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). ...

A few restaurant highlights from a recent trip to Portland (which also included beer tasting, biking around, and seeing a few friends, but I promised myself this wouldn’t be a blog that’s mostly long-winded stories about my day with only a passing mention of food): The Waffle Window(at 36th and SE Hawthorne): A waffle with sauteed mushrooms, spinach, roasted peppers, fresh tomatoes, and “marinated chevre”. The chevre had the consistency of a dense whipped cream and was a nice cool counterpart to everything else. Plus, look at that pleasing collection of colors with the blue-rimmed plate! ...

This is great sliced thick and used to make a sandwich or luxurious toast (but with soup, I prefer whole wheat bread). I used to make this monthly but haven’t in many years– I just found the recipe card recently. White sandwich bread (two loaves, takes 4-5 hours total including cooling) Mix and let stand 5-10 minutes: 4 tsp dry yeast 1/4 cup warm water Meanwhile, mix: 1 cup warmed milk 1 cup warm water 2 Tbsp melted butter 2 Tbsp honey 1 Tbsp salt Combine the two mixtures. Gradually add: ...

Scones are one of the only things I’ve made where I’ve tried (and kept track of) many changes to a recipe over time and gradually evolved it. Here’s my current favorite version: Maple-Pecan Scones(makes 16) First, preheat the oven to 425 (don’t you hate recipes that don’t tell you to preheat the oven until late in the recipe?) You’ll need: 2 & 1/2 cups white flour 1 cup whole wheat flour (I’ve tried more– this is about as much as I can fit in) 1 & 1/2 cups chopped pecans (for even better scones, chop half of these pecans coarsely, and grind the other half into a powder, almost a “pecan flour”, in a food processor). 2 Tbsp baking powder 1 tsp salt 11(!) Tbsp cold butter 1 cup milk 1/3 cup maple syrup (plus a little extra to brush on) (real maple syrup, of course) A cast iron skillet The process: ...

Just a simple mayonnaise-free variant on potato salad I make from time to time: Wash and boil small russet potatoes with the skins on (20-30 minutes, until done). Toss some green beans into the water a minute before the potatoes are done (to blanche). Drain and rinse the potatoes and beans. Add plenty of mustard and olive oil, salt, pepper, fresh dill and chives.

So far I’ve seen about a third of the beers I had in Belgium for sale in San Francisco takeaway-bottle-style, either at City Beer Store or Healthy Spirits. Here’s a tasting I organized today with a few folks: La Chouffe -> Orval -> Gouden Carolus Classic -> Gulden Draak -> La Trappe Isad’or -> 3 Fonteinen Oude Geuze. The last two elicited strong opinions in both directions. My favorite of the six was definitely the Gouden Carolus Classic (tastes that remind me of caramel/burnt sugar and coffee, but not cloyingly sweet). ...

Here’s a map of the best breweries and beer cafes from the trip (as well as a few select restaurants). Perhaps some day I’ll post more details about a few specific ones.

[the original motivation for creating this blog– I had pages of notes from a trip and wanted to share them with a few friends] I recently spent a week in Belgium with three friends, visiting breweries and tasting beers. Without further fanfare or detail, here’s a list of everything I tasted and my favorites (somewhat subjective, I’m sure, depending what I was eating with them and so on): My very favorites: ...

(2011 intro) Just a place to jot down recipes, beer tasting notes, restaurants I liked, and so on. I could do that in a notebook, but why not online? The fact that other people can see it is incidental. (2020 edit) Ah, the early 2010s, when a blog felt like the easiest way to share notes and photos with friends… As I started using social media more, this site mostly petered out. That’s too bad, because I still look back at it to jog my memory on how I cooked something, or remember some specific beer I liked in Belgium long ago. ...