers bought for a pittance at the market on Saturday: butterfly weed and some kind of brilliant little tiger lilies, a frenzy of red, yellow and orange in a vase.

After several weeks of killing everything by being just way too fancy, last night I finally cooked a good meal by simply steaming the broccoli and tossing it with bacon, yellow raisins, toasted pine nuts and some oil and vinegar; sauteeing the squash with some garlic and butter; and letting the thighs of a couple of happy, pasture-raised chickens testify to the beauty of their lives without much added hoopla.

Simplicity is the name of Marc Bittman (aka The Minimalist)'s game, and here in his list of 101 quick summer meals, he's dazzlingly prolific and inventive, too. No excuse not to cook now. I think I'm almost--but not quite, since I can't seem to resist including the link--ready to forgive him for once including a buddy's (Spanish) tapas bar as the final insult in an overwhelmingly sloppy review of regional Mexican restaurants in Mexico City.

Farm Bill time

2007-07-19T08:59:00.000-05:00

Within the last several years that I've been living back in the U.S. as an ex-expat, I've discovered the simple pleasure of calling my representatives in Washington, and more recently, in New York. There is so much about the current governance of our country that does violence to my beliefs that if nothing else, calling up my elected officials and telling them that I'm cranked up or pissed off about something makes me feel slightly less powerless. It's amazingly easy to make an impact; when in D.C. for a few days last summer, I stopped by my House Representative's office, and the intern behind the desk claimed to recognize my name. The other day, when I called up my State Senator to register my disgust that a) the Democratic majority had failed to pass a congestion pricing measure in time to receive much-needed federal funds for public transportation and b) said SS had attributed the problem to Mayor Bloomberg's failure to adopt an "ingratiating" posture, I was pleased to hear from the haggard-sounding woman who took my call that the phone had been ringing off the hook.

If you'd like to try it out yourself, let me just remind you that every five years Farm Bill time rolls around, and that this is the week. The politics of food production are intimately involved in all kinds of commonly held concerns, including environmental protection, health, energy independence, trade deficits, labor rights, immigration, and social justice. Phone calls and letters have already helped remove a measure from an earlier draft of the current bill that was intended to preempt state laws or regulations beyond those mandated at the federal level. Here are some of the current provisions you could weigh in on with your Representative, particularly if s/he is on the House Agriculture Committee:

an amendment by Representative Goodlatte (R-VA) would gut COOL (country of origin labeling) mandates, making these voluntary and restricting them to the 20 most commonly consumed fruits and vegetables, capping potential fines at $1,000, and defining imported animals as domestic unless they did not pass Go and went straight to the slaughterhouse
in happier news, other amendments support:

organic conversion assistance (Rep. Gillibrand, D-NY)
"fair share" of USDA-ARS funding for organic research (Rep. Kagen, D-WI)
mandatory funding for organic research (Rep. Cardoza, D-CA

you could also express your views, among other issues, on:

increased funding for the Food Stamp and Nutrition program
mandatory funding for the Community Food Project Grant Program, the Organic Research and Extension program, the Fruit and Vegetable Snack Program and the Healthy Enterprise Development Program that would help small and mid-sized farmers distribute their products to local markets
changes to the Conservation Security Program to make it easier for organic producers to participate and receive on-going financial assistance rewarding the implementation of conservation practices on their farms
crop insurance equity, leveling the playing field for organic farmers who currently must pay a 5% surcharge on their crop insurance rates but are typically reimbursed for their losses according to conventional prices that don't take the greater value of their products into account

For more information or to sign and send a pre-fab letter instead, click here. To get contact information for your elected officials in Washington, click here.

yeast poop, continued

2007-07-18T14:49:00.000-05:00

I cannot emphasize enough how much I love this Saison yeast (Wyeast 3724).

Generally speaking, the active fermentation stage in brewing goes all too fast. Somewhere between 4 and 12 hours after adding ('pitching' in brewer-speak) the yeast, the airlock starts bubbling and the air fills with the smell of rising bread. It's my favorite part and I could hover around all day loving it, except that it tends to be all over with by the time I think to look again. The first time this happened, I freaked out, requiring multiple telephonic assurances from my Brewing Uncles that there had not been some kind of catastrophic yeast blight. By now I've gotten used to it, but it's always a little disappointing, like fireworks can be. Just when it's getting good, poof.

Anyhow, this batch got started on Saturday night and is still bubbling along slowly. I have no hydrometer or the kind of patience it would take to measure the amount of malt sugars left in solution. All I really need to know is that for four days, a colony of living fungi has been living fat and happy off of my beer, chomping up the malt sugars and pooping out CO2 and alcohol. Mine is a rough science.

From everything I've read, this slow attenuation, besides providing good, relatively cheap entertainment for the better part of a week, will result in a dry, estery brew. That's really the word They use, estery. It means perfumey, more or less; fruity like pineapple, banana, or bubblegum. That may sound gross in association with beer, but I'm imagining something with a wine-like character, a fruity pucker. And it's incredible to think that those flavors are the byproducts of little one-celled mushroom geniuses, or that anyone ever was smart enough to figure this out.

The hard part is going to be waiting to tap this eventual keg. The same sources that tantalize me with aromas of juicy fruit also insist that it takes around 10 weeks for Belgian yeasts to hit their stride. I may just have to take that on faith; I want to be drinking this stuff before the saison ends.

I think it's because I really like capes.

2007-07-17T20:38:00.000-05:00

This just in....I am Superman!

But wait....all two other people I know who did this are Superman too, though maybe not quite so definitively, mild-manneredly, and virtuously as I am. Maybe I laid the virtue on a little thick. Can we really all be Superman, though?

Your results:
You are Superman

Superman		95%
Supergirl		78%
Spider-Man		70%
Wonder Woman		68%
Robin		62%
Iron Man		50%
Batman		50%
Green Lantern		45%
Hulk		45%
Catwoman		40%
The Flash		40%

You are mild-mannered, good,
strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

back to the yeast again

2007-07-16T11:27:00.000-05:00

...I forgot to mention the other cool thought I thunk or maybe just read in Omnivore's Dilemma with regards to yeast: that is, that beer is what you find at the intersection of the four elements...of water, of course, and earth in the form of grain; of fire as heat, and yeast from the air. Isn't that fabulous?

aw shucks

2007-07-16T11:04:00.000-05:00

A friend/coworker just phoned me up and told me she'd thought of me this weekend because she'd seen Michelle Shocked play and she reminded her of me. "I don't know how you sing," she said, "but she's tall and thin and political and funny and eclectic and. . . ." In fact, one of the few songs I know on the guitar is "The Ballad of Patch Eye and Meg" from the Texas Campfire Tapes, an album I first heard when I was living in Louisiana a LONG time ago; last I caught sight of her, Sister Shocked had become a born-again Christian ("yeah, a lefty born again Christian!" my friend interjected) and was playing a few nights with gospel back up in one of her old punk hangouts in Amsterdam.

I am so insanely flattered that I had to go and brag about it here, and I swear, as soon as I finish the work I've got cut out for me today, I'm going to tune my guitar.

in praise of the sturdiness of yeast

2007-07-15T12:10:00.000-05:00

In the last meal that food journalist Michael Pollan prepares in Omnivore's Dilemma--the meal assembled of hunted and foraged ingredients--he makes an interesting comment with regards to the bread. It's a sourdough, made from a strain of yeast Pollan captured in his yard. The air around us is teeming with microscopic yeast spores, so all you really have to do to get a starter going is to create an environment with the food and moisture yeast need to thrive and let nature do its thing. Pollan mixes flour and water to make a loose paste and waves the container around in the air for a few seconds before covering it. Within a day, he's got a bubbling, beery smelling sponge, a live culture of yeast that he can use to leaven his bread.

Recalling that incident comforted me yesterday in the moments--OK, not the first moments, but within the first hour--following a long chain of brewing mishaps that culiminated with the discovery that my yeast had not been incubating for the past several hours as I'd thought. I'd been pondering and mixing and boiling rather expensive ingredients all afternoon in my first attempt at beer recipe development, and waiting several hours to properly culture that yeast would put the cooled wort at risk of bacterial infection. I panicked and threw the contents of the yeast packet in cold.

I've been off my game a bit lately, culinarily speaking. Last Monday, in a fit of let me just clear out the refrigerator here before the next CSA pickup frenzy, I'd made a dinner that was nothing short of God awful. In one pan I had Swiss chard with olives and raisins, in another pea pods and garlic, and in a third, hanger steaks with some red wine, mustard and stock that I was trying to use as a braising liquid for mustard greens while still keeping the steaks well left of medium. Oh, and I forgot (then as now), a saucepan full of red lentils on the back burner. Needless to say, the steaks were way overdone and tough; the mustard green "sauce" I'd cooked them in a stringy, disconcertingly greyish mess; the lentils blown apart into so much baby food. Th'usband tried to put on a brave face and assured me that "most people would think of this as a fine, homecooked meal," but though I might have graciously accepted such a meal had Most People in fact made it for me, what with my pride all mixed up in there it was really, really hard to swallow.

To make it worse, a few days earlier, I truly had made that roast chicken I'd been going on about, a lovely meal to warm the kitchen and the cockles of one's heart--in November. Outside and now in our kitchen, it was at least 95 degrees. How was I managing to take all these fresh, locally produced, seasonal ingredients and turn them into such heavy, wintery meals?

But then get this: the day after the steak disaster, needing to pack a lunch for a day at the office, I filled a to go container with arugula, layered it with the swiss chard and olives stuff, and topped it with a few strips of steak. . . and Reader, it was gorgeous: peppery, summery, and light. I repeated that lunch 2 or 3 times before it was all gone, and was sorry to see it go. Sometimes food is merciful like that.

As I learned last night, so is yeast, particularly the Belgian strain I was using for this particular batch of Saison beer. Tim at Bierkraft had introduced me to the style, explaining that it was farmhouse ale traditionally made in the spring to ration out (at the rate of 4 or 5 liters per day) to summer field hands. No one was using fussy, refrigerated yeast cultures; some brewers just left their wort in vats open to the air, and others carried yeast strains from village to village on the end of a stick. (This notion comforts me too, in that lacking a Y chromosome, I don't seem to have the crazed sanitation gene common to most other brewers.) In the words of Erik the Brewmeister--who'd sold me the yeast in the first place, then spent the better part of Friday and Saturday calming me down when I started freaking out about the wisdom of shipping liquid yeast cross country on the hottest week to date of the summer--

Saison yeast is about as bullet proof as anything. After all, Saison's or Farmhouse Ales were made up of just about anything the brewers had that would ferment, and fermented in the barn, so hot temperatures and stressed yeast just adds to the complexity and is normal. Seriously, it will be fruity and estery, but it is that way anyhow.

