Beeeeer! Our First Brew

Andrew and I, with our new spacious home, decided it was time to start making our own home brews!  I received one starter kit for my birthday from my wonderful MIL and Andrew and I bought another on the recommendation of my fabulous friend Jake (a home brew expert). We tackled the Irish Red Ale yesterday and it was a blast.  Hopefully it is delicious.  We are still trying to decide on a name for it, so help us out with some suggestions!

Week 9: Coffee - Coffee rubbed grilled salmon tacos

 I really wanted to avoid baking something with coffee in it for this challenge. It seemed like the easy answer and let's face it, the more I bake, the more I eat it; I'm a sucker for sweets. We bought some awesome salmon at Costco a day or two before so it needed to be used. Thank goodness for Google.  I searched coffee and salmon and this great recipe came up!

First I created the rub for the salmon. It included freshly ground coffee with coriander and other spices(left) made liquidy with EVOO (right). 

Salmon from costo (left) with some pepper and parsley on it already.  I wiped most of that off and basted the salmon (right) on tinfoil so we could grill it .

While I worked on the salmon, Andrew prepared the brussel sprouts and brocolettes for grilling

I whipped up the very simple red cabbage, lime juice, and cilantro mixture and set it aside to marinate while I moved on to the guacamole.

It was entirely appropriate at this point in the cooking to crack open a bottle of wine.  This bottle was a gift from my Reddit Secret Santa in Montana (see my post about that here) and I've been saving it till I was able to properly savor it.  It was a fruity delicious red, so a big thanks to my SS!

The guac called for boiled tomatillos to be added to jalapeno, avocado, lime, and cilantro.  It was very basic but very delicious; reminiscent of the guac at Taco Lobo here in B'ham (which is uh-maze-ing!)

With the red cabbage slaw it really looked pretty.

Andrew perfectly grilled the fish, which is not too easy to do.  Well, it is easy to cook it, but it is equally easy to over cook it.  This salmon ended up flavorful and tender and not dry at all.  

Here is the finished plate.  I chose white corn tortillas but both Andrew and I felt the flavor was over powering to the somewhat subtle salmon coffee rub and we both ended up just eating the guts of the tacos by themselves with no tortilla.

SO much better.  Here is a perfectly composed bite:

Without the tortilla we could really taste the coffee in the rub and although we both felt a little wired afterward, it is most certainly something I would do again.

Week 9 - Cookies - Oatmeal Fudge Cookie Bars

First off, let me say these are delicious. Now that we have that out of the way, I confess that although I love love love making cookies (I go a little nuts around the holidays in particular), I just did not have the brain power or time to handle the whole cookie sheet and batches process, so although perhaps a cop out to do bars, I guarantee you'll see plenty of cookies from me in the future. Also, this sorta serves as a double BC/CC whammy since I used coffee in the fudge port of this creation. 

As many of you know I am working on finishing up my Masters degree and with only two weeks left this quarter it is crunch time. I had (ugh, still have) copious amounts of writing to do and spent most of my weekend hunkered down in my office at work getting homework done. I know this is a food blog, but just to give you a glimpse of my weekend, here is my qualitative theme analysis spread out on three desks.

Now, lets forget about that an get on with this week's challenge details! The nice thing about this recipe is that the oatmeal mixture you make serves as both the crust and the topping! It is a basic oatmeal, brown sugar, flour, melted butter mixture. Pretty straight forward.

I pressed 2/3 of the mixture into a foil lined 13x9 and threw that in the oven for 12 mins or so - till just brown and firm. This picture is a little foggy but shows the baked crust and the leftover mix ready to be used as topping.

After cooling the crust, I put the chocolate chips into a double boiler. I was a little short on the chocolate chips so I improvised and added some butterscotch to the mix.  

Once melted I whisked in two eggs until fully incorporated.

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While the chocolate and butter scotch melted, I threw together a little mix of dry goods including sugar, flour, and instant coffee. This gets added to the chocolate and egg mixture next.

The result is a thick brownie batter-like substance which I then spread over the cooled crust.

Sprinkle the remaining oatmeal mixture on top and pop it in the over!

Here it is fully cooked and cooling.

I cut them into small 2 or 3 bite bars (I learned my lesson with those White Trash Bars back in week 6) and, of course, dug in. They are really tasty and I like the addition of the slight butterscotch taste in the fudgey middle.  Pretty easy and quite good -these are getting added to the repertoire for sure. Now, Andrew and I just have to avoid eating them all before Wednesday - these are intended for a work potluck that day. Probably won't be too hard for Andrew since he's not a huge sweets person, but my will power will be another story. Although, the fact that I'll be at work doing homework till late every night means they have a hope of surviving till the potluck.

