December 2006 Archives

If you haven't noticed we've been geeking out deep on the whole video-taping your food thing lately. And after a couple of dutiful hours of market research on the realm of YouTube cooking videos, we have selected a winner. Here's a clip that is both wondrous and disgusting, and gives us one more famous vegetarian to add to the list...

The wild baby cabbage that we call the brussel sprout is one of the most hated vegetables in the Western world--and that's hard fact not speculation. They can turn nasty off-green colors, their texture is more than a little rubbery, and yes, they cause gas. But this winter we've grown attached to the little bugger and offer up a couple recipes to the Tribunal.

For this easier than easy holiday side dish, we complimented them with two of our other fave ingreedies right now: Oyster mushrooms and shaved fennel. The end product is a steamy, and stinky but hearty as hell, bounty of winter vitamins.

Meaty Brussel Sprouts
1 lbs. brussel sprouts (or one whole, intact stem)
3 Tbs. extra virgin olive oil
3 shallots, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 bulb fennel
1 cup oyster mushrooms
1 cup chardonnay
3 1/2 Tbs. whole grain mustard
1 cup mushroom stock
salt and pepper to taste

1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Bring a large pot to boil with salt water. Once rolling, add brussel sprouts and boil for 3-4 minutes, until just tender but only half-cooked and bright green. Remove, drain and run under water to cool.

3. In a saucepan, add oil and bring to medium heat. Toss in shallots and garlic and stir for 5 minutes or until nutty. Shave your fennel bulb by cutting in thin strips on a diagonal and add. Wash your oyster mushrooms and add them stem and all. Cook for another 5 minutes. They shouldn't be fully cooked.

4. Then add your wine and let cook off, reduce by half before adding stock and mustard. Season.

5. Spread the brussel sprouts out in a large casserole dish. Pour the sauce over top. (It should halfway cover the sprouts.) And toss the dish in the oven to finish off with a 10-minute braise. Remove before they lose their bright green tint.

Beverage: Paraduxx Cab/Zin table wine.
Soundtrack: Bob Dylan's Modern Times

This dish is light and fluffy like a pile of food snow. The object is to bleed red and green sauce all over it. Because it's a stack with essentially 3 levels (all white) we're calling it a napoleon, which more or less means a cute little stack of nutrition you're about to eat.

Below are the instructions for whipping up the red and green oils (do them first) and then the white bean hummus and finally how to construct your tower. If you can think of a way to pin an angel or a star on top, go for it.

Bright Basil Vinaigrette
2 cups basil leaves
1/2 extra virgin olive oil
2 Tbs. white wine vinegar
1 Tbs. apple cider vinegar
salt and pepper to taste

1. Heat a pot of salted water to a boil. Prepare a bowl of ice water. Dunk your basil leaves in the boiling water for less than 10 seconds. Immediately cool in ice bath. And set aside.

2. Add all other ingredients and pulse in a food processor until consistent.

Roasted Red Bell Oil
3 large red bell peppers
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
3 Tsp. smoked paprika
salt and pepper to taste

1. Roast your bell peppers by placing directly on the stove top under high heat. Char each side and flip. Prepare a bowl of ice water. When peppers are scorched lightly on all sides (black burns covering half the pepper at least) toss them in the ice bath and cool. Gently remove charred skin. Remove pepper tops and seeds.

2. Add all other ingredients and pulse in a food processor until consistent.

White Hummus
3/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
3 cloves garlic
1 can cannelloni or white kidney beans, drained
2 Tbs. water
2 Tbs. tahini paste
2 Tbs. smoked paprika

1. Heat a large saucepan on high heat. Add half the oil, garlic and beans. Sauté for 3 or 4 minutes and toss the mixture in your food processor. Pulse thoroughly while adding the other half of the oil., then the water, tahini and spices.

White X-mas Napoleon
2 pieces of bread
1 ball buffalo mozzarella
1 can hearts of palm
Cannellini Hummus
Red and green sauces

1. Cut off the crusts of the bread. Slice two pieces of mozzarella and top. Stick toasts in the oven for 3-5 minutes on broil. Remove once melty.

2. Drain and wash hearts of palm. Slice in half lengthwise.

3. Build a napoleon stack, starting with cheese toast. Lay 3 or 4 hearts of palm on top in parallel rows. Then a large dollop of cannelloni hummus. Finally squirt both sauces around the plate evenly.

