Month: November 2009

Potato Chip Review – Doritos – Smokin’ Cheddar BBQ

Posted on by AuSable

Since I don’t remember ever seeing this flavor of Doritos before, I had to get a bag. And the flavor listed on the bag is the actual order that you get the flavor when eating these Doritos. First you get the smoky flavor, and as you chew you get the cheddar flavor, with a finishing flavor of BBQ sauce. The only downside was the BBQ flavor, in that it is more of a sweet BBQ sauce flavor, almost like the BBQ flavor on Lay’s Honey BBQ flavored chips. Personally if they would have used the BBQ flavor from the old KC Masterpiece Ruffles, it would have paired up better with the smokiness and the cheddar. I guess we can all dream.

Cream of Cauliflower Soup – v1

Posted on by AuSable

I’ve been on kind of a kick lately, in trying to clear out old food from my freezer. At least a year ago, I bought a 1pound bag of frozen Bird’s Eye cauliflower. Why I bought it is beyond me, since I really don’t care for cauliflower to begin with (since it’s easy to overcook cauliflower), but I’ve got to make it into something. Continue reading →

Black Friday 2009

Posted on by AuSable

I didn’t partake in a lot of the Black Friday madness, but there was one item that I had a keen interest in obtaining. For the last couple of months I’ve been thinking about getting a KitchenAid stand mixer, but I just couldn’t pull the trigger. Maybe part of it had to do with the +$400 price tag on the model that I wanted (Pro 600, 6 qt bowl, 575 watts, bowl lift style.) Continue reading →

Drying Sage in the Box Fan dehydrator

Posted on by AuSable

Since I’ve basically mulched the garden and cleared everything out, I had to do something with the sage plant that was still alive and kicking, even after the killing frost in October. So I basically stripped all the good leaves from the plant and laid the leaves on a screen for the dehydrator to do its thing.

I did end up using a blue furnace filter this time around. I set the fan on medium speed instead of low, but it still took about 7 days to dry a single frames worth of sage leaves. Personally I thought that it would have been a little bit quicker, but go figure.

Garden mulched for the year – 2009

Posted on by AuSable

Well now that the garden is officially done for the year, about two or three weekends ago I cleared out any of the leftovers in the garden, which was a sage plant, a row of green onions and a row of chives. I did a little bit of hand weeding and picked what was left of the herbs, and then I used my propane torch to burn out everything else. After everything was burned out and cooled down, I laid down a layer of grass clippings and shredded leaves. So next spring instead of raking up all the mulch on the ground, I’ll just till it into the soil and hopefully I’ll have less weeds to start the season, since the ground will be covered in mulch to begin with. But we’ll see, come spring 2010. Continue reading →

Magnum Society Shipment for 2009 – Domaine Carneros

Posted on by AuSable

Booyah!!!! Last Friday I stopped by UPS to pick up my Magnum Society shipment from Domaine Carneros, which is a 2006 Magnum sized bottle of Sparkling Brut this year. But Domaine Carneros is also offering a bunch of different holiday deals this year for wine club members.

One deal that peaked my interest is their Thanksgiving Trio of the following three bottles for $110: 2002 Late Disgorged Brut, 2007 Avant-Garde Chardonnay, 2006 La Terre Promise Pinot Noir. But I don’t think that I’ll be ordering anything extra then my normal club shipments this year, seeing how I still have over 12 bottles of Carneros wine just sitting in the basement from this years shipments. Plus I still have another regularly scheduled shipment coming in a couple of weeks, of a 2005 Ultra Brut and a 2007 La Terre Promise Pinot Noir. So I think I’ll be bringing some wine for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner this year.

Pumpkin Ale – Keged and Bottled this weekend

Posted on by AuSable

Boy did I leave this beer in the secondary a long time, just shy of a month. But this time around I’m doing something a little different, in that I’m priming the entire 5 gallon batch of homebrew before bottling & kegging. I’ve had this discussion with JRR offline, but the gist of the conversation was about the pro & cons of kegging homebrew. With the major downside of kegging being the inconsistency in carbonation, when the homebrew is force carbonated.

