miia monthly

When I went to Baltimore for New Years a few weeks back, I hadn’t planned on having to do any cooking while on vacation. But as they say “duty calls”. So on New Year’s Eve I went on a trip to Wegmans out in Hunt Valley, MD with Boxcar to pick up all the main ingredients to make dinner on New Year’s Eve. As kind of a side note, I had never been to a Wegmans before that day, but I have to say, it was a pretty nice grocery store. So without further to do, here was the menu for New Year’s Eve from a couple of weeks back:

• A four-bone beef rib roast (~10lbs) paired with a cilantro chimichurri (or you can call it a salsa verde)
• Double baked potato skins
• Baked broccoli, with Italian breadcrumbs and cheddar cheese
• Spring greens salad mix with raspberry vinaigrette and tangerine segments.

The protein was originally supposed to be a beef tenderloin, but when we got a Wegmans the tenderloin wasn’t looking so hot. But the beef rib roast on the other hand was much better looking, plus it was going to be large enough to feed the ever expanding dinner guest list. Because what started as dinner for ~8, ended up being dinner for ~13. But in the end, this four bone roast was enough to feed the crowd, with enough leftovers for breakfast in the morning. As far as cooking method goes, instead of cooking the rib roast in the oven, we grilled it outside on a gas grill. It ended up taking about 2 hrs of cooking time to get the roast to about medium/medium-rare. And with the taper of the meat, people that wanted more well done, were able to get what they wanted, along with the people that were looking more for a medium rare slice of beef.

As of the “sauce”, it was something that was fresh in my mind. Since I was just in Washington DC with the posse for sight seeing on Friday the 30th. And when we got into DC, we had lunch at José Andrés’ Oyamel Cocina (which by the way was a very good eatery), and one of the small plates that we ordered for lunch was Costilla de res con salsa verde (Beef short ribs with a tangy green sauce of cilantro, parsley and garlic). Let me tell you, this dish was awesome, the short rib was fork tender and the salsa verde went great with it. So with the salsa verde still stuck in my head from Friday’s lunch. When Big Red mentioned that he didn’t have any use for the remaining cilantro from his guacamole, the salsa verde popped into my head. The rough recipe that I came up with for the salsa verde was half of bunch of cilantro (finely chopped), about 2 tsp of horseradish, ½ a lime, and some olive oil. This salsa verde ended up being an excellent condiment to the beef.

For a starch, we went with double baked potatoes, as this was a request from Boxcar, so I made it work. I started with 8 baking potatoes that I scrubbed and baked in the oven at around 375F for about an hour and a half until tender to the touch. From there the potatoes where cut in half length-wise, the insides scooped out and placed into a small pot. Then all the insides were mashed with milk, butter, olive oil, cheddar cheese, salt and pepper, and spooned back into the hollowed skins. I then popped the skins back in the oven at ~350F to bake while working on the rest of dinner.

The broccoli I was on the fence about, since I really don’t eat that much broccoli, but it was another request from Boxcar, so I made it work. Personally I think that plain steamed broccoli is boring to eat, and boring to look at. So when I was in the shower the morning of New Year’s Eve I rolled around the idea of doing something different to jazz things up. So what I came up with was to first par blanch the broccoli (about 3 mins in boiling water), then adding it to a Pyrex dish with Italian breadcrumbs and cheddar cheese and baking it in the oven at the same time as the potato skins. The baking took care of a couple of tasks for this dish: 1) It will finish cooking the broccoli so that it is still firm but not a pile of mush and 2) it will brown up the breadcrumbs and melt the cheese.

Last up was the salad, which really took nothing to put together. Since all the salad was, was two bags of pre-washed spring mix greens, two carrots shredded with a peeler, a quarter of a finely chopped red onion, Wegmans own raspberry vinaigrette and four tangerines that were peeled and cut into segments. Then I just tossed it all together and served.

In total about 3 hours of cooking/kitchen time from about 5pm to ~8pm when dinner was served. There weren’t very many leftovers after dinner, so I’ll take that as a sign that people enjoyed the dinner.
Attached are some pics from my cell phone that I took that night.

Editors Note: This should have been posted about 6 months ago. But better late than never.

Whole chickens were on sale at the grocery store for $0.69 a lb. So I thought that it was high time to make a roasted chicken on the grill.

The cooking time couldn’t be simpler for this dirty bird. With the bird directly over the coals, grill 8 mins on breast side, flip, than 8 mins on the back side, finally another 2 mins on each side of the bird (20 mins total.) Then move to the cool side of the grill, with the breasts facing the coals. And let it go for 30-40 mins, until the bird is at 160F.

