A quick one today:  this recipe by popular demand!

For a recent party, I threw together some baked chicken wings. These things came out so tasty, even I was shocked! Although really, should I be shocked that chicken wings tossed in bacon fat & baked are delicious?? Hardly!

I wish I’d gotten a better picture of how they came out – they were gorgeous – but they got snapped up super fast!

Rosemary & Garlic Chicken Wings

Pre-heat oven to 425f

48 wing pieces (for big parties, I buy the bags of pre-separated ones at Costco. Not pastured I know…)

2/3 cup of rendered bacon fat/lard (heated enough so that it’s liquid)

1.5 tbsp finely chopped fresh rosemary

2 tbsp chopped fresh garlic

Salt & Pepper to taste

Mix all ingredients in a large bowl and toss the wings to coat.

IMPORTANT: make sure the wings are completely defrosted and room temperature before putting them in the marinade, otherwise you’ll end up with a goopy mess when the lard re-solidifies on contact…believe me, I did this 1st time around…it’s gross!

Place on a cookie sheet over a tray (to catch the drippings) and roast for about 40 minutes till crispy & brown. Check them regularly as the time could vary depending on your oven!  Enjoy!

(N.B. Brent wrote this back in November)

So let’s give you some background.  I’ve been doing Crossfit-style workouts 5 days a week for 6 months, and have gone Paleo for 2. I just got a job as a traveling consultant, and I’ve been scared to death that my “per diem” was going to take my diet and send it to hell. Being that it’s so scary, I decided to periodically document my efforts;  it helps more than you know that my wife has the same plan and goals and supports me fully.

So I’m 2 weeks in.  I started this all wrong, keeping a daily log of every bite I ate.  Meal 1, chicken and veggies, meal 2 i tore a sandwich apart and ate a big salad… I  think this blog may be boring because it’s not that hard to do “Paleo on the Road”, it’s all about perspective.  Once I got used to this diet 2 months ago, and I got so fit, how would I dare screw it up??  I find salads, and veggie subsitutions for starches at most restaurants. I avoid pizza, pasta and all that hullabaloo. I’m NOT afraid to ask anyone at any restaurant to make it “my way.”

So back to where I am.  I’ve been on the road 2 weeks as I said, and I’ve not found a constant location or Gym to join.  What I have found is discipline, and a combination of modified WOD’s (workout of the day) from my home gym http://HardExerciseWorks.com and using their “travel WOD’s” have enabled me to stay true to the workouts.  Combine that with the fear of not fitting into my new clothes (lost 15 lbs, and 4 waist inches) has kept my food intake pure. OK, ok, I’ve had a few drinks a few more nights a week than I did at home (yes this is cheating) however, that forces my food choices and exercise regimen to be more strict.  Also being a beer brewer and honestly “beer geek” working in Denver, home of many breweries, does not help.  However I persevere.

Join me as I fight the beer and swing the kettlebells, then fly back and forther, hither and yonder.

Being a Paleo On the Road isn’t for the faint hearted, so I best not faint!

2011 was a crazy year, having more ups and downs than most of the years before it. As far as beer goes, we made some great beers, attended our first National Homebrewers Conference in San Diego, and settled on plans to move to Adelaide, Australia to open our brewpub in a couple of years.

It was a big year for my health too! In April, I joined a new gym (Hard Exercise Works) and in them finally found something I absolutely love and is sustainable over the long term. They recommended a primal/paleo way of eating, which I greatly resisted at first – give up bread you say???! However, I gave it a spin….aaaaand it seems that removing the grains, legumes & (most) dairy from our diet has had a super effect; I’ve dropped about 15lbs and around 12 inches since making the switch! A side effect was also losing my reflux/GERD type issues, as well as the arthritis in my hands completely disappearing; a very happy side effect!

