Sherry's garden plot was awarded "Garden of the Month" this past month at the Pacific Beach Community Garden. Not bad for something that was just a plot of dirt with potential a few months ago.
While I'm bragging, I might as well mention that we're still getting tomatoes in December. I love you, San Diego!
The issue of what to do with leftover home-smoked almonds doesn't come up often in our household - they are usually gone too fast. Recently, however, we smoked a big enough batch that they somehow managed to outlast the initial wave of gluttony.
Faced with these rarefied leftover almonds, we decided to try making them into a brittle. Neither one of us really has much of a sweet tooth, but if you add nuts to the equation we're all over it. We found an almond brittle recipe in Mario Batali's Holiday Food and went from there.
The recipe is pretty simple. Coarsely chop some smoked almonds, then toast them in the oven a few minutes to make sure they're nice and crunchy. Put plain, white sugar into a sauce pan along with a little water to moisten it and set over medium heat. Watch carefully - it will be clear and bubble vigorously as the water cooks off, but once it starts turning from straw to caramel colored you will need to move fast. Just before it hits the color you want, pull the pan from the heat and quickly stir in the nuts. Immediately spread the mixture out on a sheet pan lightly greased with butter or lined with a Silpat
Once it's cool, the candy can easily be snapped into small, irregular pieces. You can adjust the flavor by varying the darkness of the caramel - cooked to just tan, it'll be rather toffee flavored, but cooked to a deep caramel color it will be more intense with a slight bitterness to it. Since the smoked almonds are already intense, we found that we prefer it on the lighter side of caramel.
baking mat.
We're doing a traditional Thanksgiving meal with family this year, but many times it is just the two of us. Given that, we often try to find a way to do something other than a whole turkey. We also like to try twists on the traditional holiday meal, while still keeping the spirit intact.
Here are a few dishes we've done in years past:
 Rolled Turkey Leg Stuffed Thanksgiving-StyleWe're both dark meat people, so a meal composed solely of the leg and thigh is perfect for us. The stuffing inside keeps things solidly Thanksgiving-y. Add a sausage in the middle for extra credit. |
 Thanksgiving Stuffing Croquettes with a Gravy CenterWe invented these little guys last year - a ball of stuffing filled with bits of turkey, coasted in panko crumbs and deep-fried. The molten gravy in the center seals the deal. |
 Roasted Yams with Moroccan-Spiced Compound ButterYams go really well with North African flavors. The simple addition of this compound butter takes a standard holiday side dish in a completely different, delicious direction. |
 Smoked Turkey BreastAnd of course we can't forget the smoker... |
Even though we didn't get started on our garden plot until early September, we still wanted to give tomatoes a shot. We planted some varieties known to tolerate colder weather (Early Girl, Siletz, Glacier) , and were lucky to get some help from late season warm weather.
While we haven't gotten a ton of tomatoes, the ones we have are very tasty. Yesterday, Sherry made up a batch of fresh mozzarella to enjoy with some of them. We didn't have any basil on hand, so we picked some sprigs of marjoram from our patio.
Sherry has had trouble making mozzarella in the past, but this batch came out perfectly. It is really easy to make (when it works). If you are interested in giving it a try, stop by our friends' new cheese and wine making shop, Curds and Wine when it opens this Thursday and get yourself some cheese making supplies.
For years now, I've been plugging away with my little canon point-and-shoot
What better way to break in the new toy than with some pictures of tasty pig parts? Pictured above is smoked pork tongue with a vinaigrette. We were making Coppa di Testa and had a tongue leftover, so we brined it and smoked it at the same time as some slabs of bacon we were doing. Good stuff.
Speaking of the testa, we did a post on Warm Testa with Waxy Potatoes (a recipe from the Babbo Cookbook
And we never make a batch of testa without doing some Testa on Toast...
So far I'm really pleased with the new camera, although I haven't done much beyond fully automated shooting yet. It does hi def video, so we might have to try our hands at some food in motion. We'll see...
Back in August, we posted about picking fresh Cascade and Nugget hops at Star B Ranch. We've been drinking the beer we made from those hops for a month or so now, so I guess we are overdue on posting about brewing the beer itself.
Scouring the internet didn't turn up a whole lot of information on brewing with fresh hops, and what information we did find was often contradictory. Since our beer turned out well, hopefully this recipe will help the next person searching for information on the subject.
We used our standard west-coast IPA malt bill, so there were no variables to worry about there. With the hops, though, the questions were how much to use, and when? In terms of amounts, the general wisdom seems to be that you want to use about 4-5 times the weight of fresh hops as compared to what you would use with dried hops - this accounts for the extra weight from water in the fresh hop flowers.
Given that we normally use 6 oz of prepared hops, by that calculation we'd need 24-30 oz of fresh - nearly two pounds! But, since we only picked about 18 ounces, that would have to do...
Regarding timing, I had read that you can get too grassy a taste if you boil the hop flowers too long, so we decided to push most of the hop additions later than usual in the schedule.
By the time we had finished adding the hops, they were definitely starting to pile up - you definitely don't want to be using an undersized pot. Once they were saturated with wort, however, they became more manageable.
At the dry hopping stage, space becomes an issue again. We were barely able to get all of the hops into our secondary fermenter. Again, though, they shrunk down as they got wet.
We had also read that dry hopping for too long can cause problems, so we only dry hopped for a week rather than close to two like we usually do.
The result was a very pleasant, subtly hoppy beer. Given that the flavor was not at all overly grassy, I think if we do another fresh hop beer we would move the hop schedule up in the boil and and increase the dry hop time to both increase the bitterness and the aroma.
The recipe that follows is exactly what we did:
As we mentioned a few months ago in our first "Dishes with Fishes" post, we've been eating a lot more fish lately - mostly because of the fantastic quality we get from Catalina Offshore Products.
Here are some dishes we've made with our recent purchases at COP.
Pan-cooked Grouper with Sesame Noodles
In the past, we've generally made this dish with salmon. We haven't been eating much salmon lately, so we gave it a try with grouper and it was fantastic! Grouper is fast becoming one of our favorite fishes.
Black Bass with Corn and Caramelized Onions
This dish is from the Balthazar Cookbook
Halibut with Garlic Sauce
We got this recipe from CAB Cooks and it is a good one. While she uses red snapper, this rendition was done using halibut and we've also made it with sea bass.
Sculpin with Coriander-Lime Butter
Not the beer, the fish. The coriander-lime butter was an experiment that turned out really well.
Grilled Swordfish
Just a straight-up grilled piece of fish. When you have a quality source product, you don't need to do much to it. The tomatoes and lettuce in the salad were fresh from our garden (yay!).
Rock Cod with Gnocchi "Worms" in Tomato Sauce
The rock cod went beautifully with Mario Batali's Basic Tomato Sauce - which has been our go-to house red sauce for about a decade now. The gnocchi were from a recipe at La cucina di Cristina, and they added a fun textural contrast.