I really hadn't set out to make a seasonally appropriate beer, but it turns out that I did. And the happy ending to the whole story is that five or six hours later, when th'usband and I returned from a dinner to celebrate the near-completion of his (totally excellent) documentary and keep me from doing violence to myself or flushing the wort down the toilet, fermentation had set in. Tick, tick, tick goes the little bubble in my airlock. Bring on the fruity esterytude! And long live this streak of successful batches brewed in a stuffy 1-BR apartment in the heat of a New York summer!

Newsflash: Contrary to market wisdom, Americans do care about more than just price

2007-07-13T11:22:00.000-05:00

Call me crazy, but I think we've got something like a groundswell going here. Check out the results of this Consumer Reports poll, released on Wednesday following a phone survey in June. A few of the highlights:

92% of consumers agree that imported foods should be labeled by their country of origin; a 2002 Farm Bill provision mandated country-of-origin-labeling (COOL) but implementation was delayed until 2008; now there's hope Congress may move the enforcement date up to September 2007
86% of consumers expect the 'natural' label to mean that processed foods contain no artificial ingredients (so no more sneaking in the high fructose corn syrup, please; ditto for partially hydrogenated corn oil)
83% of consumers expect 'natural' meat to come from animals that were raised in a natural environment. Currently, the USDA standard for natural meat only pertains to how the cut of meat was processed and not how the animal was raised or what it ate
Only 46% of consumers approved of using the 'pasteurized' label in place of 'irradiated.' This is bad news for producers depending on irradiation to cover for the poor sanitation endemic to feedlot operations, because just 29% of consumers would buy 'irradiated' meat

Vintage Pattern Lending Library

2007-07-12T12:59:00.001-05:00

My friend C. just passed on the best resource a long, lanky DIY-type with ready access to garment district fabric stores could ask for. Check this out!

how to eat closer to home

2007-07-08T18:28:00.001-05:00

Not long ago, my friend H. challenged me to write some how-to's for would-be ethical eaters. She had been reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, a book about one family's experiment with eating locally, and was inspired to eat 'better' herself--just a little unsure about how to start. I haven't read the book myself yet, but from what I understand, the Kingsolvers decided to opt out of our heavily industrialized food chain by spending a year eating only what they could grow on their land or buy from their neighbors.

While totally sold on the various arguments for eating locally, I feel pretty unqualified to tell anyone else how to shorten their food chain. I'm new to the pursuit, and rather longer on theory than I am on practice. But I can probably pass on a general principle or two of the sort that can always be taken up a notch from wherever you--or I--happen to be at the moment. I eagerly invite any and all other lovers and defenders of real food to chip in their respective two cents.

1. Summertime, and the Eating is Easy....At no other point in the year is fresh, locally produced food going to be so abundant. Look for it today, whether by stopping at a roadside stand or shopping at a farmers' market; here's where you'll find one.
2. Connect an existing priority or personal goal that you have to a new, specific commitment that you can make to these food sources. Do you want to reduce your exposure to pesticides? Keep this wallet-sized list of the most and least contaminated kinds of fruits and vegetables handy when you do your shopping, and be as consistent as your budget allows about limiting yourself to the organic, local versions of the worst offenders. Trying to lose weight? Exercise auto-portion control by starting your largest meal of the day with a salad, then aim to get some or all of the fixings from a local food source. Want to shake your reputation for being a picky eater? Try one new (seasonal, locally produced) vegetable every week of the summer. Alarmed by reports that the oceans are running out of fish? Print out a regional guide and commit to buying (and ordering) seasonal, sustainably fished seafood only. Grateful for the animals in your life? Decide that eggs from cage-free chickens are worth a little added expense.
3. Do anything and everything you can think of to emphasize the social dimensions of eating. As often as possible, eat meals that an actual identifiable and known-to-you someone has prepared. Call up your mother-in-law and ask her for that great recipe. Plan a picnic. Get home from work in time for dinner with your actual or improvised family. Organize a group of friends to pick apples, can tomatoes, or take a cooking class. Strike up a conversation with someone at the farmers' market about their plans for that fine-looking eggplant. And--this is most important--ask questions of the people who sell you your food, whether the lady selling sweet corn or the guy behind the butcher counter. Reward those who give you knowledgeable, thoughtful responses and take pride in the quality of their product with your loyalty. Food has the power to connects us in all kinds of wonderful ways. By making eating a social practice, you will find yourself naturally inclined to cut out the middle man on lots of different levels.
4. Learn to cook. Keep it simple--fresh, quality ingredients don't need a lot of fancy preparation. Instead of going out to the store with a list of things you need for a specific recipe, go to that farmers' market or roadside stand and buy what's in season, which not coincidentally will also be the cheapest and most plentiful stuff there. This is the information age, and I promise you, you can come home, google a recipe, and come up with a million doable ideas, especially if you keep some basic staples on hand.
5. Be frugal about your food. This is different from being cheap. Being frugal amounts to a much more complex appreciation of the value of your food. It means making thoughtful decisions about what and where you buy; limiting your purchases to what you can actually use (last night's roast chicken can be today's chicken salad, and you can make soup or stock from the carcass and the vegetable peelings); and saving money not by pinching or bypassing local farmers, but by buying food in season and doing the value-add part (whether peeling the carrots, frying the chicken, making the applesauce, or canning/freezing those beautiful green beans) yourself.

Chile beer? Hold, please....

2007-07-08T16:42:00.000-05:00

Finally some traffic from brewers! I was getting a swelled head about how many hits I got this week until I traced pretty much all of them back to a homebrewing forum's interest in those Kathy Ireland pics. (Sigh...and here I thought it was my legs that you loved.)

Well, welcome Kathy-obsessed homebrewers, because the upshot for me so far has been a helpful tip--thanks, Ron & Brenda--with regards to my current batch of would-be chile beer. It seems that chile oils wreak havoc on head generated by barley malts, so you're best off adding some wheat or Cara-pils, a.k.a. Dextrin malt.

Anyhow, the English Pale Ale I had hoped to dry-hop with chiles during the secondary fermentation stage didn't contain either of these head retainers, so I decided to keg it just as it was yesterday. I then dug around in a bunch of old Zymurgies until I found a wheat-containing, contest-winning recipe for 'chili' ale, as well as one for that (Belgian) saison-style I'd been wanting to make. Things are getting a bit more complicated, as I had to go beyond my usual supplier to find the specific yeasts these recipes require. (Can someone please explain to me why there is no brew supply store anywhere in the five boroughs?!) I'm also about to have my first experience with liquid malt extract and yeast. Meanwhile, New York is finally starting to heat up, and the witbier, my current light offering, is going fast--so I have a hunch that I'll be glad to have the plain old English Pale to fall back on with so much experimenting going on.

The Revolt of Guadalajara, Chapter 1 installment 4

2007-07-01T20:39:00.000-05:00

The whites could do as they pleased, take their women and cast them off again, teach their sons to be soldiers and to fight against them... If just once the old gods did decide to come after them, their gods wouldn’t even be able—despite their strength—to protect them. Really, they were sacrifices themselves! It was inconceivable, but if you really thought about it, you had to admit it! Jesus hung pale, bleeding and defenseless on the cross. Sebastian, the patron saint of a large parish, was shot through with arrows and lances and bathed in blood. John, so strong and bearded and muscled like no white person really was, had later allowed himself to be beheaded without a fight. Who were the strong ones?

The one half bled, the other was soft and sad, Mary, always with the child, Ursula, Agnes...

How did it happen that they turned out to be the powerful ones and ruled the world? They had other nameless gods they never spoke of, but that they carried with them everywhere; these kept their silence for a long time, but when they spoke it was with thunder, crashing and flame from the mouths of blunderbusses and muskets. Then they brought down destruction on their adversaries.

And besides these were gods in temples that no one ever got to see, that didn’t even make themselves known in noise and destruction, and these were the mightiest of all. They were fed with bars of gold that always were kept ready in vaults. And on small, colored papers were written the mighty prayers that crushed the entire world. The almighty white men themselves wrote a short prayer on a sheet of paper and with it got some of the gold that was really meant as food for the gods.

In Guadalajara there stood seven temples for the weak and sorrowful Christian gods: the Sé, two cathedrals and four parish churches, and three for the mightiest invisible gods: the Banco del Estado, Banco Hispano-Americano and Banco de Jalisco. In the Sé there was an old white high priest, named the bishop, in the cathedrals the nearly-white mestizos, in the parish churches the Indians... In the temples of the invisible gods a whole host of low priests served, the high ones never were seen, they sat in sanctuaries called private offices. The lower and poor believers had no access to these temples either, they were even chased off of the steps if, tired from a long trip to the city with humble wares, they sat down.

Life in the past quarter century was certainly better in Guadalajara and the environs. Barring getting sick or having accidents or too many children, one could live without going hungry all that often. For the most part there was some work to be had in the salt flats and the tin mines. And besides these and the soap-works (that didn’t go as well as they let on) a new industry had come thanks to the initiative of a philanthropic Veracruzian, who—no one knows why, because aside from the fevers Veracruz is a far more attractive city—had settled in Guadalajara. He was rich enough. After some time he’d established a couple of hat factories that operated free of any state or local subsidies and still paid a good wage. They didn’t make the majestic wide sombreros there that true Mexicans wore with such aristocratic grace. The Indians and mestizos from the region would have looked ridiculous wearing them, their narrow bony high yellow or dirty brown faces with the deepset eyes would have disappeared beneath them. Narrow, floppy hats were made there for cheap; everyone wore them.

beer update

2007-07-01T19:33:00.000-05:00

I haven't said much about the beer lately. We're back to having two different brews on tap, a Witbier and a Porter, after running dry following my birthday party last month. I'm quite pleased with both, and like the contrast of light and dark beers.

Yesterday, I cooked up a batch of pale ale that I intend to dry hop with chiles when I transfer it to my new secondary fermenter, a glass carboy that minimizes oxidation and hence permits longer lagering. A recipe I found for chile beer in Zymurgy recommended 'New Mexico chiles,' which I don't think are available around here, but since the real inspiration for this batch was an unforgettable pint of Sigda's Green Chili at Coopersmith's Pub last summer in Fort Collins, I think I'll go with their mix of Anaheim and serrano chiles. I'd love some quantity guidelines from any brewers out there who might be reading this.

What's for dinner?

2007-07-01T16:37:00.000-05:00

It's been a good week for cooking. Word of the cherry pies spread to friends and neighbors, so those are disappearing fast. Last night, I threw together dinner more or less on the spot--but with so many good, fresh ingredients to work with, my rhythm was on from the start. I even managed to take some pictures.