So I’m using this Pumpkin Ale to test out if priming in a keg will produce a better carbonated product compared to force carbonation. Conceptually when you think about it, its like you are basically carbonating one giant bottle of beer, when dealing with a keg. Plus with priming the whole batch, it allows me to bottle part of the batch and keg the rest. I ended up only bottling 13 bottles of the Pumpkin Ale. Since I had 13 open slots in the cardboard case that currently has 11 bottles of the Dry Stout I made a while back. I guess we’ll see in a couple of weeks, the results of this little experiment. Wish me luck.

Side Notes:
FG – 1.014
Priming ratio – 3/4 cup Corn Sugar (Dextrose) & 2 cups of water, with both brought to a boil
Brewed on 10/17/09
Racked to Secondary on 10/27/09
Bottled & Kegged on 11/21/09

JRR’s Purple Cabbage recipe

Posted on by AuSable

After I copied down JRR’s recipe in the comments section of the final garden harvest pictures. Here was the recipe that I came up with:

-1lb 1.5 oz of purple cabbage, cored and thinly shreaded (all the purple cabbage that was harvested)
-4 cloves of minced garlic
-half of a white medium onion (the other half was used in the jalapeno hot sauce recipe)
-2 tsp rendered and solidified bacon fat
-1 TB soy sauce
-1/2 cup Homebrew IPA
-4 strips of pre-cooked bacon, chopped into bits
-Pinch Red pepper flakes
-Salt & pepper to taste

In a sauteuse, cook the onions & garlic in the bacon fat until they start to soften, then add all the cabbage to the sauteuse. I then tossed the cabbage for a couple of minutes to coat in the bacon fat. Next I added the soy sauce & beer, put on the cover and let it steam for about 20 mins on medium/medium low heat. After the steaming is done, I turned up the heat to medium high/high to reduce the liquid. Finally just before removing the pan from the burner I added in the bacon, red pepper flakes and salt/pepper. BAM!

When I tasted the final product on my dinner plate, the thing that I noticed was that it needed a little bit of sweetness. So for next time, instead of using an IPA for the liquid. I’ll trying adding some sort of sweet wine instead, since it only needed a little bit of sweetness to balance out the soy sauce.

Please excuse all the ping-backs, it was just one of those things that happened.

Potato Chip Review – Old Dutch – Salt & Vinegar Kettle Chips

Posted on by AuSable

I guess that everything old is new again, because the first thing that I thought of when I tired these chips was Lay’s Dill Pickle flavored chips. But when you think about it, talk about a brilliant piece of marketing on the part of potato chip companies. Salt and Vinegar chips are a down in the dumps flavor, almost a throwback flavor in these current times. But guess what, you add a little dash of dill flavoring and presto! You were able to recycle a flavor that no one was buying into something cutting edge.

As a side note, for some strange reason Salt & Vinegar flavored chips always make me think of the UK and fish and chips. Maybe it was because of the baby blue color on both the Lay’s Salt & Vinegar chips as well as these Old Dutch chips. Did I somehow miss the memo that baby blue = salt & vinegar?

But in any case, I thought that these Kettle Cooked Old Dutch chips were pretty good, and judging by my consumption of half a 8.5 oz bag in one sitting, that means a pretty solid thumbs up from me. Maybe I’m currently experiencing a salt & malt vinegar deficiency that needed to be quenched. But these salt & vinegar really hit the spot. And mixed with a little bit of beer from a free keg of BL (15.5 gallons isn’t going to drink itself away) in the kegerator it made for a nice, though unhealthy late night snack.

Pumpkin Beer racked to secondary

Posted on by AuSable

Last week I ended up racking the Pumpkin beer to a glass secondary, and I took a quick FG reading and it was at 1.014. Which isn’t too shabby. At first I thought about saving the yeast from this batch, but as I kept racking the yeast between jugs. I just couldn’t remove all the spice aroma that the yeast was giving off, so I ended up having to dump it down the sink.

It’s a good thing that I saved some of the Wyeast 1056 yeast right out of the smack pack, so that it could be deposited in my personal “yeast bank” in the back of my kitchen refrigerator.

I’ll give the beer another week or two in the secondary, or basically until I can free up some space in the kegerator, which currently has a 1/2 barrel of BL (which was free) and three corny kegs of homebrew (JRR’s stuff, IPA & dry stout.)

So with that hi ho, hi ho, its off to drink I go!