Book: Cooking with Booze

December 20th, 2007

Ah, a book after my own heart: Cooking with Booze. We all know how to cook with wine by now, and thankfully Cooking with Booze focuses more energy on spirits, beer, and hard cider. Even better, whiskey gets the biggest section of all.

The recipes in Cooking with Booze lean towards traditional English fare, with a few adventurous side trips abroad. Some recipes that piqued my interest were Potato Salad with Beer Dressing, Whisky Pancakes, Brandy-baked Brie, and Roast Pork with Apple Stuffing and Cider Sauce.

You can buy the book (obligatory Amazon.com link), or you can view it in it’s entirety online, with the occasional video.

• Posted by Nathan in Beer, Links, Misc, Spirits, Wine
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NY Times 101 Simple Appetizers, and a Brief Treatise on Olives

December 19th, 2007

The New York Times has posted a great list of 101 Simple Appetizers that can be prepared in under 20 minutes for you holiday parties.

Quite a few of the recipes call for olives — which you should never, ever buy at the grocery store, unless your store has a particularly good olive bar and you’re short on time. Buying canned or jarred olives at the grocery store is somewhere below putting your money into a little pile and burning it for warmth on the scale of fiscal sanity. Any moderately-sized community will have at least one Greek or Mediterranean specialty store, and any respectable Greek or Mediterranean store will sell gallon jars of good-quality olives for under $20. Compare that to the $8 you’ll spend on a 8 or 12 oz jar at the grocery store. Do the math — I’ll wait. Mmmhmm….convinced?

• Posted by Nathan in Links, Tips
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No Knead Bread, Revisited

December 6th, 2007

As one of the billions of people now enjoying New York Times’ (in)famous No Knead Bread on a semi-regular basis, Cook’s Illustrated’s recent revisions piqued my interest. If you don’t have a subscription to Cook’s Illustrated, you can get a rundown of the changes here.

No Knead Bread, photo licensed under CC courtesy of Taryn Domingos.

Essentially, Cook’s Illustrated addresses the major issues people were having — namely, the dough falling during transfer to the pan, and lack of flavor. Additional salt seems to help address the latter, but the article suggests substituting small amounts of vinegar and beer into your liquid to give the bread some additional complexity.

They also suggest several small procedural changes, including 15 seconds of kneading. Heresy, I know.

• Posted by Nathan in Beer, Misc, Tips
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