Recently in Epicurean Category

I've been thinking for some time of rigging myself something to nestle a coffee holding vessel somewhere on my scooter. Corazzo seems to make good products (though I bought a larger fancier Italian lap blanket instead of theirs) and this seems like an obviously handy one to have.

But patent pending, self-levelling, auto-gimbal? Either they're trying to patent basic physics (inertia, gravity) or that is supposed to be internet humor...

Make magazine's had a lot of interesting articles on coffee related topics. We haven't undertaken anything radical here, but have come up with a few simple things which have greatly improved the coffee experience with our middle to low end Krups 4050. It performs well IMHO for the price, especially with the following:

• Buy small quantities of Peet's Coffee: Maybe someday we'll try roasting/grinding our own, but this seems like a good compromise given the effort.
• Chisel off the plastic latch from the water/splash tray: We actually had to return the machine after nearly a year because we could not remove the tray to empty it. The plastic had slowly warped from heating over time and the little wedge of plastic on its bottom (which ostensibly keeps the tray from sliding out and making a mess) was simply too tight to disengage. The new machine had a tray of different type plastic, but it didn't seem worth the hassle, so first thing I did was trim off most of the nub of plastic. It no longer gives a positive click when slid into the machine, but wont get stuck again.
• Coffee ground guide: This idea came from Dave Hansen and isn't machine specific. Find a yoghurt cup with a bottom diameter size near that of the inner diameter of your portafilter. Cut out the bottom and enough of the sides of the yoghurt cup to fit into the portafilter (see picture above...Yoplait cup just visible on bottom right). This makes it really easy to quickly dump in grounds without making a mess, break up any hunks and get just the right amount (ie: slightly more than the height of the portafilter since the grounds will be tamped down quite a bit).
• Swap the Krups pressurized portafilters (double bottomed with only a single outlet hole in the true bottom versus the many holes in the false bottom): We are using pretty fresh coffee always and have gotten a nice crema with the standard Krups portafilters. This is supposedly a fake crema though and eventually we've started having a lot of trouble with the portafilters clogging, regardless of the size ground we use. Searching online we found a number of portafilters which would potentially fit our machine. Krups' own older non-pressurized ones were the first we tried and they work like a charm. The crema is not any more or less in volume, but it's notably different in consistency and taste. I'm not convinced it is notably better or worse, just different. And it doesn't clog which is key. The coffee is also coming out as a nice puck after pulling a shot now, where before the output was fairly random between over dry puck, good consistency puck and pure soup. (Pictured above the original pressurized portafilter is on the left and the new to us "older" Krups non-pressurized portafilter is on the right.)

Over the holiday I Tivo'd Ratatouille for something good visually to check out the new TV. Since then though I've been wondering what exactly is ratatouille.

Tonight I decided to make it. I served it with a simple broiled salmon fillet (with olive oil, garlic, onion, black pepper and parsley) and couscous (arguably a French connection given their north african connections; made with our home canned chicken stock, black pepper, onion, garlic and parsley). The couscous sucked up a bit of juice from each of the salmon and the ratatouille and really just connected the whole thing into a scrumptuous meal.

The following is a combination of my thoughts plus the Smitten Kitchen's take on the movie Ratatouille and a random glance through the top hits on google for "ratatouille recipe".

Ratatouille:

• 1c diced/stewed tomatoes


• 1 red onion, diced


• 5 cloves garlic, minced


• olive oil


• ground black pepper


• ground thyme


• parsley flakes


• white wine


• 2 bay leaves


• 1 each red, green, yellow bell peppers, guts/seeds removed


• 1 eggplant


• 1 green zucchini


• 8oz cherry tomatoes, chopped


• grated mizithra (or parm or hunks of feta, goat or what floats your boat) cheese

Start oven heating to 375F.

Pour stewed tomatoes in bottom of 9-10" Pyrex baking dish. Lay bay leaves in dish.

Saute onion in olive oil with black pepper, thyme and parsley. Add garlic at end once onions are cooked, stir briefly, layer on top of tomatoes in baking dish.

De-glaze saute pan with a bit of white wine. Pour reduced wine into baking dish.

Thinly slice peppers, zucchini and egg plant. Stand these around throughout inside of the baking dish, alternating eggplant, zucchini and peppers.

Layer any remaining vegetables on top of the baking dish decoratively.

Add additional black pepper, thyme and parsley, and then sprinkle chopped cherry tomatoes on top. Drizzle with a bit of olive oil.