I began by chopping up some greens and reds--specifically, another bunch of mizuna, that sort of peppery Japanese salad & stirfry green that has been in each week's CSA share, and radicchio, aka Italian chicory. The bitterness of radicchio lends itself well to risotto, a creamy rice dish that is much easier to make than you might think. It's easy to tend to its modest needs when you've got faster, flashier preparations going on other burners. Just get it started about 30 minutes before you plan to eat.

To do so, I wilted my greens in butter in a wide, shallow pan over medium heat for 2-3 minutes, then added about 2 cups of arborio rice, stirring for a few minutes more to toast it and coat each grain with butter. Then I threw in about a cup of wine. Ideally, you'd use white, so as not to discolor the rice; but we didn't have any open, and the radicchio was going to give it a pinkish tinge anyway, so red it was.

Meanwhile, I'd filled a two-quart pan with water and tossed in a handful of frozen stock cubes. You can use bouillon cubes if you aren't in the habit of making, concentrating and freezing your own stock, and either chicken or vegetable flavor is fine. What you want is a nice hot liquid to add bit by bit to your rice. The simmering stock will gradually dissolve the rice's rich starchy coat and combine with it to produce a creamy sauce, then soften the grain within. You have to take it slow, though, so lower the heat if it starts to boil or you'll lose too much stock to evaporation.

I started adding stock to the rice about a cup at a time while I began thinking about what else would be on the dinner menu. With each addition, I gave the rice a quick stir and sprinkled it with salt. If I'd been using commercially made bouillon, which is already pretty salty, I wouldn't have needed so much, but you'd be surprised how much salt it takes to season a skillet full of rice. Each time that the liquid was nearly absorbed, in would go another cup. Beyond this, though, risotto just kind of makes itself.

And as for the what else part, I remembered that we still had a couple of Belgian endives in the fridge that I'd bought at the farm stand.

We also had two lamb loin chops, purchased on CSA pickup day from Dines Farms. I heated up a cast iron skillet on the stove while I rinsed the meat, patted it dry, and sprinkled it with salt and pepper. Simple preparations are the best way to show off quality ingredients, so all I did was brown it for a couple of minutes on each side on the stove top, then put the pan into a 400 degree oven to finish cooking for about 7 minutes. I let the finished chops rest on a plate on the countertop for a few minutes while I finished the rest of the meal.

Taking a cue from epicurious, I quartered the endives and browned them in butter for about 5 minutes total before drizzling them with balsamic vinegar.

I also grated a nice little pile of parmesan cheese while I waited for the final addition of the stock to absorb into the rice. When it was close, I dumped in the cheese and stirred it well to melt and distribute the cheese evenly into the risotto's sauce. I probably could have been a bit more aggressive with the stirring, but I like my risotto on the soupy side.

Et voila!...we had a meal. Th'usband, who normally isn't much of a lamb fan, said that it was the best he'd ever tasted. That's because it was pasture raised, and if all that running around made the meat slightly less tender, it also made it much more flavorful. Myself, I was grooving on the overall balance of flavors, and the fact that with the exception of the rice, the parmesan, and those few drops of vinegar, all the ingredients were bought straight from the area farms that produced them. Provecho!

Salad days: CSA weeks 3 and 4

2007-06-28T16:11:00.000-05:00

Summer is here.

I just pulled some pie dough that I mixed up yesterday from the fridge, and am getting this post started in the time it takes to soften enough to roll into the crusts for a couple of cherry pies. I did my annual shift on Tuesday at our CSA pickup site and came home with 2 quarts of cherries, about 10 lbs. of apples, and two bunches of flowers

(one of which I gave to a complete stranger on the train on the way home, an act that while not quite as selfless as it may seem--I did deliberately sign up for the final shift of the evening, after all, knowing that in doing so I'd boost my take--was really fun. God bless you too, honey. And while I'm confessing, I ought to mention that th'usband pitted all the cherries for me, and in return I'm heating up the house on him)

over and above our weekly share.

A few days before that, on Saturday, th'usband and I drove out to Water Mill at the very tip of Long Island (just barely in our 100 mile foodshed radius if you want to know the truth) to take advantage of the annual invitation to pick strawberries and visit the farm that supplies our CSA.

Now there's a happy story. Green Thumb farm has been in the Halsey family for over 300 years. The last of its 95 acres was certified organic about 20 years ago, though as Bill Halsey pointed out, all his generation did was to convert the farm back to the kinds of practices that had been used through the middle of the 20th century.

(For a great story connecting the dots between modern agricultural production, World War II, and Muscle Shoals, read this article by Michael Pollan, originally published in Smithsonian Magazine. When you feel sufficiently disgusted, click here to sign a petition to request that Farm Bill subsidies be extended to organic farmers. The goal is 30,000 signatures by July 15th, and as of this writing, they're about halfway there.)

In the mid-70s, around the time that Bill, his two sisters and one brother were in college and trying to figure out if they wanted to spend another generation on the farm, their father had an accident involving pesticides. He wound up in the hospital, and though he almost died then, thirty years later, he's still working the farm with his kids, and lately, his grandkids. In addition to a farm stand adjacent to their land, a favorite with personal chefs for the Hamptons crowd, the Halseys produce enough organic fruits and vegetables to feed 450 families participating in 7 CSAs.

Importantly, they also sustain themselves. In the 60s, like all of their farming neighbors, the Halseys grew nothing but potatoes, and were finding it harder and harder to get by. Before the organic conversion even began, they found that they could increase their revenues by planting tomatoes, corn, peppers, and eggplants to sell at the farm stand. Today there are about 400 different varieties of maybe 150 different types of crops. (We walked through just one patch of lettuce with Bill Halsey, who encouraged us to pick whatever looked tasty--and by the time we stopped with heads of iceberg, romaine, salad bowl, and a red-leafed something, it was only because we knew that there are physical limits to how much salad a person can eat.)

With limited yields, prices stay higher and the family is protected from catastrophic crop failure; though this wasn't the best year for strawberries, there's always the

swisschard(yesi'mtryingtobegratefulforswisschard)bokchoitoma
tillosfavabeansblackbeansgreenbeansleeksbroccolicauliflowercab
bagesummersquashbasilpumpkinsbeetscollardgreensrosemary (etc)

to look forward to. It's a far cry and a far better life from that of farmers stuck growing nothing but corn and soybeans for the subsidy payments while moonlighting as truckers or what have you to get by. And it's just one more reason that we're enjoying what's on our plates this summer.

Caesar dressing

I keep meaning to pick up a tin of anchovies, but even without them, there's nothing like the rich, lemony decadence of homemade caesar. Per person, in a large bowl you'll later use to toss the lettuce, whisk together:

1 egg yolk
a generous squeeze of fresh lemon juice
an equal amount of cider vinegar (balsamic is just fine too)
a dash of Worcestershire sauce
a pinch of salt (probably not necessary if you've got the anchovies)
minced garlic if you want it, or mix some with olive oil, coat cubes of stale bread, and bake them to make croutons
Grate in some fresh Parmesan cheese, and sprinkle some more with a good bit of pepper over the salad

nose to toes preparation

2007-06-21T12:51:00.000-05:00

Read this. These are the kinds of lives that simultaneously inspire my thinking about food and creativity and make anything that I've imagined so far seem small.

local vs. organics, round two

2007-06-21T10:58:00.000-05:00

A recent post about organic and/or local produce drew this comment about another certification option:

...Certified Naturally Grown (CNG), a certification program created in 2002 specifically for farmers who grow organically and sell locally but may not have the time and/or money to pursue USDA Organic certification. Certified Naturally Grown is designed to supplement the agri-business focused National Organic Program by recognizing small, local, organically committed farmers for their sustainable practices and giving customers assurance that CNG farmers adhere to specific, publicly-documented standards.

Certification through our program requires an application process, an annual inspection, and publication on our website of documents signed by the farmers and their inspectors. Certified Naturally Grown bases its standards on the National Organic Program, but improves on these standards where necessary (particularly with respect to livestock living conditions and access to pasture).

Currently almost 500 farms in 48 states are Certified Naturally Grown. CNG is a private, independent, non-profit grassroots effort that runs primarily on free-will donations from farmers and supporters, it's nationally recognized and endorsed (http://naturallygrown.org/supportive-orgs.html), and it is a legitimate alternative to the "non-local certified organic vs. local non-certified” conundrum.

Meanwhile, the May/June issue of Eating Well features an interesting article comparing and contrasting organic and conventional agriculture, particularly with regard to the impact of pesticides on food safety. Cited are a number of other organic certification alternatives, including

...Food Alliance, an Oregon-based group that has created its own alternative certification program for farmers committed to sustainable agricultural practices.

Part of the impetus for creating local certification bodies is a practical one; certain heirloom strains of apples and tomatoes, the article points out, are extremely susceptible to pests that require management practices off limits to organic farmers. Other farmers, like the ranchers behind Food Alliance, reject the kinds of compromises that overly strict organic regulations can occasion:

Doc Hatfield, a veterinarian by training, [explains], “We’ve got 14,000 acres of our own, but our cattle also range over land maintained by the Bureau of Land Management, and the BLM sometimes uses pesticides to clear weeds away from the roadside.” For that reason, his cattle can’t qualify as organic. But the Hatfields have come to believe that letting the animals roam over as much land as possible is more important to their health—and contentment—than restricting them to organic acreage.

Still others ask the kinds of questions raised by environmental journalist Michael Pollan in Omnivore's Dilemma and elsewhere about what organic labels mean when they are applied on a large, commercial scale. From the EW article again:

...a Wisconsin-based farm policy research group called the Cornucopia Institute reported in April that at least some organic milk sold by a major nationwide brand comes from industrial-style dairy farms with thousands of cows who are kept confined rather than being allowed to graze. Wal-Mart, meanwhile, recently announced that it will double its organic produce offerings—sparking new worries that the original notion of organic farming as small and local has been lost to big business.

I'm worried about all these certification tiers. I think that all or most--even the federal organic guidelines--are designed with the best of intentions, and provide important information to consumers in the absence of direct contact with producers. The danger, though, is that faced with a dozen different virtuous-sounding labels, a lot of people are going to get confused, and then cynical.

My guess is that the organic standard will soon really only be meaningful at the national level (when choosing between oranges, for instance, all of which are raised far outside of my foodshed), and as a gauge of the relative nutritional value (as in EW's focus on pesticide residues) of items within a category. For all the things that I eat that can be produced closer to home, meaningful choices are going to require a correspondingly closer look at the standards applied. Really, though, I'm back to the same realization that I made a few weeks back when trying to figure out what my food goal for the summer should be: it's only once I've completely adopted a locavore lifestyle that I need to worry too much about the relative merits of this apple vs. that one. And that's still a long way off.

brew news

2007-06-15T21:41:00.000-05:00

On Thursday I kegged the batch of Belgian Witbier that I made the week before. Like all 'white' beers it owes its light color and refreshing taste to the partial substitution of wheat for barley. I also brewed up a batch of Porter, based on a standard English Sweet Porter kit but with chocolate malt (the grain, not the ice cream drink) added. It smelled great as it was all going into the pot, and when I took it off of the boil, I noticed an extra creaminess owing to the rolled oats in that recipe. There was a bit of a sanitation breakdown towards the end when I was trying to strain it all into the fermenter--first the doorbell was ringing ('Do you want an exterminator, Mami?') and the dog was barking and then the phone was ringing (twice) and both the dog and the cat were running crazed circles around the kitchen past the open lid of the fermenter--but hopefully I'll get away with it. If you're nervous about it and you stop by, you can have a nice summery glass of the Wit instead.

