CSA Week Two, a recent trip to City Beer, and a friend visiting from Boston inspired another little dinner party: Deviled eggs (perhaps the best variant I’ve made: hard boiled eggs, the yolks mashed with quite a bit of olive oil (and no mayo!) and a little mustard, salt, and pepper, sprinkled with smoked paprika, and topped with crispy-fried capers, a crowning touch inspired by this printer & piemaker post). ...
Quite a day at work, so treating myself to: steak ( Five Dot Ranch ribeye w/ salt and pepper, seared on each side in a cast iron skillet on the stovetop, then cooked in the oven in the same skillet at 500F to the hairy edge of medium-rare), padrone peppers fried in olive oil, kale and spinach (lightly steamed), some good tomatoes ( Happy Boy dry-farmed, sweet), and a special Russian River Damnation-Ale-aged-with-oak-chips. Yes. ...
I’ve probably made bagels 25-30 times at this point, and have reached a point where they turn out surprisingly well– not the best I’ve had in New York, but better then any bagel I can buy locally. Here’s my standard recipe, based on trying a few variants (I’ve even made two different recipes and done blind taste tests with friends). It’s very similar to the one in The New Best Recipe. ...
This is the first time I’ve made a dinner for friends with courses each paired with / inspired by a specific beer. Some of them worked well together, some didn’t, but it was a good evening overall. Appetizers: a slightly bitter, slightly floral beer (Upright Flora Rustica) with a collection of snacks: bread, cheese (Cowgirl Creamery Mt Tam), radishes, fresh-pickled fennel (an interesting concept), Boccalone orange-fennel salami and pepper salami, salted almonds, and three kinds of pickled carrots (carrots pickled for a week with dill, vinegar, and salt, carrot quick pickles (overnight with lots of vinegar, mustard seed, cloves), and some Happy Girl spicy carrot pickles I bought). ...