Cut parchment paper to fit inside top of dish.

Bake at 375F for about 45 minutes, until the vegetables are cooked. Vegetables should be cooked and releasing juices and the sauce be bubbling, but the veggies shouldn't be dissolving into mush.

Sprinkle top with cheese and serve.

Our tomato plants have really kicked into major production (finally...the season's always really late in my garden). Last weekend I canned 6 quarts of spaghetti sauce. Tonight I did 8 more of stewed tomatoes. I also decided it was time to get a good ceramic knife for cutting all the tomatoes. Sometime back we'd been at a cooking class and tried a ceramic knife. They work really well and are definitely a useful tool to have when chopping lots of tomatoes. I hope they're sturdy and it lasts a while. Definitely looks fragile.

I guess if I'd have stewed the tomatoes a bit longer they wouldn't have separated? I usually put them in soups and other soupy things and didn't want them to be cooked down too much.

As we fall asleep the jars are popping shut.

I've been meaning to blog more about my beer making and haven't done a good job. This week Adam Litke was in town for the Linux Plumber's Conference and I brought some homebrews into lunch one day for him to try. He's got a pumpkin ale I'm really curious to try and he (as have many) really liked the Scotch Ale we made.

It's a fairly hard to find brew but quite tasty. We've found it at Pelican (hour away) as well as Max's (only 5 minutes away), but there isn't really anything available to just grab at the grocery store and have on hand at home for a meal that matches. So we decided to try our own. And it was winner.

We'll have to make a second batch soon and make sure it wasn't a fluke. But I intend to go with the same recipe I did the first time:

• 11lbs light malt extract


• 1lbs crystal


• 0.25lbs chocolate


• 2oz Willamette hops (in for the full 60min)


• White Labs Edinburgh Ale Yeast

I did a primary and secondary fermentation at the yeast's suggested temperatute. Our favorite supplier and experts at Main Brew suggested we'd want to let it age a while and we did. Also because of that I carefully syphoned the beer from the secondary back into one of my plastic fermenters and let it settle a bit before bottling to leave as much yeast sediment behind as possible...didn't want it to sit in the bottles conditioning and come out with a really yeasty flavor.

We tried a bottle after two months and decided to let it condition a bit longer. We ended up letting it wait almost 5 months after bottling. And at that point it was quite exceptional. At this point it's been another 4 months or so and I think it's slowly getting past its prime, so it's about time to finish off the last couple bottles and make another batch!

I noticed the new batch of Bigfoot at the store today. So I bought some and had my last bottle of '07 with dinner.

There's fancy new label 25th anniversary label. And Sierra Nevada's (finally) moving to pry tops instead of twist. Assuming the new bottles work with my capper I'll be able to recycle the bottles with my homebrews.

Jenn got us the best Valentine's present ever...a hands-on Indian food (breads in particular) cooking class at In Good Taste. We learned how to make naan, batura and paratha and a number of other things. I've got some shopping to do for a few extra kitchen tools, but in general all the preparation was quite easy. And it tasted great!

This past week we kegged two batches of beer we had brewing for a party. It was a learning experience.

First, for a nut/brown ale the primary fermentation goes faaaast. And a secondary immediately after is probably required to keep the beer from tasting yeasty. I'd imagine this lesson can be generalised to anything where you're not actually meaning to make a yeasty beer.

Second the sockets on the tops of soda kegs are bit tricky. I broke the threads on one of the sockets, so we've now got one less keg (or a few more extra parts depending on how you think of it). The tiny input "pipe" under the socket comes out easily and this can go unnoticed. The output pipe/hose is long so you notice if it starts to slide. Without those, you're missing a rubber gasket and some vertical displacement inside the socket. This means tightening the socket to get it to seal (without the bit of metal from the tube top and its gasket) will damage the threads. Oops.

To me it seems easier to clean bottles than the kegs. And lacking a kegerator, it's much easier to store/chill bottles. But for a large party it seems like the keg will be easier especially now that I've learned how to break a keg.

The nut brown ale was somewhat yeasty in flavour. The belgian wit was really quite good and I'd like to start a batch of it to bottle and consume over the coming months.

In the meantime we have to have a party or something to finish off the bottom third or so of each keg.

The root balls / canes we planted this winter have taken nicely and appear to be bearing a suprising amount of fruit for their first year, although they're a few weeks from being ripe since they've not got a southern exposure. But yesterday Paul invited us next door to pick some of his as they're in full production. We must've picked four pints worth in very short order.