As for the swiss chard, my crop of swiss chard was a total disaster this year. So I ended up having to bum some swiss chard from my farmer neighbor. As for cooking method, I lightly blanched the swiss chard, along with some green beans for a couple of minutes. And then in a frying pan with a with a little bit of bacon fat, I sautéed the swiss chard and green beans until golden. And then at the end, I gave it a couple of squirts of sriracha for some heat. I might have added just a little too much sriracha (as you can tell from the pics), but I like it hot. Thought it could of used some kind of crunch in the mix, maybe french fried onions or breadcrumbs. But I consider a missing crunch, only a minor detail.

It’s been close to four months since my last post. Unfortunately my life has been very hectic since about mid-July, with side projects and general work stuff. I’ve got some new posts lined for after the new year. So I’ll see you in 2012.

Well I just received my scoring sheets in the mail on Friday from the Iowa State Fair, and I have some very good news. My final judging scores were high enough that I received two bronze and one silver ribbon from the state fair.

And in reading the scoring sheets, the most surprising thing that I noticed was that the cider that I thought was the worst of the bunch, which was the one that used the Lalvin yeast scored the highest of the three entries that I submitted, winning a silver ribbon. While the cider that used the Premier Cuvee yeast scored the lowest of the three, which I thought was the best of the three. So go figure. But this is most certainly motivation for next year, to work on my brewing techniques.

So here is the breakdown of the final scoring:

21A – Vegetable Beer – Pumpkin Ale – Final Score: 29.5/50

27A – Common Cider – Final Score: 28.5/50
Yeast: Premier Cuvee

27B – English Cider – Final Score: 37/50
Yeast: Lalvin 71B-1122

Seeing how my last post was all about beer, let’s talk some more about beer. And with it being the middle of the dog days of summer, its time for me to partake in my favorite American summer time beer, that being Rolling Rock beer.

Yes, I know that Rolling Rock is no longer an independent company every since it was gobbled up years ago by Anheuser Busch (so sad). In the beer wars, I’m a Miller kind of guy, but when it comes to Rolling Rock, I’m not that much of a partisan ideologue that I’m going to stop drinking Rolling Rock and give up my summer beer.

With that said, each week I’ve usually been picking up a 12 pack of Rolling Rock bottles, to rotate with my homebrew on tap. But at $11.99 a 12 pack, it’s not exactly a good value play, since my usual value play is a 30 pack of Miller High Life cans for $15.99.

So too my utter and complete surprise this past weekend, the grocery store that I go to just north of my house, had 30 packs of Rolling Rock cans for $15.99. Well consider me sold, over and over again!

Since the last time I saw Rolling Rock in a can, was close to a decade ago in Michigan. And even then, it was only an 18 pk of cans, so a 30 pack is like manna from heaven for me. So until the grocery store stops carrying Rolling Rock in a can, the High Life is getting put on the back burner, since I plan on rocking the box of rocks for the rest of the summer.

One of my goals from last year was to enter a couple of beers into the Iowa State Fair. And what ended up happening last year, was that I totally missed the entry deadline, since I couldn’t figure out how to even submit an entry in the first place.

Well this year, I checked the State Fair’s website on June 28th (a Wednesday) to figure out the entry process, and talk about looking in the nick of time. This year’s entry deadline was July 1st (a Friday) so I just submitted my entries with only a few days to spare.

I ended up entering three different brews into the State Fair this year, with the breakdown being two hard ciders (one with batch #23 using Premier Cuvee yeast aged less than 1 year, and the other cider used Lalvin 71B-1122 yeast aged for 2 years) and the beer I entered was that pumpkin ale that I kegged back in November 2009.

With my entry application accepted, I swung by the fair grounds on July 23rd, since that was the date to drop off oenology entries. And the judging is going to happen before the fair starts on July31st.

The way that the read the entry form, it seems like the final results won’t be released until after the fair is over. Which doesn’t seem to make sense to me, but maybe they will post the results on the fairs website, when the fair starts in a couple of days. Personally I’m curious to see what the judges think of my entries, since this is the first time that I’ve entered one of my brews into a competition. Wish me luck.

As some of you might know, I’m usually not the type to really stock up on something when it goes on clearance. Part of the reason being that I just don’t have the space in my house to set-up a massive cache.

Well this past Saturday, I ended up getting up early to finish reading a business book (yes, I know this sounds very nerdy.) And after I was done with the book, I looked in the fridge, and noticed that it was pretty empty. So with an empty fridge, I started to write up a grocery list to do a little bit of shopping for the week.

