(late January 2023)
{Watch the prelude!}
My Frau and I started the new year on the right note – with bowls of Hoppin’ John.
With good luck guaranteed for 2023, I think we spent the day lounging around with the cats.
A few nights later I put the Frau in the car and we went to check out the holiday lights down at Olin Park before they were taken down. Various groups assemble light displays every Christmas season and it’s fun to creep through the park with the car’s lights off and see what folks came up with.
This might have been for the Dane County Humane Society but I cannot recall.
I have no recollection who put up the dinosaur family, including baby dino in a stroller. They look all friendly in lights but probably would have us for dinner, if we were to travel back in time and meet them.
After we left Olin Park, I drove us out to the far east side of town. I had heard tell of a house whose owner goes crazy with the Christmas lights. At first, I got a bit lost in a newish subdivided development. But, after taking a turn at one point, I saw a bright light in the distance and it was just like the Star of Bethlehem...but different. Still, I knew we had to be close. And indeed we were.
When we got to the house, we found that we were not alone as there were a couple of cars parked across the street when we pulled up so we just got in line.
In addition to the lights everywhere, there was a screen on top of the garage and one in the front yard. They displayed animation as the lights flickered and changed color to the music on a particular FM radio station.
I shudder to think about this guy’s electric bill.
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Last entry I noted that I was given enough rhubarb to feed an army back in the fall and now had a freezer full of the stuff. What to do?
If you just do a simple search for rhubarb recipes, you’re gonna get crisps and pies and all manner of sweets. So I went searching for savory dishes and here’s what I came up with.
This is rhubarb beef. I rather liked it. The rhubarb and a good amount of lemon juice added some tanginess but it was not mouth-puckeringly tart. The recipe involved saffron and I hadn’t cooked with it in a long time so that was a treat.
Funnily enough, I couldn’t find our aging jar of saffron when prepping this dish and so I went out and bought a new one. After using it all up, the old jar promptly reappeared. Of course it did.
I also found a recipe for pork chops with a rhubarb-cherry sauce which sounded intriguing so I made them.
I couldn’t find plain dried cherries – they all had some sugar on them – so I adjusted the amount of added sugar on the fly hoping to keep the sauce from becoming cloying.
I really liked this recipe. The cherries and rhubarb made a good combination with balsamic vinegar, onion, and a pinch of nutmeg rounding things out. There was a bit of sweet and a bit of tart which went well together and with some saltiness and maybe even some umami.
I took a break from rhubarb after making a big dent in my frozen supply. One day I inexplicably found myself with a hankering for fried chicken. And so I threw some breading together and fried some up.
It really hit the spot. I don’t fry chicken often so I think absence makes the taste buds grow fonder. While deep fried foods are not the healthiest of options, I think the hassle of having to dispose of the leftover oil is really why I avoid deep frying most of the time.
The Frau has been no slouch on the cooking front either. One day I came home from work to find that she had had a craving for fried potatoes and had gone Spanish. There were leftover patatas bravas in the refrigerator.
It’s a simple dish that means “brave potatoes” because you dip them in a spicy red sauce made from, amongst other things, tomatoes, onion, garlic, lots of paprika, and hot pepper. The white sauce was made of mayo, sour cream, lemon juice, and lots of garlic. It was all quite delicious.
We must have had a surplus of white potatoes because, not long after the Spanish potatoes, she also roasted some chicken along with some thinly sliced spuds.
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Back in the middle of the month, a friend of mine invited me over to his house to cook another food: beer!
He is the beer chemist guy and also the R&D brewer at a Madison brewery. We hadn’t seen one another in a while so he had me come over to visit and help brew a batch of red mole table beer.
My understanding of table beer is simply that it's a very low alcohol beer. A beer that you can serve to everyone at your table with a meal, even people younger than the legal drinking age in your municipality. I think I read somewhere at some point that they were around 1% A.B.V. or less, generally speaking. My impression is that, today in the United States, table beer refers to beer that is 3%-4% A.B.V. and is not served to children at the dinner table, except in Wisconsin, perhaps.
My friend had things mostly set up when I arrived. Brew kettle was out on the deck.
The mole flavor was to be provided by a trio of ingredients. First, we had some roasted cocoa bits.
Then there were some chilies that had been smoked by his brother-in-law and finely ground.
And, lastly, some cinnamon. (Not shown.)
I lugged a big, orange thermos full of hot water outside and placed it next to the other big, orange thermos which would be our sparging vessel or whatever brewers call it.
My task (other than to follow my friend's words as if they were the words of God) was to sparge, that is, take the water and pour it over the grains where it would grab all of the wonderful beery flavors and sugars before draining into the brew kettle.
Once in the brew kettle, it boils. And, after a spell, I added 5 grams of hops.
Along the way, various measurements were taken and recorded. Here, the brewmaster is measuring the sugar content of our proto-beer with a hydrometer.
After the wort cooked some more, we added the mole ingredients and stirred.
We used gravity to transfer the wort from the cooker to the fermentation tank by way of a fancy cooling device which required that a garden hose be run through the house from the spigot out front. Everyone hoped it didn’t spring a leak, except for the dog who secretly hoped it would so he could have fun in the den trying to drink from a ruptured hose spraying water all over the walls, furniture, and record player.
Before tucking the wort away for a few weeks to ferment, we tasted a sample.
Wort does not taste very good and I am unsure why brewers sample it. I suppose they are ever on the hunt for off flavors and/or contamination. Here it could also be justified on the grounds of wanting to know how much chili heat it had. There is surely also a ceremonial element too of bidding farewell to something that will reemerge in a few weeks fully matured.
We tucked it away in the fermenting cooler where it would sit as the yeast ate the sugars and pooped out alcohol while the marriage of mole flavors was consummated. It should be ready around St. Valentine’s Day.
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Bonus photo. Here’s Grabby being very naughty and eyeing up the Frau's dinner.
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