We’re happy and hungover at Sixpoint and BeerAdvocate, and want to thank everyone who came out to our inaugural fundraiser event, Beer For Beasts, at the Bell House on Saturday. I had a fabulous time, and am eager to share a recipe for one beer I heard many compliments on… me and Robert’s Triphop Grapefruit IPA! But first, a quick recap of how the event went down:
Happy St. Patty’s Day! If popular tradition had won us over, we’d be toasting pints of Guinness in leprechaun hats and forking up mouthfuls of corned beef with cabbage and potatoes right about now. But as much as I hold dear that classic meal, it just didn’t seem like an appropriate day for boiled potatoes and cabbage. At sixty degrees and sunny outside, it’s picnic time. Spring is here, and that’s reason enough to celebrate.
If it weren’t so easy to make an entire one, I might succumb to ordering a slice of savory quiche at a bakery or for brunch. But it is, and no matter if you incorporate the most luxurious ingredients or leftovers in its airy, yellow mass, definitely more economical than the options above. It’s one of my favorite ways to add class to eggs.
I had an I-Can’t-Believe-I-Made-That moment when this cake slipped out of the new bundt pan. Its surface was like a helmet of crisp, melted sugar; it hit its final destination of a plate with a slight spring. A wave of warm, buttery caramel, with citrus and spruce filled my nostrils. It looked like an Art Deco sculpture of sorts. It was a real moment of victory. And I can’t wait for it to happen to you, hopefully, too.
Hear me out: making kimchee at home is really easy! And the payoffs are practical in the kitchen, too. Here’s a look at my first attempt at making a true, Korean friend-approved batch of kimchee, and one way to put it to delicious use: as a seasoning for everyday, ever-versatile roasted potatoes.
photo by MHT What do figs, spice and everything malty and nice have to do with one another? They’re all ingredients of a specialty beer I helped brew this week, for Sixpoint and BeerAdvocate‘s Beer For Beasts festival. It’s an event we’ve been “brewing” up for a while, and the pieces are all coming together in the form of twenty-some unique, one-off beers that will be served for it. This is just one of those among the lineup, but an … Read More
I love Asian ice cream, milkshake and flavored tea flavors, but so often they’re sad, powdered relics of the real stuff. The pale green “honeydew” makes me miss the juicy, floral freshness of the real fruit, slushed up, that I’d get in Taiwan. Bright lilac “taro” flavor just plain is not. Although I may never have enough sun to grow fresh, tropical fruit and coconuts here, one flavor I don’t see the need to place in artificial form, anywhere, is … Read More
My friend was talking about how she’d made spanakopita, the Greek savory spinach pie, recently. Only, she didn’t actually finish making it: “The filling was so good I just ate it up with a spoon, and didn’t bake it with the crust.” She was also impressed with how much spinach she had eaten; the one-pound bag, the size of a fluffy pillow, had all cooked down to a portion that neatly filled a soup bowl. That’s a good way to … Read More
Today was gusty like a regular dust storm, at least in Red Hook where I was a-working. And there was some music playing, by a feller named Woody Guthrie, and he was a-talkin about some dust storm in a song called “Talking Dust Bowl Blues.” In one verse, he sings, “My wife fixed up a tater stew,” and it got me hungry and thinkin’ food. So I’ll stop with the bad sing-song writing here, but now you know the reason … Read More
In the summer, beans were for dressing in a gloss of olive oil, tossing with a confetti of crisp, chopped vegetables, and having as salad. In the winter, we simmer them with rich fats, sometimes with finely chopped (less colorful) vegetables, which dissolve into the resulting soup or baked casserole. While it’s definitely winter, I tried to make a compromise between these two polar opposite ways to eat beans. Starting with the king-size fava (or “broad”) bean, dried.