Some of you probably wondered why I fell off the face of the beer earth this year; it started with the cutting back on grain products in our diet, luckily I have since figured out a happy medium and beer is back, phew! But it continued with me getting pregnant a few months ago – forcing a vacation from beer – unfortunately I miscarried just before Thanksgiving. I know I don’t normally get so personal or serious on this blog, but honestly people don’t talk about miscarriage enough, and us women feel like sad little islands when it happens. And it happens a lot; about 50% of women who have kids had a miscarriage at some point, yet it’s such a taboo topic. Enough already.
Anyways, the blog will continue to be about beer/wine and definitely food too; however, there will definitely be a Primal/Paleo spin to it, and probably some fitness-y type stuff too. Brent got a new job as a consultant with a big, fancy firm and is now living in Denver half  the week, so hopefully he will be helping me out with a “Paleo on the Road” post here & there also!

This year Big Brew Day fell on Brent’s scheduled weekend to brew; this was good for two reasons! 1. Brent was the one running around the house trying to brew while 20 friends were hanging out on the patio & in the backyard, and 2. I got to get in the kitchen and turn out some great beer-themed food!

I have quite a few vegetarian friends, which you would think would be difficult for me to work around being the dedicated omnivore that I am, but no. I take great pleasure in the challenge of having something equally delicious for them to eat whenever we have people over! The menu (with veg options) for Saturday included the following dishes, all prepared with delicious libations from Shvitzing Matilda Brewery! :

1. Deschutes BrewPub’s spent grain veggie burgers. I’m all about trying new recipes with spent grain in them, and these burgers have been raved about in the beerverse ever since they were put on the menu. Alas, I was unable to find anyone who had posted the recipe so that I might attempt to replicate them. BUT! Within 15 minutes of posting my lamenting tweet about not ebing able to find the recipe, or anyone that knew it, Gina the Brand Ambassador from Deschutes had replied saying that if I sent her my email address, she’d send the recipe right over! And she did! I hope she doesn’t mind that I post it here, because frankly, they were EXCELLENT! A huge thumbs up from all who tried them, including omnivores such as myself; hooray for another way to recycle my spent grain!

Veggie burger

Yields: 5 – 5oz burgers

Ingredients:

1 ¼ cup           cooked black beans

3.5 oz              carrots peeled

3.5 oz              red onion

¼ ea                 large red bell pepper

½ cup              Panko, Japanese bread crumbs

¼ cup              salsa your favorite

1 tsp                kosher salt

1 tsp                black pepper ground

1 ea                  clove garlic

½ tsp               chili powder

¼ cup              spent grain. If unavailable you can use cooked oat meal.

½ cup              whole wheat flour

Prep notes

In a food processor chop carrots, onion and red bell pepper separately into 1/8” size

Add all ingredients to a large mixing bowl and mix by hand.

Divide into desired size burgers and patty

Bake in 400 degree oven till firm about twenty minutes depending on oven.

Allow to cool, reheat using grill or skillet.

2.     Homebrew Chef’s Four Ale Nachos

These actually ended up being 3 ale nachos, as I got distracted and forgot to put out the IPA sour cream. Oh well, they were extremely well received anyway! I made a plate of 2 Ale Nachos together for the vegetarians, who I’m told thought the beans were great! The meat-eaters were in love with the chili which made such a disaster of my kitchen the night before – the Bubba Gimp Milk Stout that I put in there was probably the worst gusher I’ve ever opened. Milk Stout all over the white cabinets in my kitchen!  I subbed out lamb for beef (cheaper, and more of my friends eat it), and obviously some homebrew for the Lagunitas stout. The beer cheese sauce and the smoked porter beans both got a dose of Brent’s Iron Brewer Smoked Porter. Pretty damn yummy; a highly recommended recipe, great accompaniment for beer drinking!

3.     Beer Cook’s Spicy Beer (BROWN ALE) Brined Drumsticks (Wings)

I made a couple of changes to this recipe (hence the parentheses); I used a Belgian Wit to brine the chicken and I used drumsticks instead of wings because the thought of chopping wings for hours before a party filled me with dread! I’m pretty sure the recipe did not lack for my laziness though; this chicken was heavenly! Juicy, spicy and downright delectable – the spicy sauce was just fantastic! Absolute rave reviews from the beer drinkers in the house. I will definitely be making this again & again.