Meanwhile, th'usband has ordered me some more brewing gear for my birthday, namely a fourth keg and a second fermenter. This new fermenter is to be a glass carboy, which is purportedly better when you can't keg right away because the glass protects the beer from oxidation. Having a second will also allow me to space batches closer together and to clarify them with a two-stage fermentation process.

Many beers with a hoppy aroma get it from an addition of hops to the secondary fermentation stage, 4-7 days prior to bottling or kegging day. What I'm wondering is how that works given the narrow neck of a glass carboy. I guess I can't use a muslin bag with plug hops or it will expand like a sponge in there and I'll never get it out. If anyone out there is a brewer, I'm asking what may seem obvious to you: what do I do? Just throw the hops in there loose so I can rinse them out later? Am I missing something?

Fun ag/local econ. facts from July Harper's Index

2007-06-15T09:03:00.000-05:00

Amount that a Colorado state prisoner is paid to work a day as a field hand at a local farm: $0.60
Amount the prisons are paid by farmers for each inmate's daily work: $77.20
Amount the USDA's Rural Development program has given in aid to distressed rural areas since 2001: $8,600,000,000
Amount the program has given to metropolitan areas, retirement communities, and resorts: $39,100,000,000
Percentage of every dollar spent at a locally owned Chicago store that is retained or recirculated in the city: 68
Percentage of every dollar spent at a chain store in Chicago that is: 43
Portion of the worldwide revenue from food retailing accounted for by ten corporations: 1/4

What's Fresh Now: CSA week 2

2007-06-13T11:37:00.000-05:00

Here's a picture of this week's harvest, avec chat. I figured that if I let her momentarily indulge her taste for green leafies, she might leave my basil plant alone for awhile. Here's the list, L to R:

romaine lettuce
mizuna (a Japanese stir-fry green)
leaf lettuce
strawberries
rhubarb
more curly cress

Last night's dinner already made use of the mizuna and rhubarb (which I cooked with duck breasts, to mediocre & mushy effect; if there's any more rhubarb next week, I'm going with this instead) and the strawberries, for strawberry shortcake. I also neglected to mention the other day that I made a soup out of last week's sunchokes.

the organic/local food conundrum

2007-06-12T12:05:00.000-05:00

I take a hobbyist's approach to many of my greatest passions--something I ought to discuss with a skilled therapist, perhaps--but lately, I have no trouble finding confirmation of their relevance in the daily news cycle.

While the mainstream media often discusses local and organic foods as if the two were in competition with each other--or suggests that the choice to buy one's food from anything but a supermarket stocked with the products of conventional agriculture is most basically a romantic one, as Time magazine does here--there may be even more reason for consumers to question the significance of their choices if the USDA continues to relax organic standards. I share grocery industry analyst Kevin Coupe's rejection of such actions, even in the face of the complications he acknowledges, like the shortage of organic feed crops relative to rising demand for organic dairy products. If giants like Anheuser-Busch want access to the lucrative organic market, they should be the ones funding the full conversion of their suppliers to legitimate, 100% organic farming practices. Smaller producers are doing it.

And, if we apply the analogy a little more personally, if the wealthier citizens of the wealthiest nation on earth want access to quality food, we have to be willing to put our dollars into the farmers and systems that can deliver it to us. And we have to use our brains to navigate the choices we may encounter along the way.

I had an interesting conversation about this the other day with my brother-in-law, a Denver area chef. His wife's family owns and operates a crop and dairy farm in southern Missouri. While still not convinced it is worth it for him to go for organic certification, B's father-in-law routinely pastures his dairy herd and is committed to many of organic farming's basic aims. It might make more sense both from an environmental and an economic perspective for consumers in the Ozarks to buy their milk from this or a similar local family farm than from a big organic producer like Stonyfield, which is located in New England.

An earlier draft of this post ended with a chirpy story intended to show how the organic or local question is often a false dichotomy. I wrote about laying in a small supply of ground beef for my party on Saturday from the meat guy who sells his wares at our CSA pickup each week, and who I believed was both a local and organic farmer. Make no mistake; the beef was good. One guest came up and asked me what we'd done, because that was about the best burger he'd ever eaten. That inspired th'usband to make a funny about my "college-educated cow meat," which I've gone on to repeat, smugly, several times.

But a conversation yesterday with the man also cited by the NYTimes for his incomparably delicious all-natural hot dogs revealed a stance very similar to that of my sister-in-law's dad in Missouri. Dines Farm is a 100% natural operation: that is, the cows (and lamb, pigs, chickens, ducks, and turkeys) are pasture raised on 120 acres without antibiotics or growth hormones, and their grass-fed meat is leaner and more complex in flavor than the cloyingly buttery corn-fed feedlot stuff. It is also fresh, very fresh: they have a processing plant on site, and do most of the cutting for the week on Tuesdays. But Dines is not an organic farm. "No need," said Mr. Dines. "I've got a top-quality product. I've been doing this for 20 years. But with 15 new plants going up to produce biofuels, the price of feed is already going through the roof, let alone certified organic feed. It would mean a lot of paperwork and a lot of expense, and it wouldn't make the meat any better."

Honestly, I was a little bummed to hear this. Like the well-trained, prestige-driven consumer that I am, I am drawn to the word "organic" on a label as to a favorite brand. But I'm going to use my brain here, as I exhorted everyone else to do just a couple of paragraphs back, and stick with Dines Farm meats. I'm persuaded of its quality and value, including its value for the community I live in and the reduction of our local dependence on fossil fuels. I do find that my confidence in the superiority of organic agriculture has clouded over a bit in the last couple of days, however, and for the first time I'm seeing the organic label as something of a gimmick.

If it is, then at least it's a gimmick I am happy to see succeed on a national scale. By all means, let big processed foods concerns pay for the right to stamp the word "organic" on their cheese doodles and salsa verde. Let Anheuser-Busch pour money into Yakima Valley to support the organic conversion of hops farms, and let Frank Purdue create a huge & compelling demand for organic corn. My freshly-minted feeling, though, is that until changes of this magnitude occur (and they can and should and will occur rather quickly, I do expect) to our systems of agricultural production, it is best for me to make a distinction between local and organic, and to choose local in every possible instance.

Oops

2007-06-12T11:03:00.000-05:00

My Booze & Yarn attendance has been pretty piss-poor lately, but I want to save this Knitty article with its list of DIY fixit tutorials for future reference. In the meantime, author David Demchuk's About-the-Author-cum-confessional cracked me up:

David has been making mistakes in his knitting for more than 20 years. He has made frightful design and colour choices, has knit yurts instead of sweaters when he hasn't swatched for gauge, has confused his numbers and knit two sizes at the same time for the back of a cardigan, has grafted thumbs inside out onto gloves, has seamed the outside of a hat by mistake, and once came very close to making a sock with a toe at each end. He is not too proud to ask for your pity.

on the wagon, sort of

2007-06-10T15:43:00.000-05:00

We've run out of beer.

I've got a birthday coming up, so we invited some friends over for a party last night. It is a lot of fun to be able to hand each guest a pint glass at the door and let them have at it, but for the first time in 3 months and 6 kegs, the bar did demand some maintenance. Brew and learn, I guess.

It began on Wednesday when I discovered that the CO2 tank was pretty much empty. The next day, I started googling "compressed gas" "CO2 tank refills" and "beverage service." Nothing--or at least nothing relevant.

Somehow I did find a link to a welding supply company out on Long Island with no website but a soothing man in their employ who told me that I could exchange my spent tank for a full one at a location near me. That sounded easy enough, but it was already pretty much closing time and my errand would have to wait until the next day. In the meantime, I decided to create a mountain out of that proverbial molehill by calling up Brooklyn Brewery and asking someone there where they got CO2. A few phone calls later, I'd learned (here's a big surprise) that my CO2 tank was too small for big commercial suppliers to be bothered with, and besides, it had gone out of test the month before. The particular gentleman who helped me figure that out went on to tell me about incidents of tanks that exploded after faulty servicing from a competitor he refused to recommend--or name. I worked myself into a pretty big panic about it all, but in the end, just like the soothing man said, all I had to do was take it to a welding supply place and swap it for a new one. I must admit, however, that I didn't go to soothing man's shop, but chose one in my favorite Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook instead. Note to other desperate home brewers: if "welding supplies" doesn't do it, try googling "industrial gases."

All fine and dandy. We got the new tank installed but laid off the beer for a few days, both to save the half (Red Hook ESB clone) and nearly full (Sierra Celebration Ale clone) kegs for the party, and to gain some control of our drinking habits. In the meantime, I set about brewing a batch of Belgian style wheat beer with some additional Curacao orange peel thrown in for good measure. (I was going for heightened citrusy tang, but I just read that I might have been better off with an extra ounce of coriander. Whoops.)

Fast forward to the party, when the flow of ESB thinned to barely a trickle. BrewUnc#3 had just walked in the door, so I put him to work diagnosing the problem, which I assumed to be with the CO2 boost. Not so, said me Unc. It seems the kegerator cabinet could use some more weatherstripping, and a mighty block of ice had built up around the beer lines; somewhere in the left set of hoses, something froze (that will teach us to leave beer untouched for more than a couple of days!) so that we had to settle for drawing from just one tank at a time, using the hoses on the right side only.

We blew through the first keg midway through the evening, but made it to the end of the party on the second. Before calling it a night, I unplugged the whole business and put a bath towel in front of the door to catch the meltwater. This was soaked by morning, when I went to check how much beer was left and came up with a sputtering glass of head. Empty!

All well and good. If the CO2 lines had any moisture in them, they now will have a couple of weeks to dry out. I've also rinsed out the kegs and filled the tap hoses with iodophur sanitizing solution. Before we hook up the next batch, I'll make sure to tack some more weatherstripping around the door frame. And a few weeks on the wagon never hurt anyone...though if I'm not mistaken, there's a six-pack or two in the fridge left by some thoughtful guest. Salud!

What's fresh now: CSA week 1

2007-06-06T20:35:00.000-05:00

For those of you not into brewing, knitting, or Dutch novels about Mexico, I bring you a new feature: what's fresh now.