I ground up some more of the walnuts from the backyard tree two seasons ago and grilled up some walnut crusted steaks and served them with greenbeans and a simple rasberry sauce. I need to shell the rest of those walnuts as this year the tree appears to be ready to bear a tonne again. After the bad crop last year I was hoping it would recover.

Plus we have three mason jars set up for a first attempt at rasberry liqueur. And I started one each of strawberries and watermelon yesterday as well.

Our lager is probably ok. It was showing signs of slow fermentation still and I checked with a friend who's a beer pro and he said not to worry. Tonight we moved it to secondary and it was noticably more active after that. It's back in the crawlspace chillin (and the crawspace is back to filling with water..urg).

We also tried something different for dinner...loosely following a recipe for pancetta-wrapped roast halibut from this week's food section in the newspaper. It turned out really good. I just slapped the meat in on top of some chunked up potatoes that had been roasting for a while already. Nothing like bacon and halibut drippings to make some yummy taters!

The liqueurs turned out really good!

Saturday we went by the brew store in Hillsboro (which has the best customer service!) and bought supplies for a lager and to bottle our liqueurs. Turns out we already had bought bottles though and had forgotten, so now we have plenty. And he also said just put the beer in a warmer place for a few weeks and it'd still carbonate, by the way. But I digress.

Yesterday after our snowy trip to the store we decanted the fruit liqueurs we'd started in August. They are all excellent. We have strawberry, blueberry, green/yellow plum, red plum, red cherry, and blackberry. We also started a second batch of blackberry (still have summer '04 blackberries frozen in my freezer) and are thinking of making an orange one with some clementines we bought yesterday.

Either we'll have to buy some smaller bottles for gift giving or you, dear reader, will just have to pay us a visit!

A friend at work forwarded me this really interesting article on the chemistry of bad beer taste.

Our second batch of beer was an experiment to begin with and the results are a little mixed. It's a wintry sort of ale though for the most part and I've decided I like it well enough. One friend's tried it and at least said it was good. The above mentioned friend now has two bottles and I should be getting two more taste test responses from him soon...

There was definitely some contamination in a few bottles which I popped and poured out. A few of them were definitely skunky. We maybe aerated the beer a bit much in some of other the bottles as we were bottling?

And it's not super carbonated...probably didn't cool the sugar water enough before adding it at bottling time and killed some yeast? But I think the lack of carbonation goes with the spicy quality that the coriander imparted. It really feels like a winter ale. I just wish the consistency was higher bottle to bottle.

Oh and while the hefeweizen definitely wanted the sediment transferred to the glass and consumed, this ale seems better with a careful pour leaving the sediment behind.

Now that it's really cold we might have to see about starting a batch of lager.

Nestle's got some sort of new coffee brewing. Fermented and foamy like beer, but non-alcoholic. I still miss Double Hook.

Our second batch of beer is just about done with primary fermentation. This one's hopefully going to be some sort of European ale. We kind of went with something like the Joy of Home Brewing's Belgian Wit and French Biere de Garde. The prior's yeast wasn't available, so we did like the latter, but I added some coriander seed to the grain when making the wort. I'm thinking of doing honey for the carbonation sugar. We'll see how it turns out. If it goes well maybe we'll be inspired to do more experimenting.

I wonder if I wrote Red Hook if they'd give me some guidance on how to make a Double Hook-esque stout since they don't anymore. Or if I can find a similar recipe anywhere...

This weekend we finally got a pressure cooker. The garden's been putting out tomatoes faster than we can use them in other things so I filled up the crock pot and made a batch of sauce.

It's not the best sauce I've ever made (though not the worst). Something was just missing from it. I diced some pepperoni into it and maybe put too much? I need to write down the proportions sometime when I make a better one.

We've been buying Classico brand sauce as it has some lower sodium varieties that taste good (and some high sodium that tast really good too), but also they come in mason jars. I packed six of them with the sauce. One was not sealed this morning, so it went into the fridge to be used right away.

Next up, we have some plum juice/pulp frozen from August of last year which needs made into jelly.

Our first batch of beer (a German style Hefeweizen) turned out quite well. We learned a lot in the process and the next batches should be much easier and probably have better yield also. Still for a comparable tasting German import it was a lot cheaper even only having gotten around fourty bottles.

I do want to get some little soda kegs though. Having the secondary fermentation in those and no bottling would certainly make the whole process easier, especially if we're planning on having some get togethers.