Week 8: Slow Cooking - Red Curry Chicken

Andrew and I use our crock pot regularly. Other than occasionally making about 10x what two people can possibly eat before getting sick of something, it works out so well and produces such great meals.  It has been a while since I did a curry and we had several veggies that were just dying to be made into a curry.  The result was pretty delish and made for a wonderful Sunday night relaxed dinner. (It has come to my attention after taking pictures of last week's crock pot chicken and dumplings that it is very hard to get an appetizing picture of food in a crock pot once it's been cooked, so sorry about that...)

Three chicken breasts on the bottom covered with a rough chopped onion and about 2 cups of potatoes went in first.

 Sweet potatoes and chick peas were next.

Topped off with peas and a curry sauce consisting of orange juice, red curry powder, garlic, cream, salt, and pepper were the last step before setting and forgetting.  The sauce did not cover all the veggies but did cover the meat in order to successfully cook the chicken without turning the veg to total mush. 

Once it was all cooked (about 6 hours on low since my crock pot runs pretty warm) I removed the chicken and veg into a bowl.  The chicken was tender and shredded/chuncked very easily with a fork.

In a pan I heated one can of coconut milk with about 2Tb of red curry paste. Once it had boiled and then simmered to thicken up a bit (5 minutes or so) I added the juice/sauce that was in the bottom of the crock pot plus about 1Tb corn starch to thicken it up even more. 

I put the chicken and veg back into the crock pot and poured the sauce over the top. 

We piled the delicious red curried chicken over rice and sliced up a bit of naan to complete the meal. 

We have plenty of left overs but it shouldn't be too painful to finish it all since I didn't make a bajillion cups of it, and it was so satisfyingly good!

Week 8: Candy Decorations - Reese's Pieces Piggies

While the Reese's Pieces aren't a huge part of the decorations, I guess I can kinda count marshmallows too!  Andrew bought me some cake pop pans so I decided to try those in addition to some cup cakes. It took a little modifying to make the decorations work for the cake pops.  It was not super easy to cut the pink marshmallows into tiny snouts.  They turned out pretty cute though!

The cake pop recipe calls for the addition of pudding so the cake mix ends up super thick.  

I piped the cake mix into the pans

 The top of the pan went on and the two rubber fasteners clipped on. 

They over flowed in the oven which looked pretty hilarious.

When they came out of the oven, popping off the overflow was easy and quite tasty :)

They came out with a little saturn ring around the edge of each but it was easily trimmed.

A little melted white chocolate helps the stick stay in.

Once the stick was firmed in, the decorating began!  I rolled each cake pop in the melted white chocolate then had to rapidly affix the decorations.  The eyes are Reese's Pieces, the snout and ears are pink marshmallows cut into shapes. 

Getting the snout right was the hardest since cutting marshmallow is about the worst thing ever.  It sticks the the scissors, it sticks to your hands, and the white chocolate coating dried so fast is was lame trying to get it all situated in time. A little pink gel finished off the snout.

 The cupcakes were significantly easier.   

It wasn't until the last cupcake that I realized I could fold the marshmallows to create the cutest ears!

Week 7 - Valentine's Day or Love - Nutella Ravioli

Double love themed posts this week!  Between Valentine's and my birthday there were more sweets in my belly than I care to admit.  I was looking for something I could make just a few of rather than end up with tons more sweets in the house. Nutella ravioli seemed like just the trick.  

Wonton wrappers are square which makes hearts pretty easy to cut out.  I have a heart shaped cookie cutter, but it is small and kinda sucks.  I tried eyeballing it and it wasn't working that well, so I cut out a template from a Bud Light Lime box (Yea, you heard me.  I love me some BL with L and I ain't ashamed).  The template worked perfectly.

I outlined one of each pair of hearts with water to prepare for the pasting.

The recipe I used said to pipe the Nutella out, but I didn't want to make that many, and dolloping was not difficult.

I was worried the two wonton wrappers wouldn't stick together, but whomp, they did! 

I made several more than I intended to eat mostly because I wasn't sure how the frying would go. 

Only one got a weird carbuncle in the frying process and the rest came out just perfect.

Dusting with powdered sugar can be difficult with out one of those fancy shakers devoted to powdered sugar but my little trick is to use my tea steeper! This one acts like a alligator mouth so I just chomp it in to my bag of sugar and then shake shake shake. 

Shake shake shake!!

So pretty. 

My dear friends Julianne and Cassidy bought me these martini glasses several years ago.  I don't use them nearly enough, but they are red and perfect for a Valentine's day dessert. Vanilla bean ice cream and two Nutella ravioli for each of us.

They were crispy and hazelnut-chocolaty. Not my all time favorite, but they were cute. They were easy to make and interesting.