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Following up on my summer goals, I recently made another batch of home-brewed ginger beer. Sweet, spicy, with a wicked kick, ginger beer makes a refreshing drink on its own or mixed half-and-half with lemonade. For an evening highball, try a Dark & Stormy: ginger beer with a splash of black rum and a squeeze of lime. Mmm, you can feel that summer breeze drifting your way, can’t you?
This is an ersatz ginger beer; real ginger beer requires a ginger beer plant, a symbiotic colony of yeasts that carbonate the drink through fermentation. I decided not to buy or culture my own ginger beer plant. Instead, I followed Dr. Fankhauser’s instructions for fermented yeast carbonation, which gives a nice fizzy lift to a syrup-and-water base.
For my long-ago first batch of homemade ginger ale, I followed Dr. Fankhauser’s directions carefully. The resulting drink was tasty and fizzy and exactly what he promised, but not spicy and dark as ginger beer should be. For my recent batch, I brazenly modified the ingredients and the prep technique to produce a richer spicier drink, but the brewing directions remain the same.
A few improvements I made: cooking the ginger and spices with the sugar extracts more flavor and also eliminates the need to dissolve the sugar after it goes into the bottle. Adding the lemon zest, cinnamon, and clove results in a more complex flavor profile, and the peppers and peppercorns add bite and snap. Straining the syrup makes a cleaner, less cloudy ginger beer that’s far more pleasant on the tongue — no shreds or ginger to tickle your throat! I also added a bottle-sterilizing step for extra safety. Read the rest of this entry »
A simple meal for any time of year: zucchini fritters, pan-roasted potatoes, and herb & olive oil sauce. Read the rest of this entry »
Today I’m making a big ole batch of my brother’s pulled pork recipe, more or less. I like to thin down the BBQ sauce with red wine and add some chili powder or cumin and a clove of garlic, but the process is identical: put it in a pot, clap on the lid, and go to the beach for the whole day go about your business while the pork turns into a delicious tangle of tender meat.
The Fella left the house before it started wafting its enticing aroma out of the oven, which means I am the only one who gets to walk around for the next two hours saying, “Hey, what smells like pork butt?”
It’s official: this year, The Fella and I are celebrating Thanksgiving at home, just the two of us. We’re having a modest vegetarian feast, and because many omnivores wonder what the hell to serve to vegetarians at traditional holiday meals, I thought I’d outline our menu here. Read the rest of this entry »
From the Historic American Cookbook Project at Michigan State University Libraries, here’s an excerpt from Aunt Babette’s Cook Book: Foreign and domestic receipts for the household (published c. 1889) instructing the reader how to fashion a bacon bandage as a treatment for sore throat:
Cut the bacon in strips one quarter of an inch in thickness and two or three inches in width and long enough to pass entirely around the throat. Remove the bacon rind and any lean meat there may be in it to prevent blistering of the throat or neck. Sew the bacon to a strip of flannel so as to hold it into position and prevent its slipping and then apply the bacon to the throat and neck. Pin it around the neck, so that it will not be uncomfortably tight. The throat and neck should be completely swathed with the bacon. If after an application of eight hours the patient is not better apply a new bandage in the same manner.
I particularly like “the throat and neck should be completely swathed with bacon.” This seems more like a sound brunch-time policy rather than a health concern, though.
I recently came across a bowlful of cherries languishing in the fridge — a little too soft for eating plain, but too firm and fresh to throw out. What to do, what to do?
Here’s what to do: cherry upside-down cake. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m trying out a Christmas experiment, and if you want to experiment, too, you’ve got just enough time to play along. I’m taking a whack at making homemade bay rum, or some approximation of it, to give as Christmas gifts.
(In the unlikely event that my brother B or my brothers-in-law are reading this: Surprise! Merry Christmas!)
Some time ago, my mother lamented the depletion of her jar of sweet-sour cippolini, which she’d brought back from a trip to (Italy? Slovenia? somewhere). After scouring the local shops of my small city to no avail, I took a critical tasting and a casual (and no-doubt inaccurate) translation from the original jar and thought “Gee, I wonder if I can make these?”
Turns out I can, and so can you.
There are a few foodstuffs that will always be better homemade than storebought. Usually, these are recipes that require a few simple ingredients and a modicum of care. Shortbread. Alfredo sauce. Ice cream. Pesto.
Butterscotch sauce. Holy cats, I made butterscotch sauce for my mother a few months ago (a riff on this recipe, incidentally) and made the mistake of tasting it before pouring it into a pretty jar to give her.
I very nearly kept it. It’s that good.
How good? Well… this week, when I asked Mom what she might like for Christmas, she perked up. “Oooh! Butterscotch sauce!”
Yeah. Simple and utterly delicious, with a dark, faintly bitter undertone that faced up to its sweetness.
Remember wacky cake? For many, it’s a childhood recipe.
Why “wacky”? Because this cake flouts all the conventions of cakemaking chemistry. It contains no butter, no egg, no milk. It requires no creaming or whipping. You stir together flour, sugar, and cocoa right in the ungreased pan, then mix in oil, water, and vinegar. This suspiciously simple recipe bakes up into an improbably dark, moist cake. It’s no barn-burner, but it’s pleasant and easy, and on a few late snowy nights, wacky cake has satisfied my chocolate cravings when the cupboard was nearly bare.
It took a post by Homesick Texan to make wacky cake a weekly player in my home. Homesick Texan plays with the flavor, leaving out the cocoa and adding chopped apples and nuts.
Me, I can’t leave a recipe alone, so I’ve now made wacky-apple cake with dried cranberries, wacky pear cake with blueberries, and wacky-papple cake, which is wacky cake with apple and pear. I added extra flavor by replacing some of the water with leftover canned pear juice, increased the spices, and replaced the vanilla with kirsch. My favorite variation is documented below.
Elli
Elsa