We made some beer!

Matt has brewed beer with friends before, but our place in San Diego was way too small to do it ourselves. Pretty much as soon as we found out we were moving to Kentucky Matt started getting excited about home brewing. So he ordered a starter kit complete with ingredients for a West Coast Pale Ale recipe from Home Brew Mart in San Diego (where the Ballast Point tasting room is in Linda Vista) and we brewed some beer! I'm still fuzzy on the process so I honestly couldn't explain much of what we did but here are some photos.

Supplies

We basically used the simplest recipe possible by using dried malt extract. This provides sugar that the yeast will eat and turn into alcohol. In the future, we'll probably purchase some steeping grains from the local home brew supply store, My Old Kentucky Homebrew, but this was a good way to start.

Adding the malt extract.

After a lot of bubbling and stirring, we added hops. Because Matt is making beer with me we made something minimally hop-y, but all beer uses some bittering hops. I'm sure he'll want to dry hop something eventually.

Adding the hops.

Matt ordered a pot meant for an army or something, so it was too big to fit in our sink and we had to cool it in the bathtub. It made it a little tricky but it worked out. As a consequence of having a giant pot around the house I now want to make a huge batch of phở.

Cooling the wort

Once the beer had cooled to the right temperature, we moved it into our primary fermentor. At this point we used a hydrometer to measure the specific gravity or whatever, but unfortunately the recipe from Home Brew Mart didn't include the finishing gravity so really I still don't understand that part or why we did it. I guess it somehow measures the density of the liquid and that reflects how much alcohol is present? I don't really know. Anyway, we added the yeast, which is what turns sugar into alcohol. Yeast does some awesome things for us humans, if you think about it.

Adding the yeast.

Then the waiting game began. We kept an eye on the air lock (which is what allows the gas produced by the yeast to escape without letting naughty, undesirable organisms and contaminants in) to make sure the yeast was doing its work.

All sealed up!

After a week or so, it technically had alcohol, but again, because I don't understand the specific gravity thing I couldn't say how much.

Beer! Sort of.

Then we were ready to put it into a secondary fermentor to . . . ferment some more? Moving it is called "racking." I really don't understand the importance of moving it before it continues to ferment. I'll have to read up on the process before we try this again so I actually understand what's going on.

Racking.

So then it hung out in this glass carboy, covered with a blanket to keep the light out, for a little more than a week before we were ready to bottle. This is when we added bottling sugar, which is what gives the yeast enough to eat to make carbonation. It doesn't carbonate before that because the air lock lets out those bubbles.

Dissolving the bottling sugar. This will give it bubbles!

Then we put it back into our primary fermentor because that bucket had a handy spigot for bottling, and then we bottled it and put lids on it. The bottling was actually kind of fun, but that may be because Matt did all the sanitizing because he is nice to me.

Bottled!

I should mention that the suckiest thing about home brewing beer is sanitizing everything. It's tedious and feels kind of uncertain. It is super important though because you only want yeast growing in there, not other nasty things. The beer is not quite ready yet as it has only been bottled for nine days, but we decided to try a bit and I dare say it tastes like beer! We're excited and look forward to starting another batch soon.

Dumplings and Other Kitchen Adventures

Lately Matt and I have been experimenting with filled pasta. A few weeks ago we made pierogi and this week we tried our hand at ravioli. For the pierogi, I did a little research and found this really helpful site. We didn't follow the recipe, but it had some good tips. Some pierogi we filled with potatoes and cheese, some with sauerkraut, and we even got really experimental and added jalapeños to a few (hey, we do live in San Diego).

After making the pierogi, I decided it would be fun to get a ravioli press to make more dumplings. For the ravioli, we followed a recipe from The Complete Book of Pasta and Noodles, which I gave him for Christmas with his pasta machine. We haven't actually cooked the ravioli yet, we are freezing them to cook sometime this week. The filling is meat and ricotta with basil, and we plan to serve the ravioli in a basic tomato sauce.

In addition to having fun with dumplings, a few weeks back I made a strawberry rhubarb crumble using an easy recipe from The English Kitchen that delivered great results! Also, Matt bought some darling flower-shaped egg molds, so he whipped up a cheery breakfast this morning.

Sweet Saturday

After a long week, I was really, really glad to be able to sleep in today. It was nice to just lie in bed, snuggling with Matt and the cat, and stare our the window at the beautiful San Diego day unfolding . . .

When we finally dragged ourselves out of bed, the mail had been delivered, including some packages I ordered from Etsy. One was a gift for someone else, but I couldn't resist getting these adorable cards for myself. I discovered the seller after reading a CityBeat article about local Etsy shops.

Cards by SparklePaw

Matt is spending tonight in LA with a buddy, but before he left we went to the zoo. It was . . . a zoo. I mean really packed. I know the weather is San Diego is pretty much always nice, but when it starts to warm up, you really see the city come alive. Because we got a late start, we parked on the street instead of circling the lot, and there was even a small line to get in. We didn't stay for long, but while we were there we saw the Malayan tigers being fed, the otters snuggling in the shade, and checked out the remodeled polar bear exhibit. It was so crowded, I didn't actually take any photos today, but here's an older one I took from the Skyfari, which we took today for a quick exit:

We stopped by the grocery store on the way home, where the butcher told me he could sell me a 10 pound bag of chicken leg quarters for $4.90. It wasn't butchered at the market, which is a downside, but it was cheap. So I took it and now I'm making chicken stock. It doesn't look like much yet, but believe me, this is going to be some pure, golden deliciousness:

Now, I'm just relaxing: drinking some Arnold Palmer and listening to Matt & Kim while sitting on the couch next to the cat, who is also relaxing, unsurprisingly.

Cheese Flavored Ice Cream

This weekend I made ice cream from salted Oaxacan cream. To be completely honest, I'm not really sure what Oaxacan cream is. My boyfriend got it to use in another recipe. It's got a sour cream texture but a cheesy flavor. We had a bunch left over so I decided to make ice cream out of it.

I think I was partly inspired by our visit to Neveria Tocumbo. There, the bf tried an amazing corn ice cream and I got the fresa con queso (strawberries with cheese, by my questionable translation). I found it disappointingly heavy on the strawberry. The cheese flavor was pretty subtle.

For this ice cream, I adapted a creme fraiche ice cream recipe from The Perfect Scoop: Ice Creams, Sorbets, Granitas, and Sweet Accompaniments by David Lebovitz. It also suggested a variation with mascarpone.

The results were . . . cheesy. Personally, I liked it, but it is very different. Some friends of ours tested it with us on Saturday and the consensus was that it needed a fruit pairing. Strawberries would be good I'm sure (I think Neveria Tocumbo was on the right track) but blackberries were on sale so that's what I tried yesterday. The result: A touch of tartness balanced by a rich, cheesy flavor.