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Summer Fizz
With the warm weather thoughts are turning to cooling summer drinks. So far TB has brewed some Apple with a mild fizz – the first batch of which was pleasant and the second which had fizz but seemed to have gone off. A brew of traditional ginger beer and a more exploratory brew of chicory root are also in production. You can blame the latter on Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall whose brewing exploits on his most recent River Cottage series have proved inspirational. As we had some very large chicory roots it seemed like a good idea to try a brew of them (on the left of the photo). The first taste prior to fermentation seems more promising than scary. However we will have to wait and see what the final outcome is as the brew is still ticking over.
At a friend’s place yesterday for a BBQ dinner we tried her ginger beer. Made with a traditional ginger beer plant, she had first thought that it hadn’t worked as no fizz seemed to develop. However a check two weeks later revealed some activity. In all it turned out to be a very pleasant ‘dry’ drink. Tonight we tried our first taste of Warrigal Greens or Tetragon (Tetragonia tetragonoides) as it is called in our recipe book Tukka: Real Australian Food, by Jean-Paul Bruneau (Angus & Robertson, 1996). This is one of only two native bush tucker foods we grow at our place, the other being Old Man Saltbush (Atriplex nummularia). I had nursed three very small Warrigal Green seedlings through the winter, tucked in a pot and placed under my garden seat to avoid the worst of the frost. I succeeded until I left them out one early spring evening when we had a frost. Two succumbed and one survived. I transplanted the last seedling into one of the garden beds in late October and since then it has galloped away. In fact it grew so rapidly that it started to over-shadow the edamame planted next to it. So we cut the plant back and transferred the Warrigal Greens to a space where it could spread out a bit more. Bruneau recounts that Warrigal Greens wasn’t a food that was used much by Aboriginal people, possibly because of the high salt content of the leaves. When Captain Cook visited New Zealand in 1769 the leaves were collected and eaten. Subsequently Banks and Solander recognised the same plant in Sting-rays Harbour (later called Botany Bay). I made a side dish of Creamed Tetragon. You give the leaves a quick blanch in boiling water. Fry off some onions and garlic (but do not brown them) in butter and pepper, add the leaves cook for two minutes then add sour cream and cook another two minutes. It made a tasty side dish with our sausages, however the sour cream somewhat overwhelmed the whole dish so next time I might leave it out. Bruneau describes the taste as more green bean than spinach but I couldn’t form an opinion from that dish. It certainly tasted good enough for me to keep on with some of the other recipes he provides including a Tetragon pesto and a macadamia ,bunya nut and Tetragon pesto. Tomato updateI was pleased to see that both the Mortgage Lifter and the Roma are now bearing fruit. We gave one of our friends some Siberian seedlings and they are also in fruit, just out in the normal garden bed. Don’t forget to give your tomatoes a side dressing of potash to encourage flowering. Lime should have been added to your bed as part of the treatment to combat blossom end rot. Otherwise add some calcium. Leslie Land suggests crushing up your egg shells and adding them to the soil. This is a nice idea, but unless you go through a lot more eggs than we do in a week your tomatoes will be dead and gone before you have enough for several plants.
The Perfect Beer : Lessley Anderson gives Supplication ale the nod - CHOW
via chow.com
From Chow.com? I gotta try this beer, yo!
How to Brew
There are many good books on homebrewing currently available, so why did I write one you ask? The answer is: a matter of perspective. When I began learning how to brew my own beer several years ago, I read every book I could find; books often published 15 years apart. It was evident to me that the state of the art had matured a bit. Where one book would recommend using baking yeast and covering the fermenting beer with a towel, a later book would insist on brewing yeast and perhaps an airlock. So, I felt that another point of view, laying out the hows and whys of the brewing processes, might help more new brewers get a better start.
via howtobrew.com
You can enjoy the great book on home-brewing online, the first edition, on the site of the author, John Palmer.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0937381888/prokhorenkous-20
At the same time, I've downloaded the latest, third edition, into my Kindle and going to spend a few hours tomorrow morning with this book, getting into insights of beer brewing.
Have fun!
I've consumed the bacon beer...
This beer is smoky/ bacon gusto,you betcha/ This beer is my boy.
That's the first bacon haiku I've written in months. It comes in honor of Allagash Burnham Road, a beer I drank last night. It is the bacon beer. Best pared with a sofa, a bowl of onion dip and a Statham film.