We've got some really good fruit liqueurs last summer in Germany and have since had some yummy fruit wines here in Oregon. With all the fresh fruit around we've been thinking about trying to make some of our own. We went to a local brew shop and got some info. The fruit wine is probably a bit harder, so we're starting with some simple liqueurs of blackberry, red and yellow/green plum, strawberry and cherry. We also got a kit to try our own beer.

Glaze isn't probably the right word as it was a thick pile of stuff on top of the chop. We got bacon, pork chops, potatoes and green beans at the farmers market. The green beans were steamed with a bit of diced bacon and some fresh black pepper. I trimmed a bit of the fat off the sides of the pork chops and threw that in some foil with some baby blue and yellow potatoes, some rosemary and some greens from the tops of my garlic plants and threw that on low heat in the bbq. For the pork chops I mixed something like five tablespoons each of diced bacon and cilantro paste (from a fresh frozen tube), about a table spoon of minced garlic greens and a teaspoon of crushed red pepper. I seared one side of the pork chops, flipped them and put the sauce/glaze stuff on top and left them to cook slowly. The topping gave some extra juices to the outside of the pork which carmelised a bit. To keep the meal light and summery I put out a side of pineapple cubes and opened a bottle of Oak Knoll's Niagra.

As always the stuff fresh from the farmers market is just perfect. The blue potatoes had a great flavour and the pork chops were really tender and juicy.

This site says, "Have an analytical mind? Like to cook? This is the site to read!" I've been experimenting a little more lately cooking and have had a few successes...followed by failures. Maybe I should better record my test recipes instead of just trying to remember and refine them.

NPR's been running a series called Hidden Kitchens. Some of the stories were more interesting than others, but today's final episode really reminded me of what I like so much about cooking. Getting together in the kitchen and talking and collaborating on a meal is a great way to spend some quality time with people.

I have a lot to be thankful for this year and tried to show some thanks yesterday:

• for my health - couple mile run in the morning and didn't over-eat.
• my girlfriend and new house - made a proper Thanksgiving dinner for us and got the house smelling yummy.

We made two pumpkin pies with pumpkin frozen from our Halloween jackolanters, cornbread/giblet stuffing, green beans, corn, mashed potatoes and a big turkey with gravy. I think we opened two cans...some olives to munch on while we cooked and evaporated milk for the pie. Otherwise it was all fresh and from scratch. And it turned out amazingly well considering I've never done more than help my mom in the kitchen with the turkey and dressing and she mostly just dumps stuff instead of using a recipe.

It didn't seem that hard really, although it probably took about 10 hours of prep work for the 20 minutes or so we ate. And then an hour to clean up.

Now I have left-overs to last quite a while in the fridge and freezer. We're gonna make sheppard's pie, turkey and dumplings, boil bones for a broth for Pho, and have turkey/dressing a few times probably.

The only thing surprising to me about this is that it hasn't happened sooner or more often.

I've spent enough time in England specifically and Europe in general that by either criteria I cannot donate blood according to the American Red Cross's donation guidelines. Living in Europe in the mid-90's there was a lot of interesting press about the disease. Given what I learned then it's quite amazing the US doesn't have more problems. Just in the last weeks I was double checking whether the Red Cross would take my blood and their guidelines proved misleading and inconsistent, given what was common knowledge when I lived in Europe.

The US's general response is a typical NIMBY response of, "It can't happen here." They ban European and Canadian goods, but don't enact stringent checking of meat here or rules that would limit the disease's ability to pass through the food chain. The disease in cows happens sponteneously, just like scrapie in sheep. So the disease can and must occasionally occure here. Once spontaneously generated, the prion is very stable and survives processes typically used to inactivate other biological agents, so it should travel through an unrestricted food chain. Yet, the US still allows cattle to be used for feed stock, encouraging the disease to spread. Testing is statistical (due to cost complaints) and statistically infinitesimal. So not only can it travle, but it can travel far through the food chain.

Reports always emphasise that when they find a positive animal, "...it hasn't entered the food or feed chain." They don't emphasise that the testing is a very lossy sieve, nor that the positive animal was a product of the food/feed chain.

Its highly likely that European beef is much safer than US beef. But our government keeps its and the populace's heads in the sand, preferring a safety net of crossed fingers rather than forcing a deep pocketed industry to protect us.

I don't know why there's all the talk about Starbucks increasing music sales. What they should do is get with Red Hook and bring back Double Black Stout (yummy dark stout brewed with Starbucks coffee).