That's right, our first CSA delivery for the year was yesterday. Farmer Bill makes the drive from Water Mill to the Cobble Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn 26 times a year, each Tuesday from June to December. This is our second year of participation. Last year, I attempted to keep a personal record of what we got each week and what we did with it; but without anyone reading or reacting to this journal--or more importantly, getting on my case when I let yet another batch of mystery Asian greens go dank and unexplored--I got sloppy.

To me, the single best part of belonging to a CSA is the really concrete awareness it brings about what's in season. We still have to supplement our weekly take with trips to the grocery store (though this year I've also made a personal pledge to buy local, pasture-raised meat each week from the Dines Farm guy who parks his cooler at the CSA pickup point) but I find myself less tempted to buy tomatoes when we should be eating asparagus, or mangoes when it's strawberry season. It's a start.

And then the weather report takes on a whole new level of interest. (I'm told it's not really normal for someone not yet in her 80s, but I love the weather page and have been known to make mix tapes of songs that sing to this passion, from 'The Only Living Boy in New York' to 'Weather with You.') Our April monsoon, for instance, has had me a little stressed about the strawberries, which were the juicy red-to-the-core highlights of the first deliveries last year. Word from the farm says they're still on their way, though, so that's exciting. In the meantime, look at the gorgeous haul we started with this year:

lettuce (two kinds)
herbs (curly cress & oregano)
jerusalem artichokes (in bowl; also known as sunchokes & are completely unrelated to artichokes or the middle east)
radishes (ever eat them with really salty butter & a baguette? yum.)
black beans (which I shelled, to th'usband's great annoyance, as we watched a movie)
asparagus

We had a salad last night with some of the lettuce, radishes, herbs, and sunchokes, dressed only with lemon juice (to help the sunchokes keep their color) and a little olive oil. Th'usband also put some of the oregano into the lasagna he was making. I'm going to have to dry a bunch of that, because there's no way we can go through that much in a week. Further uses to come.

The Revolt of Guadalajara, Chapter 1 part 2

2007-06-05T13:42:00.000-05:00

Between two oceans, but far from both, on a stony, infertile plain, where irregular mesas alternate with surly, grey-green fields, where the rare shabby village and low trees stick out and hordes of shrubs lie silent and bald on the sandy banks of the riverbed that almost always streams with silt, lies Guadalajara, the capital of the state of Jalisco, one of the poorest and most backward in all of Mexico. [note to reader: yes, these are long-winded and occasionally even run-on sentences. I’m trying to preserve what I understand to be the intentional unwieldiness of the original, at least for now.] It was founded by one of the followers of Hernando Cortes, who went almost without mention in the history of the conquest and who was apportioned the least-promising spoils.

A long road ran from the South, where the government had its seat, to the distant bent-over barrier island in the North, now called Baja California. Guadalajara was originally nothing more than a depot for goods and food for passing expeditions. Later a few salt flats were exploited, a tin mine was discovered, a soap-works set up, and something of a harvest was eked out from the meager fields in the area. But the original residents, the Indians, didn’t get ahead as a result of any of this; instead, the conquerors kept everything for themselves and had the Indians work for them. They offered no resistance. The strongest took to the hills, from which perch they threatened the plains dwellers for a long time. The ones who stayed behind were gradually weakened. In the exchange of syphilis for tuberculosis, they fared badly. The forced labor in the salt flats, the soap works, the tin mines, and the glass blowers that were later established, was deadly to them. The abuse of strong drink replaced the rare but enormously therapeutic release provided by the old blood sacrifice festivals. The unruly were exiled, the meek retained.

Only in one of the outlying towns did one strain hold themselves pure and apart, supporting themselves with crude basketweaving that they themselves carried once every two months to the market in Aguascalientes, so as not to have any trade with Guadalajara.

Once there had also been an insurrection in and around Guadalajara: when wars of independence were waged throughout South America, republics sprang up like mushrooms out of the ground, merging and dividing, and often disappearing again after a brief existence; it had only lasted there for a very short time. After that no one gave any more thought to revolts. Languishing, sickly and in filth and poverty they lived on.

There were still remnants of the old sacrifices. Sometimes a child would go missing. The law didn’t trouble itself over it as long as it didn’t happen too often, even if the child later turned up mutilated or dead. In a place ringed by walls, not far from the city, the old misshapen idols still stood, weathered and crumbling, and another still more or less intact on an offshoot of the mountain chain. There was a vague legend that one day the sun wouldn’t go down and the gods would enter the city and devour the white people, but when and how would they tell the whites from the Indians? Many didn’t even know themselves, calling themselves white if in doubt, though under those circumstances would try to pass for Indians.

The gods were still brought offerings in secret, really so few that they must long since have grown displeased. The Christian gods made such large demands: no children, truth be told (except for those who were used for work in the monasteries), but money, lots of money, more than they could ever hope to raise. They always were coming up short, their products were always worth less than they expected when brought to market and bought by contemptuous middlemen.

to groove is to purchase

2007-06-04T14:06:00.001-05:00

It's funny how close the correlation is between getting into a hobby and getting into debt. When I first started brewing just a few months back, I couldn't imagine how anyone could object to a little cloudiness or other tell-tale signs of homemade beer. Now I'm pretty much certain that I need to upgrade to a two-stage fermentation system, both to improve the clarity of the final product by siphoning the beer off of the trub, and to tighten the spacing between batches. Of course, if I'm going to have two different brews fermenting at the same time, I'm going to need a fourth keg for a total of two in reserve. And once I've got that in the house, I know I'll be even more tempted to forgo the shortcut of using dried malt extract and want to make my beer with actual grains. These will have to be mashed first--soaked and agitated in a hot bath to kick start the conversion of starches to sugar--then sparged (don't think I fail to appreciate the geeky jargon involved here). Fortunately there's a system available for these additional steps, albeit for a pretty penny, and th'usband is willing to give up some space in his toy closet to accommodate it. But what's going to happen when I decide I need a goat or some cattle to eat & compost the spent grain for me?

help me figure out my pantry

2007-05-31T10:56:00.000-05:00

I seem to be in the calm before the storm work-wise, so I'm using it today to organize an order of brew supplies. If there are any homebrewers who happen to be perusing this blog, I could really use your input. So far I've brewed 6 batches, all from kits. Now that I understand the basic process and have started to develop my beer palate a little bit, I'd like to move into recipes and eventually into improvisation. I cook by ear, as it were, consulting printed recipes as a starting point more than anything else; as soon as I am confident that I can more or less anticipate and describe the Z produced by a given X + Y, I'd like to play around with beer recipes and style variations of my own.

Anyhow, all of this means that I'm interested not just in ordering ingredients for a specific recipes or two, but in laying in a supply of staple yeasts, malts, hops, etc. that could form the start of a versatile brewing pantry. Now that this site is starting to get more traffic, I'm hoping you, dear casual Reader (or someone in your circle), might have some ideas about what my pantry should contain. Efficiency is going to be key here since the husband and I are both packrats and together with our livestock are wedged into a scant 900 sq. feet. We do have an awesome kitchen, though, and a two-tap kegerator that holds 5 gallon kegs, of which we currently have one spare. In the short term I am interested in brewing the creamiest, chocolatiest Porter recipe I can track down, and after that, a nice summery wheat beer or saison. Please send me your ideas!

The Revolt of Guadalajara, Chapter 1 part 1 continued

2007-05-29T14:33:00.000-05:00

But sometimes the desire for something else—for someone from the outside, whoever that might be, whoever can upset the lifeless balance of being—is so strong, that they surround him or comes out of the town to greet him, and he feels the feeling of welcome that is so appealing to a drifter or a traveler-over-great-distances. Then he is lost.

Sometimes in just these kinds of towns there abides a strong belief, like the last remaining vine on a ruin, that something is finally going to happen, that the sun is going to shine differently, that someone is going to come who will upend life in such a way that people will dance in the same otherwise quiet and vacuous streets. And every stranger who arrives in an uncommon manner is believed to be the one who will bring the turnaround. The wanderer thus endangered, crushed under the centuries-long hope of an entire people, can still sometimes save himself by means of a wild flight, across the plain, over hill and dale, until a fold of the earth shields him from the town and there are no villages left to obstruct and stare at him; then he collapses, leaning against a stone or a tree trunk, and falls into an exhausted sleep.

And the next morning, when the sun rises over an expansive plain and shimmers early in a salt flat or a shallow sea or on white spotted cattle, and he wakes up, stiff from sleep but still ready to keep walking, his first thought is of the oppressive dream of a town that was built of stone but wasn’t really there. Because space and the man that freely passes through it are the only truth, that is what life is, and everything frozen in place and gradually returning to dust is dead from the get-go.

But the drifter who is too weak for his calling, who nurtures a secret longing in a corner of his soul for a resting place, a community where even he can find a place, often is ambushed by a dead lonely town, in the middle of an abandoned plain or a harborless coast. He betrays his calling and it wreaks its revenge. The residents of the lifeless place think that he comes to bring life and when they realize that it’s rest that he wants, they drive him away or kill him.

The Revolt of Guadalajara, Chapter 1 part 1

2007-05-25T10:43:00.000-05:00

Sometimes, on the shores of a shipless sea, at the foot of an uninhabited and bald-scraped mountain range or in the middle of a parched and arid plain inspiring little hope of a lone house, much less a cluster of them, there lies a town. Its raison d’etre—a rich mine, a good harbor—has long since been abandoned and still the town remains, the inhabitants breeding forth though starved of new blood or money, their line like that of the surrounding tribes growing meager and weak. The outside world does not begrudge this town her pinched existence and leaves her be; she is harmless.

Only for the lonely traveler bound for better places does she present any real danger. Tired from long journeys, seeing that town lying there now in the middle of nowhere, he wants to rest. The town juts out on the coast, on the foot of the mountain or in the middle of the plain like a reef that is hard to get around. If he risks getting too close to her, all the hope, all the longing for a new life and a better fate that exists in the people of the town and the plains as surely as it does in all mortals, is poured out upon him. He doesn’t notice it, he takes his feeling to be a heavy exhaustion after his long trek, such that he decides to stay on the plain or in the town for a few days to catch his breath. But a terror does seize him when he sees the hungry, hankering faces of the locals lifted up towards him, when he wanders through the alleys and streets and hesitates on a sunless square about where to go, when he reads a persistent inbreeding on the pallid faces and slack suffering of the inhabitants. And despite his exhaustion he runs faster and faster and, if he is lucky and his sense of direction doesn’t leave him in the lurch, he gets out of there, and stands in an hour on the other side facing the same plain, prostrate now and endless before him, wholly manageable, beckoning him to cross. And if, clammy with sweat, he should have the good fortune of a stream to bathe away his weariness and his brush with the town, then he’ll be saved.