I’m really only just recently getting into the cooking with beer thing; It’s a new world to me. I’ve cooked with wine forever, and of course I make my own beer and pair it with food, but the incorporation of beer into the recipes has escaped me up till now; no longer I say! I plan to come up with recipes for each new beer we make! Stay tuned

Call me a hipster if you want, but I love my bicycle. Bicycles and beer go together. Or they should. You’re much less likely to get a DUI on your bicycle

Look at this brilliant-ness!! From my fave handy-crafty site Etsy, the store is called Walnut Studiolo

Coolest bike gadget EVER!

If you only need one beer...!

 I’m going to start featuring more beer & food related geekery+gadgetry  going forward, so if you see anything cool, or know anyone who’s making cool stuff, let me know!

This year’s recipe was a remake of a 1933 Barclay Perkins Milk Stout. Frankly, before this came up, I’d never heard of it; shameful to be sure! Kristen England from the BJCP even offered up an authentic recipe from us to brew! There were some ingredients in the brew day that I’d never used before, so I was a little nervous; plus I was not able to get 2 of the malts listed (amber and brown malts) that I ended up having to toast in my own kitchen! Here’s to homebrewer ingenuity (oh yeah, and the helpful tutorial at The Brewery!!)

Brewday went pretty smoothly, even though I forgot to secure the askets that hold the false bottom of the mash tun in place; we had a frantic ten minutes trying to get the sparge going before we got it unblocked! Phew!!

The new brew system is really making our brewdays into a breeze. The fact that we no longer have to pick up pots to dump stuff out, or have 5 pots of various sizes around in order to boil sparge water or hold wort while we transfer between vessels is a HUGE relief. Brent and I now fight way less on brewday, and can enjoy each other’s company as well as a few brews along the way!

Chuck is as always, extremely helpful in the clean-up of any stray grains or wort. Nary a drop will go to waste in our house!

And, god forbid any ice would go astray from the wort chiller. Chuck makes sure all that ice stays exactly where it’s supposed to!

Being my first attempt at a stout, I’m interested to see how it comes out. At 88% efficiency on the batch, I’m already very excited!

OG: 1.053

FG : 1.024

ABV: 3.7%

Actually think I’m going to pull half of this off tomorrow and throw it on top of some freshly brewed (& cooled) espresso YUM!

Will update more once it’s bottled and I have some tasting notes! Recipe is here.

I’ve been slowly (veeeerrrryy slowly) chugging my way through Chris White & Jamil Zainasheff’s book “Yeast” recently; it’s fascinating stuff, and has inspired me to try my hand at some yeast wrangling in my own backyard. As you may or may not know, once upon a time all beer & wine was fermented solely with the wild yeasts that were found on the ingredients used, or that fell in from the air around them. The folks back themn had no clue that yeast even existed, but that’s another tale entirely.

So I started trolling the interwebs for information of home brewers who’d actually tried to catch their own local , wild yeast; I was surprised that there’s not too many who’ve done it, and many who had were far from successful. But I was not to be deterred!

(btw, I say “yeast” because I have no way of knowing at the moment whether I have caught yeast or a bacteria that acts like yeast!)

Here’s how I “caught” the yeast, and how I’ve used it so far:

First of all I brewed up a batch of starter wort (1/2 cup pilsen light DME & 2 cups water), placed it in a sanitized mason jar and added a couple of pellets of hops (to keep the mold spores at bay)I then covered the jar in a fine mesh painters bag.

The covered jar then got situated in a planter pot outside in the backyard, somewhere out of direct sunlight where my lovely dog Chuck, would not knock it over. I left it outside for a full 48 hours.

My trusty flask and stirplate came out for a spin next, so I could see if I’d caught anything viable, or if this little exercise was a bust. Surprise of surprises! I got activity within a couple of hours! I washed out the yeast (procedure for another post), made a new batch of starter wort and stepped-up the “yeast” to cultivate a larger number of cells by feeding them wort. I did this 4 times over before I thought I’d have enough cells to pitch into a 2 gallon starter batch.

