Monthly Archives: August 2013

It’s Can-demonium! The Wild Proliferation of Craft Beer in Cans

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Bottles and cans, just clap your hands, just clap your hay-ands.

I imagine when I first saw a can of Oskar Blues beer, my expression was akin to the one my mother made the first and last time I made her listen to Beck. Like, really–you thought I’d like this?

I first came across this can-only Colorado brewery at the 2006 Great American Beer Fest in Boston. Until then, my only contact with canned beer was that one Busch Light I sipped on unhappily for hours at a college party, the stress of being polite rendering me dead sober. Imagine my surprise when I tasted a sample of Ten Fidy, an imperial stout in Oskar Blues’ trademark can, and found it not just equal to the beer samples I’d had poured from bottles, but even better than many.

Now, eleven years after Oskar Blues launched the “Canned Beer Apocalypse,” the rest of the craft beer world is picking up the trend. Cans are IN. Why, you ask? There are numerous checks in the pro-can column; here are a few:

  • Cans are cheaper to make and ship. Aluminum is less expensive than glass and considerably lighter, resulting in lower shipping costs. Also, the cost of creating a label and a bottle separately can be costlier than using pre-printed aluminum. Lastly, glass can break in transit; aluminum doesn’t.
  • Cans keep beer better than glass. They don’t let light in, light being the prime culprit in skunky beer. (Beer in green bottles = bleh.) Also, these aren’t my father’s cans: nowadays aluminum cans are lined so the beer never actually touches it, which eliminates that metallic zing on your tongue. Continue reading →

It’s Raining Vegetables. Make a Casserole.

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vegetable casserole

All layered up and ready to go in the oven.

August is my favorite month for fresh, local veggies. It’s the time when all the fruit (as in seed-bearing) vegetables like tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant and chili peppers hit the table.  But with everything ripening at once, this time of year can leave both gardeners and cooks feeling like they’re drowning in vegetables. Farmer Dwight (of cabbage fame) has been sending me frequent updates about the massive tomato yields that are currently covering every flat surface in his kitchen. Garrison Keillor used to joke that it’s unwise to leave your car windows down at the end of summer lest you discover a squash in the driver’s seat when you come back, deposited by some overwhelmed gardener.

And this week I found myself trying to exhaust our ample CSA shipment before an impending trip out of town. How many vegetables can you fit in a single dish? To find out, I devised this casserole. It’s true that I had to break my own rule about turning on the oven in hot weather, but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do.

It’s Raining Vegetables Casserole

  • 2 eggplants, sliced
  • 6 plum (or other smallish variety) tomatoes, diced
  • Handful of fresh basil, chopped
  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 4 to 8 garlic cloves, sliced
  • 1 chili pepper, diced
  • 2 zucchini, cut into half moons
  • Salt and pepper
  • 1 teaspoon dried oregano
  • 6 oz. muenster or mozzarella cheese, sliced
  • Parmesan cheese to taste Continue reading →

Rabbit Poop, Warhol Chickens, and How to Crush an Avocado Stone with Your Bare Hands

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I had the good fortune this summer of working with the Learning Gardens program of the City Parks Foundation, a program that hires public high school students to learn about garden basics while maintaining community gardens.  One of our field trips took us the EarthMatters, a pretty fantastic composting facility on Governor’s Island.

Amongst the things learned:

1 – Avocado pits are hard as hell.  And yet…

…three weeks in a compost pile big enough to generate some real heat, and I could crush this pit in my palm with only a little more effort than it takes to squish a banana.  I find this absolutely, completely fantastic, though no one else to whom I have detailed this little miracle seems quite as excited as me. Continue reading →

Swiss Lentils with Dill and Poached Egg

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The writer Carlynn Houghton dropped this on me the other day.  Her name for the dish is Lentils with Dill & Yumminess.  At its core, it’s a simple lentil recipe taken from The Joy of Cooking, but it veers off the expected course in a kind of funky way.

To start: I’ve never considered adding dill to lentils.  When it comes to these legumes, I’ve always been firmly rooted in the gastronomic headspace of the Indian subcontinent and, thanks to Shannon’s creation of a vegetarian Cincinnati Chili, the American Midwest.  I’ve also never considered adding an egg, let alone a poached egg, which is what Carlynn does in this recipe and is what adds the “Swiss” prefix.

I’m fairly “ehh” on poached eggs, but I think they’re fantastic for this recipe.  I usually think of the unexpected egg as something fairly American, as if it primarily takes the form of a hamburger topping that crowns bacon, fried onions, mushrooms, ketchup, mayo, and cheddar cheese.  The fact that the unexpected egg can come at me out of left field from some place as sensible and subdued as Switzerland makes me happy.  It reminds me not to condescend.

Carlynn wrote: My cousin in Switzerland poached an egg and put it on top. This made a delicious lunch with cheese and bread on a table overlooking Lake Geneva and the French Alps. Sadly, my photos are from NYC.