Introducing Jan Jacob Slauerhoff

2007-05-25T08:43:00.000-05:00

J.J. Slauerhoff was a ship's doctor-writer-translator (from Spanish, Portuguese, and French to Dutch) widely regarded as one of the greatest Dutch poets of the 20th century interbellum.

When I first moved to the Netherlands, I imagined that someday I would translate Dutch poetry into English. I'd had a course in 20th century poets during an undergraduate semester at Leiden University, but that was before I'd read much of anything beyond the Romantics in my own tradition, and I didn't realize that relative to American poets after Whitman, the Dutch had an incredibly stubborn penchant for formalism--let alone that this would piss me off. (I don't know about you, but not much of the world I live in lends itself to orderly sequences of weighty conclusions hammered home by rhyme.) So anyhow, that didn't work out.

Then just as I was leaving for Mexico, my friend J gave me a novella by Slauerhoff called De opstand van Guadalajara (The Revolt of Guadalajara). It is a misanthropic little melodrama, written in the last year of Slauerhoff's sickly, misanthropic little life, and I loved it. I've been talking about translating it for years, ever since I discovered that it's come out in translation in Germany, Indonesia, and Italy--as recently as 1999 in the latter--but never in the U.S. I've even done rough cuts of the first and last of ten chapters, and made my friends read them and tell me they'd like to read the rest.

. . . Fast forward to this morning, when I got it in my head yet again to work on it serially in this blog, where I hope to be buoyed along by the inevitable crush of readers clamoring for its completion. A girl's gotta dream. Anyhow, it had been quite awhile since I'd had this particular bug up my ass, so it took some time to even find the book. Then, scanning the back cover, something registered for the first time: Slauerhoff died in 1936 at just 38 years old.

It just so happens that I am turning 39 next month, and it bears stating outright that I identified from the get-go with Slauerhoff as a kindred vagabond/poet/translator crazy in love with the sound of Spanish but more properly at home among the Dutch. So this discovery was kind of fraught, an echo of a moment 11 years before when, walking past a record store in Leiden, I felt compelled--really, physically compelled--to go in there and buy a German edition of Janice Joplin's greatest hits. From the liner notes I learned that Janice died at 27, the age that I was just about to stop being, and though I've never been all that rock & roll and her music is a bit out of character for me, it seemed important that I do something in honor of our unlikely connection that day. Like dedicate this translation of Slauerhoff to her. So here it goes:

The Revolt of Guadalajara

by J. Slauerhoff
translated by Jenny Gage

for Janice.

boozy knitters in the news.

2007-05-24T20:57:00.000-05:00

Almost forgot: Booze & Yarn got some good press. Read it here.

Chicks Brew, Too

2007-05-24T19:52:00.001-05:00

Several weeks back, I received a 52-lb. package from BrewUnc#1, containing almost 20 years of back issues of Zymurgy, the official magazine of the American Homebrewer's Association. One of Zymurgy's editors is Charlie Papazian, who founded the group and authored its Bible, and is pictured holding the plaque (to the left) and hanging out with Kathy Ireland (above). Admittedly, all of the pictures here came from the same 1988 issue, but brewing remains a demographic that gives facial hair a bad name (& I even like facial hair!). I wound up throwing out about half of the issues after discovering that a complete article cycle is about 8 years long and that the older issues are b&w and way too fascinated that Chicks Brew, Too. The Kathy Ireland cover story killed me, though, so I kept that one: just imagine how many mustaches twitched to learn that Kathy was 'a beer enthusiast with the same fantasies that inspire most brewers.' (Did you know about her line of home furnishings, btw? Me neither.)

Anyhow, I've got a lot of reading to do, and just in time: the last of my pre-packaged kits is in the fermenter and I'm fixing to move to the level of (other people's) recipes next. I'm browsing for a creamy, chocolaty Porter for th'husband, and a frisky Saison for me. Any suggestions?

you can get paid for that, you know

2007-05-24T18:46:00.000-05:00

Wow. I really, really need to market myself better. Just got word from my friend J about Sweet Deliverance, a new business piggybacking on the CSA boom.

[A quick aside to all those editors who passed on my CSA diary pitch, apparently unconvinced that CSAs were poised to be the next Tickle Me Elmo: I told you so.]

Here's the deal. You sign up for a CSA share. Heck, sign up for the Mega Combo Share, which includes weekly fresh-from-the-farm vegetables, fruit, eggs, and flowers. You can afford it, you New Yorker, you . . . and that's the part that I really have to learn, because while it might cross my mind to offer a service like this, it would never occur to me that anyone would pay for it.

Now start writing checks. The first one for $925 is for the farmers. The subsequent $250 per week is for your own private chef to pick up your produce for you, wash the mesclun mix and make a vinaigrette, whip together a strawberry rhubarb cobbler, and deliver it to your door. Later it will be baba ganouj and pasta sauce, but it will still be $250. I have a hard time imagining that someone of your means eats too many family-style dinners at home, but it could be a nice change of pace. And you'll feel virtuous--not just on account of all that organic goodness coursing through your veins, but because you'll be providing an income for a chef who might otherwise be cooking 100 covers a night at $10/hour to pay off her culinary school debt.

The funny thing is that this whole national food moment we're in is about shortening the distance from the farm to the table, and here this woman comes with her enterprising little self so that you can have your cake and keep your oven clean, too.

God bless you, Chef Kelly Geary. I really hope it works.

Mohair for May

2007-05-24T18:09:00.000-05:00

I made an unexpected trip to Minnesota this past weekend and couldn't put it off any longer. M. finally has her straightjacket. She was a very good sport.

Down to Pumpkin

2007-05-15T20:36:00.000-05:00

I've been brewing a lot more than this blog reflects. After the Dubbel and the IPA came a Bock-style beer. It wasn't as dark as I thought was characteristic of the style--nor, for that matter, could the IPA fairly be described as a pale ale--but definitely malty, and an instructive contrast on tap next to the more bitter, hoppy IPA.

To my real surprise, I am starting to be able to make meaningful taste distinctions. Somewhere along the way at another Bierkraft tasting, I took a whiff of the proffered Saison (a Belgian farmhouse style that was brewed each winter for field hands, who were given a daily allotment of 5 liters when the sun got hot) and smelled lavender. Everyone agreed the beer was spicy, and some said cinnamon; but lavender won out when the night's presenter cast his vote with me. I felt very clever. And my education has been a lot more fun so far than sitting home with one of those little sets of essences that sommeliers use to train their noses.

Since that first silty batch of Belgian ale, I've also discovered that careful siphoning from the fermenting bucket into the keg is key to keeping the beer drinkable right down to the dregs. We were actually caught off guard last week--one moment there was a slightly heady IPA, the next there was only a tap sputtering foam--and then again a few days later when the Bock keg hit bottom too. The bummer was that my only backup, until the Red Hook ESB clone I've got kegged is ready in another 10 days or so, is a pretty disappointing pumpkin ale. I know, I know, it's May...but the husband and I love us some pumpkin ale--just unfortunately not this one.

Aside from the pumpkin puree, I was directed to put in an ounce of pie spices; somewhere either in the measuring or the relative proportions of cloves to cinnamon to ginger to nutmeg, things got out of hand. You just can't taste around the spices to the beer, which suggests that it's a bit flimsy anyhow. I'm really starting to crave something with serious body, like perhaps a porter.

We'll probably have to get a fourth keg before long, both to avoid a drought when two kegs run out more or less simultaneously, and to allow unbalanced beers to mellow awhile. Really, though, once we got over the shock of being down to pumpkin, we just started drinking the stuff--and it turns out to be not so bad. It's nothing I want to give to guests, but we're hardly suffering.

I'm also going to have to make some decisions very soon about what styles of beer I want to try next so that I can dig up some recipes and place an order for the ingredients. With the batch of imitation Sierra Celebration Ale I cooked up yesterday, I'm officially out of kits, and ready to start playing a more active role in the selection and crafting of my beer. Drink locally! Brew yer own!

What's on your exceptions list?

2007-05-09T16:08:00.000-05:00

I have to say, I'm really excited (because I love it when the world spins the way I want it to) about the increasing degree to which our national conversation about food is one about ethics and politics and economics and conscience. I know that I can't go to the grocery store without a cause for soul searching. This latest time, though my cart was filled with unprocessed virtue from some angles, from where I was standing almost everything in it came from too far away. Mangoes. Coffee. Fresh raspberries (for the husband, who otherwise almost never asks for fruit), fennel.

I know you've read them too, the articles about the melamine, the formaldehyde in our tofu, the vanishing honeybees. "I'm not a vegetarian," my old friend N. said the other day, "I just don't really eat meat anymore." Even my neighborhood listserv is in a huff, the soon-to-be Fresh Directies defending their desire for canned goods and paper towels (and hey, they do have a 'Local Foods' category) from the disapproval of new CSA recruits.

The question is, what are you going to do? One option that I am close to adopting as my incremental paradigm shift for the summer is to take this year's Eat Local Challenge for the month of September. It will come as no surprise that the original organizer of this and like minded events hailed from the Bay Area, where they could probably define their foodshed in such as way as to include mangoes, avocados and lemons. But they also encourage people to make reasonable exceptions (coffee & spices are common, but anything you can't imagine living without qualifies) rather than dismiss the challenge out of hand. And by September we'll have our own fennel, tomatoes, and if not raspberries, at least apples and peaches.

Beet wine and better days

2007-04-29T22:06:00.000-05:00

By all measures, April has been a really unproductive month. Just took a walk with the husband and all we could say for ourselves was that May is coming. With any luck we're through with the chills, the monsoons, the constant cloud cover shrouding our spring. With any gumption I'll shake the tangles out of my head regardless.

I was born 2 months shy of my mother's 30th birthday, so when I'm really in the mood to give myself what for, I compare whatever it is that I'm failing to accomplish with what her daily duties were like--or in an even more extreme mood, those of my grandmother--when she was my age. I grasp the obvious stuff right away--like the fact that I've never had to potty train a toddler, let alone do so in an outhouse in Minnesota in the winter, or follow it up by warming water on the stove for a succession of baths--but a letter from my friend who's still waiting for her mohair straightjacket this past week really gave me insight into how even in the kitchen, where I'm pretty proficient, I can't begin to match what previous generations of women considered routine. M had been out at the farm visiting her elderly mother-in-law, and came across an old recipe box. In it was a recipe that she thought (in the spirit of this blog) I needed for beet wine (& it is true that I was drowning in beets from our weekly CSA farm shares last summer) that goes like this:

5 lbs. beets
3 lbs. sugar
1 lemon sliced
1 orange sliced
1 lb. raisins
1 yeast cake

Cover beets with water and boil until done. Take out beets and add just enough clear water to make a gallon. Put in jar and add sugar, lemon, orange, raisins and yeast. Let stand 28 days. Stir every day. Strain and let stand 4 or 5 more days to settle. Put in jugs or wine bottles.