Once I had enough “yeast”  to make a batch of beer with, I brewed up a 3 gallon batch of  fairly innocuous, low gravity (1.032 OG) wheat beer. I wanted it to be as blank a slate as possible, so that I could really get a feel for what flavours I would get out of the wild “yeast”. I split the batch into one 2 gallon carboy and a 1 gallon growler; the 2 gallon batch got the starter I had made pitched in and the the other batch was bound for the backyard to catch it’s own inoculation of wild “yeast”.

I covered the top of the growler with a small mesh hops bag, tied it up tight so no critters could get at my liquid gold!  My Ladies of Craft Beer tee covered it from direct sunlight and it went out under the rose apple tree for 48 hours. After only 24 hours, a light krausen was forming already.

I brought it inside when the 2 days was up , put an airlock on it and let it go. The krausen formed thick and fluffy and fermented up a storm! The yeast cake that formed on the bottom of the one gallon growler was huge for such a small container.

So now both are done fermenting and it was time for a gravity test and a taste. Batch #1 is down to 1.002 (3.9% ABV) tastes a little funky with a slightly leathery aftertaste;  from what I read, this particular taste is common with Brett, so maybe I landed something extra-special-funky with this one. Batch #2 is down to 1.004 (about 3.5% ABV) and tastes cleaner, fruitier and more saison-y. There’s also no leathery aftertaste on Batch #2.

Batch #1 is developing a pellicle as of this week, so that could certainly be cause for sour excitement! Batch #2 still looks clean. If it doesn’t develop a pellicle in the next week or so, I’m going to bottle it and forget it for a while.

I brewed a higher gravity beer (IPA grain bill) 2 weekends ago to throw on top of the Batch #1 yeast cake to see if it could tolerate the higher alcohol wort; I think we can all agree that if a beer goes from 1.070 OG to 1.003 FG (8.9% ABV) in 3 days, that is has the chops! I haven’t ever seen yeast chew through sugars that fast….even champagne yeast! Tasted it and we have much the same characteristics as the original Batch #1, still with a little leathery/tobaccoey thing going on. I have high hopes it will improve with age. Batch #2 is more exciting though, as we might have something with no bugs ad makes a lovely, light and saisony type ale – perfect for a Florida house strain!

I’m really excited that I ended up with two pretty decent tasting “yeasts” out of this experiment, maybe some native bugs and no mold! Would love to hear any stories about anyone else out there who has tried this kind of experiment – successful or not! Will keep you updated on tasting notes etc down the road

Twitter was how I came across the Iron Brewer competition, which when I started was competing in round two, opened me up to a whole new group of really passionate homebrewers. That was really exciting for me. In round 3, Brent competed against Bob Olson of Bolero Snort Brewery and I was lucky enough to try his beers for the first time. When Bob put out the word that he wanted some feedback on his “Wee Heifer Fruitcake”, I threw my hand up FAST! He kindly sent me a few of his brews to try and I excitedly chilled them down in the fridge, ready to taste!

I started with the Wee Heifer. It pours a pretty reddish brown, sort of auburn colour into the glass with about half an inch of bubbly, off white head. As you can see in the picture, it looks really effervescent; rest assured though, at taste time it was perfectly carbonated! The head didn’t stick around for too long though.

On the nose I’m smelling fig newtons, a little banana, raisins and maraschino cherries. I’m also getting a whiff of custard, although that could be vanilla and I’m just thinking custard because I love it with christmas pudding/fruitcake!

Bob, you hit it on the head with the taste! There is this great sweet and sour bite which I’m guessing was from the cherries and also the bourbon. The first sip punches you in the face (in a good way) with that bite, and then settles out. I’m also getting all kinds of dark fruit; prunes, raisins and dried figs. The custardy nose I was getting is still kind of present, but not as strong.

Delicious!