Here are the goods…

Ingredients:

1/3 C. olive oil
1 large onion, minced
1 1/2 C. lentils
5 C. vegetable stock
salt and pepper
1/3 C. finely chopped fresh dill
1 egg

Sauté the onion in the olive oil until golden brown. Add the lentils and stir to coat in oil. Add vegetable stock and bring to a boil. Simmer 60-90 minutes. Add more boiling water if the pot starts to dry out. Poach an egg.  When lentils are tender, season to taste. Remove from heat and stir in the dill.  Gently place egg on top.

I’ll Have the Usual

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sam

I'm still a little in love with Sam Malone.

I was still in the single digits for most of the illustrious run of Cheers on television, too young, really, to understand much about alcohol or why bars might be a good place to hang out. But even then, I loved that the characters could belly up to the bar and Sam or Woody would just slide a beer over to them while conversing about something entirely unrelated. I was a painfully shy child, and I hated having to talk to strangers (i.e. waiters) about what I felt like eating. A place where everyone knew your name and knew what you wanted before you even had to ask? It sounded heavenly to me.

Ever since, I’ve held in high esteem the archetype of the regular, but I’ve had a hard time putting on that mantle. My first attempt was during my weeklong summer sojourns at my grandparents’ house when I  would accompany my grandfather to buy his morning paper. Every day, he stopped at a little joint called Rollin’s on the way home, and they always had a cup of coffee poured for him before he was fully in the door. I fancied that after enough times, I could just saunter in, spread my copy of Harriet the Spy on the counter and be served my grape juice straight up.  But my grandfather was always too solicitous, worried that I was bored, and would nervously run down a list of items I could order in place of or in addition to my regular order. Geez, Grandpa, pizza at ten in the morning? You’re ruining our style here.

broadway gourmet

My usual lunch date. (photo courtesy of the sushi fruit hating Devin)

Even as I got older and outgrew my deathly fear of waitstaff, the stars just never aligned correctly for me to be a regular. Big cities, where I’ve lived most of my adult life, are tough for the regulars, because there are just too many restaurants with too many choices to commit wholeheartedly to the lifestyle of “I’ll have the usual.” Variety is what I love most about the New York dining scene, but sometimes you want to go…well, you know.

And then, just as I was beginning to doubt my potential as regular material, an avocado and cheddar sandwich came and tapped me on the shoulder. It’s a beautiful mess of cheese and sprouts and cucumber and mayo on multigrain bread. We met at the Broadway Gourmet Deli, just downstairs from where I work, and we rendezvous at least once a week. Mind you, it isn’t always an easy relationship. Continue reading →

Beer for the Big Screen

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Can someone get this man a towel?

When I was 25 my roommate and I concocted an elaborate drinking game to play while watching John Cusack’s High Fidelity. Every time a top five list was created: drink; every time Rob got rained on: drink; and most importantly, every time Rob unearthed some greater life truth: drink.

By the end of the movie we both had empty wine bottles in our hands and felt wise in a way you only can when you’re drunk, 25, and just watched a John Cusack movie with your best friend. Turns out we may have been a little over-ambitious in our rules, like, maybe Rob’s line about the sad cottony reality behind women’s choice of day-to-day undergarments shouldn’t have counted as a greater life truth. If I were to do this all over again, I’d definitely do things differently. First, I would have beer, instead.

Llalan’s top five movie/beer combinations:

And don't try to tell me this isn't horror: it's effing scary!

1. Horror (The Shining)
My gut reaction with this is stout, and everyone knows you must go with your gut reactions in horror movies; if you over think it or are black, you’re dead. Drinking a stout gives you something to hold on to, something heavy, solid, both a companion and something that could be easily used as a weapon. For The Shining, I’d go with a Russian Imperial like North Coast Brewing’s Old Rasputin, which’ll have you spinning spells by scene in the hedgerow maze. Continue reading →

Soda Internacional

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I’m not really a junk food guy, but I am a weird food guy.  And by weird I don’t just mean bizarre (like that pregnant mud eel that Shannon made me eat at a Cambodian “air force” base) but also novel, cute, odd, etc.  Maybe my first exposure to weird junk food was through my old man, who still to this day will bi-annually rock a Moon Pie.  Moon Pies, in case you are unaware, are two pieces of cardboard stuffed with low-grade putty and shellacked in plastic.  Now, even though I know these taste like wood and petroleum products, I inevitably eat one if it’s presented to me sufficiently long after my last taste.  The fact that these things are still actually produced and actually purchased for consumption is just too nonsensical for me to ignore.

It's Country Club brand, so I knew it would be refined.

Less nonsensical but equally novel and compelling are what I am going to label here as Hispanic sodas. Jarrito is one brand you may have seen.  Its different flavors are different Lifesaver colors.  New York has a fantastic collections of these sodas, and a specimen I’d never seen before, one from the Dominican Republic, caught my eye the other say.