The real kicker, though, was the list she turned up on another recipe card of what this woman canned as a young bride in 1940. My friend's note puts it mildly: "It makes me tired just to read the list...and she didn't have electricity & the water was hand pumped." In a later conversation she told me that the carrot pickles had apparently been made from the little skinny ones pulled out when thinning the rows, so that truly nothing was wasted. It's a list I'll keep on my desk and read daily in May, if I have to. Onward!

1940 canned:
Beans 25 Qts.
Carrot pickles 8 pts.
Beet pickles 10 pts. 2Qts.
Peas & Carrots 4 pts.
Bean pickles 1 Qt. 2 pts.
Strawberries 20 Qts.
Cherries 10 Qts.
Apricots 12 Qts.
Sauerkraut 5 Gallons
Mixed veg. 12 pts.
Rhubarb 24 Qts.
Strawberry jam 10 jars

A Grandmother's Grief

2007-04-11T20:35:00.000-05:00

I started this blog when it looked like I was about to hit a dry spell work-wise, as a means of evading panic and of focusing on the things that keep my heart beating. That dry spell got rained out, and now the trick is finding time to post. Part of the hold up has been that I've been off on an uber-belated luna de miel with the husband in Mexico. While we were away, a letter came from my 97 and a half year old (Nederlands-sprekende) grandmother, whom I adore and who, if you ask me, is the real writer in the family:

I'm interested in your website. Not that I'll ever use it, but you call it "Thuisgemaakt" [ed. note: this means 'homemade']. How did you pick that? Does that have to do with your beer making? I'm horrified that you are into making it....I'm glad [BrewUnc#1] and [BrewUnc#2] finally gave it up. When [BrewUnc#3] comes next week...I'll have a talk with him too.

Oh, Grandma. The beer making continues. A week or so before our trip, the husband and I went on a brewery tour at Sixpoint Craft Ales in Brooklyn. If I didn't already know the basic process, I would have walked out of there pretty confused--our guide, Shane, was an extremely likable, extremely scattered guy who spent a lot of time wrestling with a dubious looking animal he claimed was an Australian Shepherd--but he did take us up into a rooftop storage silo to sample a bunch of different malts, which was helpful.

Unless you really don't drink the stuff, you're probably aware that barley is far and away the foundational beer-making grain within the Western brewing tradition. Malted barley is simply barley that has been moistened and allowed to begin to germinate to tap the rich sugar stores that are within each seed. Before the hull cracks and any sprout emerges, though, the water is drained away and the malted barley is dried, often in the presence of heat. Some temperatures produce just a nice, toasty flavor and warm color; if you pop a few of these seeds in your mouth they taste and crunch a lot like Grape Nuts. To get a darker beer, though, you really have to caramelize those sugars. Seeds of crystal malt, for instance, a key ingredient in black beers, are like sooty little diamonds--but they taste like the sweet crust of creme brulee, not charcoal. These got the husband hankering for something dark, so he suggested I mix up a nice German Bock next, which I did. It fermented while we were away, and last night I kegged it. Attached are pictures of this siphoning process, as well as an important reminder for anyone tempted to ignore the little ones while brewing.

You can see from the side of the fermenter that there's a lot of sediment involved, mostly spent yeast at this point. To get a clearer beer and eliminate that telltale homebrewer's silt, many people siphon the beer off of the sludge and into a second fermenting bucket halfway through the fermentation stage. Then they do it again at kegging time, leaving still more sediment behind. I don't understand this, anymore than I ever understood my friend Carmen's reluctance to leave any stray threads or unbound seam allowance that might betray a garment as homemade. (Granted, Carmen is an exceptional seamstress from a long line of exceptional seamstresses, and like these two-staging brewers probably left the ranks of hobbyists before she hit double digits; still and all, like any other mere mortal I enjoy claiming kudos where kudos are due.)

The upshot is that both of my finished batches have been pretty cloudy so far. The one on the left is the Belgian Dubbel; it's been really fizzy from the beginning and is increasingly so as we near the bottom of the keg. I'd been monkeying around with the CO2 feed in the back of the bar and otherwise jostling the kegs as I hooked up Batch 2 (the IPA) on the right, such that the first post-homecoming glass was almost totally opaque and really pretty disgusting. That made me a little more careful to keep the siphon well clear of the bottom as I kegged the Bock. Then, once I'd finished that, I just barely restrained myself from reaching into the bucket with both hands and smearing the sludge over my face and hair. It is so lush and abundant (and of course yeasty smelling) that it has to be good for you. I'd probably wind up with thick, curly black hair if I was consistent about it. And then life would be sweet.

OK, one last note on the kegging process. Before you set the closed keg aside to age, you first hook it up to the CO2 line. There's a little pressure release valve on the top of the keg which you pull after a minute, repeating this process several times to make sure you've expelled all the oxygen that any intrepid little bacteria that may have made it into the brew need to survive. (Botulism is an anaerobic pathogen, but I'm told I'll live longer if I try to avoid this kind of thinking.) We just got back from Mexico, you remember, so what I thought of this time as I pulled the release and the pressurized air squealed out of the keg was nothing less than my favorite sound: you might be curled up on the couch with a book, or strolling around a sultry square at dusk when a passing camote vendor--selling a freshly steamed kind of sweet potato--pulls a similar kind of release, and the whole cart whistles like a train. And then I defy you not to come running.

The sound of one needle clacking

2007-03-27T08:42:00.001-05:00

Here are photos of some of the most hardcore Booze & Yarn members, taken during a rare daylight gathering last spring for the Knitting Olympics.

The real Knitting Olympians began and completed projects in the time between the opening and closing ceremonies, and then donated them all to a women's shelter. Me, I'm just trying to get points for homemade birthday presents. Right now I am knitting a powder blue mohair straightjacket for my oldest, dearest friend. I have been doing so for a very long time, and the sad thing is that I took it on for the promise its big, loopy brioche stitch (a lace style popular in the Victorian age, says C. the knitting goddess) held for relatively instant gratification.

More than two years ago I got a 1940s pattern book (to which I've lost the first couple of pages so I can't tell you the exact date of publication or quote a few choice bits about virtuous huisvrouwly behavior) and started a handsome sweater vest/hairshirt in a color the husband refers to (happily) as feldgrau. Think brownish-greenish moss. It features a very subtle, elegant 'beehive' pattern of twin knit stitches punctuating a field of purls, and is the kind of thing other knitresses ooo and aaah over but that the general public (including the man for whom it's intended) just can't appreciate because it's not flashy or cable-y and because they've never gone back and forth, back and forth across rows of 160 stitches at 9 rows to the inch. I'm still finishing up the back half right now and hope to have it done in time for our seventh anniversary. Then it will be on to the bellywarmers, just in time for a hip senescence.

Anyhow the really bad news about the straightjacket is that my outside deadline for finishing it was M's birthday two days ago. And about 4 or 5 weeks before that, I lost one of the needles. (I was knitting in church--that'll learn me!) For awhile I just switched back to working on the hairshirt, but then finally stopped into School Products to buy a new mate. There, the size 13 needles looked right, but my instructions said 11, so I left them be. Yesterday I finally went in with the piece itself and discovered that I have indeed been knitting on 13s, never mind the instructions--calling the fit of the whole thing completely into question--and that the 13s in the acrylic needles I find I must have to work with such fine mohair are now out of stock. I looked for awhile at the circular needles because their tips look quite sharp, but decided that that would be lunacy because I'm an old-school armpit knitter--I have to clamp the left needle securely under my arm to get anywhere at all. I came home with wooden needles and a lingering sense of doom.

Meanwhile I'm getting totally backlogged on my DIY projects and this blog because I've suddenly got a pile of real work to do. We're going to be away next week but I hope to update you on the Belgian ale and the IPA, as well as tell you about a tour of Sixpoint Craft Ales before I leave.

Bierkraft!

2007-03-21T09:44:00.000-05:00

Last night was the weekly free tasting night at Bierkraft, a veritable wonderland that up until now I'd managed to miss, despite the fact that it is right around the corner on 5th Avenue from a cooperative writing studio I joined when I first moved here. Come to Brooklyn and I'll take you there, whoever you are. You'll love it: they've got 900 varieties of beer, arranged by country, region, and style; 250 kinds of artisanal cheeses (& sausages too), from a hunk of Gouda aged to the color of papaya to cheeses infused with honeycombs of dark, creamy Porter; and fancy, largely local chocolates with Deco blue stencils or intriguing savory ingredients. It's the kind of place where you realize that there are people all over the place sufficiently fired up about beauty to devote their lives and livelihoods to churning out their own idiosyncratic expressions of that ideal.

Anyhow I was so amped up when I got home that I called the husband (who's traveling this week) to testify to the astonishing beauty and grace with which I'd just parked the car in a tiny little space. (In retrospect I'd probably better take the subway next time.) He is accustomed to these sorts of calls and let it go to voice mail. Then I fried up a bunch of mushroom and sourkraut pierogis with bacon and red onions (& am heating up the leftovers now, which I'll eat with a glob of artichoke dip) and sat down to write but it just didn't work. I have a hard time wrestling words into place without adequate sleep.

So with bright eyes and a clear head I'm now ready to report that the tasting was held in the basement in a narrow corner of the storeroom lined like a chapel or a jetliner with six rows of two seats on either side of a snug center aisle. We were led in the beer discussions by Tim Esnor, the storeroom manager, a skinny guy in a Sonic Youth t-shirt with round glasses and a shock of composer's hair that made me suspect he plays in an alt-Klezmer band in his free time. He'd chosen 6 oak-aged brews with more or less subtle overtones of bourbon or whiskey to complement 6 liquor-infused chocolates from the Brown Paper Chocolate Co., selected and described by Garvin Mitchell. Garvin was another classic Brooklyn type, a kid whose slow and sultry island voice was set off beautifully by the exacting joy with which he spoke about the confectioner's method, the attention to detail that he extended even to the '1960s classic style stamp labeling' of the packaging.

I expected nothing but porters to pair with the fudge-textured chocolates, but in fact had just two stout porters, an Arcadia Shipwreck Porter from Battle Creek and a Weyerbacher Heresy Imperial Stout from Pennsylvania. Both had derived a syrupy smoothness from their aging, which in the case of the Weyerbacher had been in Jack Daniel's barrels that gave the beer a soft whiff of a paper bag, as opposed to the harsh nail polish remover overtones that can plague the style. One of only two imports on the bill was Harviestoun's Old Engine Oil from Scotland, a whiskey barrel aged brew with the salty smack of soy sauce. Garvin paired this one with milk chocolates made with caramels steeped in Jack Daniel's and punctuated with bits of raw cashews. He said that was his favorite chocolate per se, but the best duo, he agreed, would come later with the pairing of dark raspberry-and-macadamia-nut chocolate and the other import, a Belgian sour called Rodenbach Gran Cru ('funky, funky stuff,' cautioned Tim, 'so don't pound it. It's like carbonated vinegar and cherry juice.') I loved the combination and will undoubtedly think of it next time I need a great birthday gift.