Beverage: Caparone Sangiovese
Soundtrack: Merry Christmas Charlie Brown Soundtrack

Tree tops and smoked meats and whiskers on reindeers.

If anyone knew winters it'd be Alaskans right? Well, almost. We snatched up both the Alaskan Winter Ale and their award-winning Smoked Porter recently and turned up the space heater and put on beanies and chugged. The ale was good but not great. It advertises itself as 'brewed with spruce tips' so we understandably expected to be rocked by some weird Eskimo aftertaste, but nope. The spice level is nice and the sweetness is higher up than the hops, which we could appreciate in a seasonal, but it just wasn't rich enough to live up to what you would expect. We wanted more, can you blame us?

The Smoked Porter on the other hand was a winning sludge. This dark brothy porter is completely up front about its intentions: it is beef jerky in a bottle, something more akin to smoked salmon than to most beers. We drank it down and immediately felt more solstice-y. You'll see.

Dairy Pairy: Traditional Munster
Soundtrack: The Shins' Oh Inverted World

Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks was all about the cherry pie and coffee. But we happen to think nothing goes better with a meal between hundred foot tall redwood trees than a salad that tastes like nature itself. This easy camping salad does the trick, just make sure you open the tent flap as shit can get a little, well, gaseous with all this healthy fiber.

Fiber Camping Salad
1 bunch radishes, sliced
2 whole carrots, sliced,
1 lbs. mixed bean sprouts, fresh
1 Tbs. nutritional yeast
1 Tbs. olive oil
1 Tbs. vinegar of choice
Sea salt and pepper to taste

1. Mix all ingredients in a bowl and eat.

Beverage: Anderson Valley's Boont Amber Ale
Soundtrack: Type O Negative's October Rust

Our friends at Urban Honking hazed us last week with a sweet challenge: To cook a 4-course veggie feast for 3 of their LA-based bloggers and for under $40. All the gooey details (including all four recipes) can be found at Urban Honking's rad food page, called Digest, where we'll be regular guest bloggers from now on. The meal's long gone, but you can check out how it went on our KitcheyCam video.

A man vacation to the SoCal Coast.

*Note to Readers: At the risk of sounding like assholes on an infomercial, this will be the last posting about Stone Brewing Co. you'll see from us for a while. We've reviewed, cooked with, and made ice cream out of many of their seasonal brews because we think they're the preeminent strong-ass beer brewery of its size, and the best chance Americans have to one day be able to order good beer anywhere in this country. In any case, we're taking a break from the SoCal scene for now.

We were both feeling washed up on the Friday morning we decided to hop in the car and drive south toward North San Diego County. But as we pulled on to the I-5 South, the gray skies started to part and the sun shined through. There were some bombers of beer in the back seat on ice just in case, but we planned on making Stone Brewing Co.'s facilities by early afternoon so we could make their 2 p.m. brewery tour and tasting. We had a camera, a one-hitter and sleeping bags.

It occurred to us at the time that our cute, little man weekend was shaping up suspiciously like the antithesis to that surprise thirty-something classic "Sideways," the movie that put Pinot Noir on the map. The parallels were both repulsive and extremely hilarious, we thought.

In that crap film, if you haven't seen it (fuck you, you've seen it, c'mon) the story starts with the dried up writer hack played by Paul Giammoti packing his car for a week of male bonding with his old college buddy who was about to get married. He leaves his San Diego apartment with bottles of 40-year-old champagne in tow and heads to Los Angeles to pick up his actor friend before they shoot north to wine tasting country.

If we were subconsciously living out this horrific, clichéd nightmare, we at least like to think we were doing it backward.

Getting off the freeway in Escondido, we found ourselves in a North County suburb about 20 miles outside of San Diego. Close to the coast, the area is pretty, but inland, where we were heading, it looked like shit. In beer culture, unlike with wine, this doesn't matter a lick though. We forged ahead through the suburban sprawl day dreaming of huge stainless steel vats of boiling barley mash. The idea of pastoral grape vines held no sway here. Total beer country.