That’s right, that’s meringue flavored soda.  And the spokescharacter, is that a drop of soda giving the thumbs-up within a different drop of soda?  I’m pretty sure it is.  How am I going to say no to that?

So I pony’d up two-twenty-five (?!) for this bottle of Country Club and twisted off the top.

Sweet Jesus. 

It tasted like a liquid Dum Dum lollipop, which is far, far less tasty than it sounds.  The meringue flavor itself was sort of a mutant cream soda, recognizable but overgrown to Godzilla proportions.  It did not taste like meringue.  It almost didn’t take like sugar.  It tasted like “sweet” turned up to eleven.  Perhaps that’s because, I noticed after my teeth stopped quivering in my gums, the bottle had 47 grams of sugar.  That’s eight more than Coke.  And that was more or less my soda intake for the remainder of 2013.

The TLT: Summer Between Two Slices of Bread

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The TLTBoy, do people love their bacon. Rarely have I come across a food that inspires such raw passion in people. Just this week, while a co-worker, Devin, and I were discussing the Powerball jackpot having reached astronomical sums, he said that if he won, he would throw me a cool couple million if I, a longtime vegetarian, would eat an entire pig. I’m not sure if this was meant to be some kind of gladiatorial entertainment or if he merely wanted to share his love of pork with the world. Devin did not win Powerball, so I guess we will never find out.

But that does not mean that I am immune to bacon’s charms. I have very happy memories of childhood summer dinners that consisted entirely of big BLTs and fresh ears of boiled sweet corn. To me, bacon is the taste of summer, and a curious package that my mom sent me while I was living in Cambodia helped me to recreate that taste in vegetarian form. Along with other comforts of home, like American magazines, was a shaker of something called Bacon Salt, completely vegetarian but very bacon-y. Bribing the postman to get that package out of hock might have been some of the best money I ever spent. I sliced some tofu from the market very thinly, sprinkled it with bacon salt, popped it in the oven, and boom…it was like I was back in Ohio. The Tofu, Lettuce and Tomato sandwich was born.

Over the years I have perfected the recipe, and I think it’s much tastier than the substitute bacon that you can buy at the grocery store. I will share it below for any bacon-loving vegetarians or anyone who is craving something a little lighter than pork on a hot summer evening. Make one soon while the sweet corn is plentiful and the tomatoes are at their juiciest.

Tofu Bacon Continue reading →

Mysteries of the Aloe Vera

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aloe plant

The beast in its lair

Sometime last year, our next door neighbor gave us a nice, unassuming-looking aloe plant, which took its place among the potted plants in our bedroom. Jason happens to be very good with plants, but the voracity with which this guy grew was surprising, almost alarming in a “Feed me, Seymour!” kind of way. It pushed against other plants, snaking its way under their pots like it was some crazy octopus-shaped professional wrestler trying to trip its opponents with a showy move. Soon, I was hovering over all of our guests, trying to foist pieces of the plant on them for any touch of sunburn, any tiny insect bite.

But still, the thing grew. Noticing the Technicolor aloe beverages in supermarkets, I began to think, “Why not?” and started to poke around on the Internet to find out more about drinking aloe. What I found was a raging aloe controversy, with some people saying that it cures everything from diabetes to bed sores and other people saying that it causes cancer in mice. The truth, of course, probably lies somewhere in between. As best as I can discern, the more controversial component of aloe is the yellowish latex part, which is right under the skin of the plant and, in addition to possibly blocking your intake of potassium, is apparently a powerful laxative. Leaving bodily harm aside, that sounds somewhat unpleasant.

But the aloe gel that is in the center of the leaves sounded fairly innocuous and possibly even healthy. And what the heck? Maybe it would make me feel like a million bucks. So I decided to give it a go last night. Continue reading →

Jay’s Summer Squash Shredder Sandwich

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Some people love summer squash.

I am not one of those people.

Zucchini, pattypan, straight-up yellow, all of these guys bore me a little.  They’re bland.  And for whatever reason, I have a hard time coming up with ways to sex them up like I can, for example,  for summer greens.

But Windfall Farms, our CSA farm, dropped some pattypans on us, and I concocted a sandwich that turned out really, really well.  This made me feel good not just because I made good use of the pattypans, but because pattypans are so cute, odd outliers in a world of goose-shaped and phallic cousins, and I like outliers.

Jay’s Summer Squash Shredder Sandwich (serves two)

Ingredients:

1 large of 2 small summer squash
strong blue cheese
a small handful of walnuts
arugula
basil
thick sourdough bread or equivalent
4 or 5 cloves of garlic
half a lemon
salt & pepper

Step One:  Grate (that’s right, grate) your squash on a cheese grater.  In a pan, fry the crushed garlic in a dab of butter and tablespoon of olive oil on low heat.  After four or five minutes, toss in shredded squash.  After another four or 5 minutes, add the juice of half the lemon, salt, and lots of pepper.  Remove from heat. Continue reading →