Next up was the Longhop IPA. It is a gorgeous caramelly colour in the glass, with a huge fluffy head. The head sticks around too, and leaves beautiful lacing down the inside of the glass.

The nose is chock-full of tropical fruit and citrusy hops. There’s also a hint of the nice balance in the beer with a caramel note as well. Taking a sip, you get a really nice balanced mouthful of grapefruity hops and a great maltback; makes it very drinkable!

I’m so glad to be able to taste my fellow zymurgist’s work; we put a little of our hearts and souls into each and every one of our home brews and it’s a joy to see it in other’s as well! Bob, you are doing some great things up there in NJ and I’m looking forward to tasting more as Bolero Snort progresses!

It’s been a long time coming, and last night the Tequesta Brewing Co. finally opened its doors to the public for a “soft” opening. I use the term soft very loosely because as you can see below, this was probably the most packed soft opening I’ve seen in my life!

As I wrote about in July the Corner Cafe and Brewery have been around for a few years in a large-ish strip mall in Juno, serving delicious foods along with Matt Webster’s fantastic brews. The dream it seems, was always to open a larger operation eventually once the initial venture proved itself. It did, and now after what seems like forever to us beer geeks, the brewery is open!

The brewery is conveniently located right next door to the original site, meaning that there is amazing food available just steps away; that is if you can tear yourself away from the bar. This magnificent piece was salvaged from an old pub (the location of which escapes me at this point), I believe from the early 1900′s, it’s quite simply gorgeous! Not to mention green!

The space is large, and very high celing’d; plenty of tables and comfy places to sit and hang out. I can now see this becoming a much more regular place for us to visit for drinks – that was the only (teeny-tiny) negative about the restaurant location, that tiny bar just couldn’t hold all the beer geeks on a Friday! TV’s up on the wall will make the sports fans happy too; not to mention they can drink all that fabulous beer while they cheer on their teams, BONUS!

The beers are, as they have always been, fantastic. Before the crowd overcame my need for personal space and/or oxygen, I had a Terminally Ale – quite a tasty brown ale, with some nice molasses & coffee notes & yummy citrus hoppiness. I honestly gave in to my Friday exhaustion after that and decided to take a gallon growler of their dangerously drinkable, Gnarly Barley – Pale Ale – home with me. No, I did not finish it on my own; although I tried!

People, you really need to get yourselves up to Juno to check this out; support a local business, drink some delicious, creative brews and even have a bite next door at the original location – I promise you won’t be disappointed!

Matt et al, you’ve done an amazing job with the new addition! Here’s to much success in the coming years, and to the expansion of the brewing scene here in South Florida! Slàinte!

 Tequesta Brewing Company is located on U.S. 1 and Tequesta Drive, just north of Indiantown Rd, next door to the Corner Café and Brewery.

So, I am a list-maker; I’ve felt like my lists should be sufficient to control the things I have up until now been putting into my resolutions. This year, however, I have some more involved and serious resolutions that I am going to name here in the public domain, so that my blog might hold me acountable instead…we’ll see.

1.     Nail down 5 homebrew recipes that I can replicate over and over. This one’s especially important to our dreams of one day being pico or nano brewers.

2.     Combining my two passions on a more regular basis, and come up with new ways to incorporate beer into my recipes. At least once a month, and put into blog posts.

3.     Plant my vegetable garden. The beds are ready, and as soon as it gets warmer the veggies are going in!

4.     Build a cheese press (this one looks like the way I’ll go) and start making delicious cheeses at home.

5.     Complete the 10 Days of Real Food Pledge, and if that works out okay, try my hand at the 100 Days of Real Food pledge!

6.     Run a 1/2 marathon. I’m not a great runner, but I once was…hopefully I can get this one back on track

7.     Read at least 1 book (not schoolbooks!) per month. This seems low, I know…but I’ve gotten so bad over the past couple of years about reading anything that isn’t school related, I’m setting the bar low

There are 3 more, but they’re a little more personal, and I don’t feel like broadcasting them quite yet. Maybe when I achieve them, I’ll let you know!