Stone Brewing lies at the top of a hill in an unlikely neighborhood of corporate headquarters, Silicon Valley-style office complexes with wide streets and flagpoles. The brewery does, however, stick out like a sore thumb. It rises out of the ground like a fortress of granite, natural stone and wood planks. (We found out later that all the materials used in construction were recycled from demolished Downtown San Diego buildings, awesomely.)

The front entrance, though construction wasn't complete on our visit, is awe-inspiring. A 50-foot ceiling lets columns of light in like a cathedral does; in the center sits a massive stone boulder. We've never felt so small.

The front lobby is also a general store. At the far end there's a refrigerated aisle of every Stone beer. A maze of kitschy, overpriced merch (Ruination IPA bicycling jersey anyone?) was the only thing between us and a bar made of stone slabs and sleek taps of every beer Stone makes. A surfer dude employee, a young Kurt Cobain-looking feller, started pouring us cups as soon as walked up. We had arrived. The first sips of Levitation Ale went straight to our giddy little fucking heads.

The tour, by the way, is free and comes with a free beer tasting. And raddest of all, the brewery staff loves giving tours and showering visitors with free beer. It's a win-win situation. They get bragging rights, you get to drink free booze in the middle of the day.

Do you, or someone you know, have a bachelor uncle who is really obsessed with cigars or antique cars or eighties metal and loves to share his useless information in chat rooms? This was the case with our brewery guide for the day--we forget his name, sorry man. He was decked out in black and gray Dickies gear all emblazoned with the Stone gargoyle logo, and big leather boots. We followed him, and the other 20 or so beer geeks who'd shown up for the tour, into the sparkling airplane hangar-sized brewery. Vats the size of nuclear reactors shone above us. A black and white pirate flag waved in the air from one of them. Dudes dressed like scientists jogged around in galoshes, gripping clipboards.

After a lesson on hop varieties and a sampling of chocolate malted barley, our guide showed us a whirring monster vat that, he told us, was filled with the Double Arrogant Bastard Ale that Stone releases for Halloween. Oohs and ahhs oozed out all over the place. We crunched down on some regular barley while our guide informed us about Egyptian brewing techniques. It was like a Natural history Museum for Beer

Somewhere in the middle of this Charlie and the Chocolate Stout Factory Dreamland, a stocky chef with bright blue hair, dressed in an all-black kitchen toque walked up to us and nervously asked if we'd been looking for him. We had. We'd been told to ask for Carlton, the head chef of the soon-to-be-open beer garden and bistro if we came down. We wanted to pick his brain. He graciously offered us a private tour of the huge kitchen and dinging room and we slunk away from the rest of the tour.

Carlton, a righteously supreme dude, has worked for his fair share of big operations and more recently ran his own restaurant in Escondido before being stolen away by Stone. He has, he showed us, been hiding away for months in the big shiny new kitchen of his, scheming the new menu and experimenting with beer cooking (pitter patter, be still hearts).

Everything from the line equipment to the walk-ins to the keg lines to the handmade plate ware this guy is working with made us shit our pants. His menu is nothing to scoff at either.

There is a shortage of serious chefs in this country who realize the potential of beer-cooking, so when Carlton explained that his IPA potato fritter appetizer required one entire bomber of Stone IPA we said a Hail Mary. In fact, nearly a fourth of the dishes on the lunch and dinner menu called for some amount of actual beer.

The rest of the place is no less awe-inspiring.

As we were winding through Carlton's tour of the kitchen we met the groundskeeper/gardener/janitor for the brewery, a guy named Chili. He was mopping the floor with a silly grin on his face. He showed us a pile of habañero peppers he'd grown in his garden and politely declined a sample. Upon his and Carlton's recommendation we made plans to drive to a pizza place down the way about 10 miles for their home-brewed beer.

Making our way through the lobby gift shop we made one last stop off at the free beer taps.

"What's that one?" one of us asked Carlton.

"Order it, tell him I said you could have some," he said slyly.

The surfer dude looked skeptical but finally poured us a baby cup of black milk.

Our lips started stinging with the sweet sensation of a beer so strong it's liquor. The hops battled with the malt inside of our brain. Fireworks backfired down our throats.

"What the...?"

"The strongest beer we ever made, you can't buy it. It's leftover from a charity event we did and donated the beer."

Now that's a good cause.