With the so call “heat dome” engulfing the Midwest, I decided it would be prudent to pack an ice filled cooler in my truck. Why? Well my rational is that if I’m going to be out running errands the whole day. I just don’t see the point of going home multiple times to drop off any perishable items, when I could just toss them in the cooler.

So stop numero uno, is the Walmart on the north side of town, since last week they had 40 lb bags of compost for $0.50 a bag, and I wanted to pick up a couple of bags. Of course I come back a week later, and they are all out of compost on clearance. But instead they had something even better on clearance, which was Milorganite fertilizer for $3.00 a bag (marked down from $12.98 a bag) and they had a pallet and a half of the stuff.

When I saw that, the first thing I did was call my mom to find out if she wanted me to get her any. Since she has mentioned to me a couple of times, how much she likes this brand of fertilizer. At first she said that she was going to check her local Walmart to see if it was on clearance by her house. So in the mean time while mom was checking her Walmart. I did my grocery shopping inside of Walmart and then picked up 8 bags of Milorganite on the way out the door.

After I had already left Walmart, and was down the street at a local butcher shop, I received a call from mom letting me know that they didn’t have the Milorganite on clearance by her house. So she told me to get her 10 bags of the stuff, so I told her no problem and I hung up the phone. Five minutes later as I’m checking out at the butcher shop I get another call from my mom, and she changed her mind, now she wants 25 bags of the stuff. Yes 25 bags of fertilizer!

So I headed back to Walmart to fill mom’s request. And in the 20 minutes since I bought my 8 bags, only half a pallets worth was left! And with that, I basically bought out the rest of their inventory, except for about 5 ripped bags that I didn’t purchase. And as you can see in both sets of photos, I have quite a bit of fertilizer on my hands now. And when unloaded from my truck and stacked on a pallet, it makes for quite a large and stinky pile in the garage at my other house.

I’ve picked up some pretty good deals over the years. But to pick up about ~$450 worth of fertilizer for ~$100 has to be one of my best scores to date. Now where my mom is going to be storing her portion of the fertilizer, I’ll leave that up to her to figure out.

Talk about hot hot hot, oh boy has it been hot and humid this summer. I’ve started on the weeding of the garden, and the first section that I’ve been working on is the rows between the tomato plants. I figure that if I just work at weeding the garden one small section at a time, eventually I’ll be able to get the whole plat completed.

Toward the end of June, I planted some sweet corn seeds in the back section of the left hand side of the garden. Once again, this is a task that I should have completed months ago, but hey C’est la vie. Right now the stalks are about to my knee, so it will be a while before I have any ears for harvesting.

You’ll also notice that I tossed in a bunch of close up shots of the centennial hops. And by the looks of those cones, I’ll need to plan a brew session in the next couple of weeks to take advantage of these fresh cones. I’m think about maybe brewing a Kölsch style beer, with these hops. But since I’m in the pre-planning stage of the brew session, all ideas are welcome.

Once again I have another planting project that should have been started at least two months ago but wasn’t and that was the salad table.

This is one of those things that only takes 15-20 minutes to plant, but I just kept on putting it off. You’ll notice that in some of the other salad table cells, are the remaining seedlings. The plan is when I visit my sister for 4th of July weekend, that I’ll give her all the remaining seedlings. Even though transplanting them in July, is way late in the season. But who knows, maybe something will turn out from this experiment.

And speaking of late season transplants, you’ll notice that I’ve transplants all the remaining seedlings from their 9-cell packs into 10 oz plastic cups. This way the plants will be a little bit less root bound, come transplant time on the 4th of July.

Well, I finally bothered to transplant all my seedlings into the garden. And for it being June 12th, this is by far the latest in the season that I’ve done my transplanting. We did end up having a freak hailstorm about a week ago, but it was only very small hail. But luckily for me, I cobbled together a make-shift shelter for all the seedlings to protect them from any damage.

In the pictures, you might notice a bunch of orange flags around the garden. I’ve lost the weeding war at this point in the season so I’ve resorted to tying orange caution tape onto bamboo skewers, and placing this homemade “flag” next to each plant. That way when I finally get around to actually weeding the garden, I’ll it least know where my seedlings are in the garden.

Also, check out the centennial hops, talk about a beast! If it keeps growing like this, I should have a bumper crop of cones.

Finally I’ve added a couple of pics of my neighbor’s “garden”. Since what he ended up doing, was just roto-tiling most of his backyard. There is a little bit of rhyme and reason to the layout, but mostly it has to do with not wanting to mow his backyard, so he got rid of the grass and put in the garden instead.