My favorite beers? Always, it seems, the sometimes cidery, sometimes creamy Belgian styles. According to Tim, the 'biggest, baddest, nastiest beers possible'--and he meant this in the kindest possible way--are all coming out of the States, thanks to the American penchant for taking a traditional style like a Belgian ale and blowing it out by doing something like aging it in liquor casks. The Weyerbacher Prophecy, for instance, was essentially a fruity Belgian Tripel that had been put into bourbon barrels ('I mean, who does that?!' remarked Tim with obvious appreciation). Best of all was the strong (10% ABV) but very smooth and creamy Allagash Musette from Portland, ME with a mild scent of apples and a nice bit of head.

OK, I've got to get to work now. Tonight I'll be switching gears and knitting and drinking with the lovely ladies and occasional gentlemen of Booze & Wine. Stay tuned.

the most feminine of beverages

2007-03-19T11:49:00.000-05:00

From a NYTimes obituary, Feb. 2007:

Mr. Eames called himself a beer anthropologist, a role that allowed him to expound on subjects like what he put forward as the world's oldest beer advertisement, dating to roughly 4000 B.C.

In it a Mesopotamian stone tablet depicted a headless woman with enormous breasts holding goblets of beer in each hand. The tagline, at least in his interpretation, was: ''Drink Elba, the beer with the heart of a lion.''
Mr. Eames, who followed the golden liquid to 44 countries, often told about his perilous trek high in the Andes in pursuit of an ancient brew made from strawberries the size of baseballs. Or about Aztecs forbidding drunkenness except among those 52 years of age or older. Or about accounts that said Norse ale was served with garlic to ward off evil.
Mr. Eames's favorite and perhaps most startling message was that beer is the most feminine of beverages. He said that in almost all ancient societies beer was considered a gift from a goddess, never a male god. Most often, women began the brewing process by chewing grains and spitting them into a pot to form a fermentable mass.

Ah, the resourcefulness of women! I heard from S. this morning that when she was in the Peace Corps in Papua New Guinea she'd repurposed government-issued condoms from the medical kit as fermenting vessels for 'wine made out of anything growing from the ground.' When pressed she admitted that they'd exploded (like beer bottles do if you get a little crazy with the priming sugar) for lack of a little hole poked in their tops.

I'm going to stick to kit beers until I get the hang of this. Batch #2 is an IPA. Historically, India Pale Ales were stronger to allow fermentation to continue at sea, with lots of hops to prevent spoilage. After bringing the malt extract and the grains to the boil, I pulled out the muslin bag of sodden English barley and tossed in two kinds of bittering hops. Later came a plug of fuggle hops, first propegated by one Richard Fuggle and known for their soft, resiny, aniseedy, almost tropical notes.

This time I was all set to go and easily strained the wort into the fermenting bucket using my knees to grip the pot, leaving my hands free to hold and swivel the strainer (actually, a splash guard for frying--gotta think about upgrading some of my equipment) so that it wouldn't clog. There's a lot of sediment involved, mainly boiled, greenish-brownish hops that look like wet henna and smell about as bad. (Open up a beer and boil it for yourself to get a sense of how wrong this is. Now imagine that there's a whole lot of plant matter in there that hasn't been strained out yet.)

Fermentation kicked in about 5 hours later; that was about 5 days ago, and in keeping with option #2: finishing hops: dry hopping step described in the kit instructions, I've just put in a muslin bag--you betcha, I sanitized it!--containing a second fuggle plug. Dry hopping, as opposed to adding the finishing hops to the boil about 2 minutes before the pot comes off the stove, apparently produces the aggressively hoppy aroma associated with the best IPAs. Now that I think of it, I think the directions said they were supposed to spend 4 or 5 days in the brew at the start of the primary fermentation, not the secondary fermentation as I've just done. But I'm much calmer following the whole Batch #1 crisis. How bad can it be?

And now, a moment for some tangential ranting

2007-03-19T09:31:00.000-05:00

When I began culinary school I got a great gig writing recipes and articles about cooking for people enrolled in grocery store loyalty programs around the country. I still do food writing and recently, my friend S. put me on to a daily news digest specifically covering the grocery industry. That's where I found this post:

A while back you had an article about female bosses and sexism in the workplace. You mentioned a party invitation from your daughter’s middle school, where the girls’ (pink) invitation was for a Sweet Dreams Pajama Party and the boys’ (brown) invitation was for a Poker Party. Obvious gender stereotyping.

My daughter is a high school junior. The other day she received a brochure from the School of Engineering at a major Midwestern university. They are offering separate engineering-oriented summer camps for high school "guys" and "girls." The male version (green block print) was called was called "SURVIVOR: ENGINEERING OUTBACK (Guys-only Engineering Camp)." The female version (pink with curlicues) was called "Project Discovery (it’s a Girl thing)."

The Guys "complete an intensive engineering project including field work led by our professors". The Girls "attend hands-on lab sessions."

The Guys "explore engineering specialties hands-on" while the Girls "gain an understanding of what engineers do."

The Guys "see engineering in action on a mid-week field trip" while the Girls "tour engineering facilities with our faculty."

The Guys go "GPS geocaching, rock climbing, and other fun stuff" while the girls "develop problem-solving skills through team-building exercises."

The contact for the Guys’ Camp was the Director of Recruitment, while the contact for the Girls’ Camp was the Director of Diversity.

Guess which college my daughter crossed off her list!

OK, now here's where things get tangential, but this is a blog about creative endeavors written by a MidWestern girl (who can see 40 looming on the horizon but who actually just rejected the word 'woman' because it sounded uptight, maybe even discreditingly so), after all; please bear with me.

One of my nieces is also a high school junior. Until recently, she's wanted to be an engineer. Now she's not so sure. Likewise, a younger cousin showed tremendous capacity for engineering--her senior project was awarded a U.S. patent and she solved a thorny design problem on one of her first days at a German automotive company by very intuitively correcting a drawing so that a brake part 'looked right'--but quit and became a math teacher, in part because she didn't feel comfortable in a dominantly masculine work environment.

As for me, I've just spent a weekend visiting with a friend who I realized has played a very important role as a model for me over the years. She's half a generation ahead of me and is a teacher, as I was until 2003. She's also a sojourner, a risk-taker, a mother, an entrepreneur, and a tremendous believer in human potential.

My grandmother had to quit school at 14 to help out on the farm. My mother was the first in her family to attend college, and felt she could choose between being a nurse and a teacher. Me, I'm overeducated and underengaged. I taught for 12 years partly out of love and commitment to social justice, but partly because I didn't know what else I could do, and was afraid to find out. Now, four years into that discovery process, I am still my own biggest enemy. It's too easy for me to write off (or more critically, to not write of) my interests and talents as being inconsequential.

As a teacher, I hope that I helped some of my young students to appreciate their worth. I hope that whatever my nieces decide to pursue, they will know the pleasure of being crazily in love with their creative process. I am grateful for friends--and now my husband, too--who keep showing me how it's done and insisting that I do it, too. And to you, if you're still reading this. La la la.

Batch 1: Brewing Basics

2007-03-17T15:25:00.000-05:00

Hallelujah! Just had a quick taste and I haven't ruined batch #1. Let me explain:

By all accounts, beer making is a forgiving process. And that makes sense: people brewed beer for centuries because all the boiling made dubious water fit to drink. Around the 12th century, says BrewUnc #1 (who just happens to be a medievalist), brewers around Frankfurt began substituting hops--first described in this employ by Hildegard von Bingen (love her!) I think--for the fennel, juniper, and other herbs commonly used to disguise off tastes, and got themselves a natural preservative to boot. There aren't a lot of beasties that can live in alcohol anyhow.

So why was I worried? Well, after the cooking stage I'd transferred my first 5 gallon batch of Belgian, Westmalle Dubbel-style ale--a purportedly chewy, malty brew that has a nice coffee aroma when kegged--into an obsessively sanitized fermenting bucket equipped with a nifty, Vinty-style airlock. I'd been told to relax repeatedly by BrewUnc#1 during the course of a telephonic play-by-play, and called him back just 3 or 4 hours later, ecstatic to report the CO2 bubbles that were making the airlock's inner, floating cap tick like a metronome. I worried again the next day when those bubbles slowed, then stopped. The husband had opened the window and the temperature in our living room where my beer was fermenting had dropped a good 10 degrees--potentially causing a catastrophic yeast die-off, I figured. "Nope," said BrewUnc#1. "That just means the main fermentation stage is over. What happens when you put a little pressure on the lid?" It burped a bubble into the airlock like Tupperware. "You've forgotten the mantra again," he told me. "Relax, have a homebrew." Easy for him to say. He had two finished batches on tap to choose from.

For the next ten days as my beer clarified and matured, I relaxed. I really did. So much so that when it came time to keg it and put it under pressure for a final aging period, I didn't consult the directions, the BrewUncs, Charlie Papazian, or Jess, the kindly sage at Alternative Beverage: I just poured in a little of the priming sugar and...uh oh. Potentially contaminated my beer. You're supposed to boil it for about 5 minutes first, both to dissolve and pasteurize it. (The addition of priming sugar to bottles just before they are sealed is what carbonates them; the real kicker was that this step is optional when your kegerator has a CO2 tank.) All the aforementioned sources told me that it would probably be OK, unless of course it wasn't, in which case no one would die anyhow because the beer would be completely, unmistakably undrinkable.

...Which brings us at last to the hallelujah part. Jess told me to wait until the weekend, then have a taste. I drew off a glass last night as I was cooking. It had a thick, cream-colored head (the priming sugar is doing its magic!), a fair amount of sediment that will get tossed out with the first couple of glasses when we tap it in earnest next weekend, and a complex caramel-y flavor. No skunk taste. No beasties.

Piece of cake.

Beer Run

2007-03-16T14:25:00.000-05:00

The brown cabinet to the left is my new bar, which I inherited from one of three brewing uncles. This particular uncle gave it up out of concern for his blood sugar, and because the current site of fraternal competition seems to be weight loss, and because his brewing son lives a mile away, just far enough that he can use the walk to justify a drink.

The BrewUncs and cousin gave up bottles years ago and claim to have invented these bars, which house two 5-gallon kegs, a CO2 regulator, and the cooling element from a dorm refrigerator. "Oh cool," said my friend K. when I told him what I was driving down to South Carolina to pick up, "a kegerator."

Um, yeah. A kegerator.

Would you believe I fit that thing in the back seat of a Prius? Not a centimeter to spare....

Tomorrow: the first two batches