Swai: Grilled confusion fish

It was Friday, which meant the Hispanic grocery on Wells, Marketon, was having its one day sale. I looked at the ad and lo and behold, Swai was on sale. However, I had no idea what Swai is so I looked the confusion fish up.

The Iridescent shark (it’s not a shark) is actually a type of catfish (shark catfish, Wikipedia says.) It is, however, packaged as “swai.” Three names: iridescent shark, swai, and catfish. It’s a native to fresh water in southeast Asia.

Speaking of, which, one of its relatives, the Wels Catfish, is reported to jump out and eat pigeons. If only we had them in our fountains.

At $1.99/lb, I figured they must taste decent enough and if they’re anything like their North American cousins, the flesh should stand the test of the grill. So, I bought two packages, totaling 7.89 pounds. The fillets I bought were huge, the length of a small cookie sheet. I poured lemon juice on it, threw on some lemon pepper, pepper and garlic salt and let it sit for half an hour before throwing it on the grill.

The plain recipe is: here.

(more…)

Ruminating on travels long past

I’ve just finished reading Abbey’s Road by the namesake, Edward Abbey. The first half is travelogue, a travelogue done much better, I think, than the Scot Rory Stewart.

The second half is polemics and reflections. Abbey reflects on his time working for the National Park Service and gives insight to what became the narrative for his novel, Black Sun, a book well worth reading.

The travelogue, his journeys in Australia and elsewhere, can be beautiful. The contrast Abbey sees in his Australian counterparts is fascinating: seemingly an entire continent that is much like the American west.

Much of the latter half of the book (none of the articles are dated, which is a shame, considering how he applies his present at the time of writing to the narrative — which wife he was with, or wasn’t, how old he was at the time) was written while he worked as a fire look out. Then the raunchy, the sex-crazed Abbey comes out, possibly as a younger man. No, that’s not true. Abbey held true to his love of women throughout his life. It appears is writing about the constant obsession is more apparent when he was working as a lonely fire lookout.

(more…)

Taco Dog

Ostensibly, this is a blog about more than just food. About life! The food part of this post is about the taco dog: A hot dog with avocado, Tapatio and . . . Why not some cilantro? Honestly, I’ve yet to hear an argument against it. The other part is about my quest to read two books every three days, adjusted for length, or 200 pages a day.

I was off to a good start: I was really into Stefan Zweig‘s “Beware of Pity.” A good injection of drama into my otherwise ho-hum life. (I find there to be a very strong argument for soap operas, myself being a former subscriber to “Sturm der Liebe.”) It was like Downtown Abbey, with more Hamlet awkwardness and soliloquies thrown in. I’m currently being slowed by the often prose-poem of “The Hamlet” by Faulkner. But more on that later.

I had cilantro in the refrigerator. So I said, why not put some cilantro on it! Well, I exlaimed it. Didn't really say it. Then, I realized I had those pickles. Those free pickles which therefore taste better.

I had cilantro in the refrigerator. So I said, why not put some cilantro on it! Well, I exclaimed it. Didn’t really say it. Then, I realized I had those pickles. Those free pickles which therefore taste better.

On to food, before I return to books! I bought a whole bunch of hot dogs, while they were on sale, for a party I was having. I’ve been slowly using the ones that remain to eke out a frugal existence. When I still had a can of sauerkraut, I used it. Now, I have a few extra avocados (five for a dollar) and the two can go together. Mix in some Tapatio hot sauce and some secret sauce (as used on fish tacos.) Some mustard and a dab of ketchup and there. A quick, frugal meal.

I started out by warming up a bun and cooking up a hot dog, either on the grill or in the pan. Then, I cut up half an avocado. Dog in the bun, mustard and secret sauce on top or in the bun, avocado on top, followed by the Tapatio.

While you’re at it, look and see if you have any cilantro and if you find some, why not put some cilantro on it?

Quick. Easy. Delicious.

It’s west meets west meets surprise cilantro!

(more…)

The Experimental Indian

This article was originally posted on June 10, 2013 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

Bryce has wanted an IPA for a long time and we have tried on multiple occasions. On these other occasions we have failed and created pale ales that were not of the India stature. This last time we tried, though, we knocked it out of the park. Well, not really. It’s really bitter though.

Leo and I went to the brew store at some point before April 6 (when we brewed it) and he picked out the ingredients, including many hops. We had an uneventful brew day — nothing in particular went wrong. We had even more hops lined up, sitting in a container in my refrigerator, but did not use them this time around. I’m not sure exactly what the hops are anymore: they were the hop pellets of brews past that kept on spilling out, the tops of their baggies cut away along with their identities.

I’ve no doubt they’ll begin to haunt me and my dreams.

We used the London ESB ale yeast, which seemed to be very tolerant.

One can see where the foam was at the top of the mug before settling down into a manageable head.

We let it sit, with much hop sediment, for over a month (closer to two months) before we kegged it. We first secondaried it and then finally kegged it. The beer is still cloudy, unlike the ciders which always seem to clear irregardless.

As it has aged in the keg, it has begun to foam more and more than it did when it was first put in, becoming harder to pour and the head is retained for one to five minutes before settling down.

On its head, there is a large amount of bitterness and underneath is a strong pale ale pedigree. The aroma is there, although it could be more, as could the hops taste itself. But, it is damn bitter. If you like bitter.

One of the problems I have found as a homebrewer is once one (Bryce) walked down the path of IPAs, his pallet seemed to be perpetually cleansed of the ability to taste any beer that was not heavily hopped. Alas, alas.

INGREDIENTS

1 lb. Caramel 60 L
1 lb Honey malt
6.6 lb light LME (liquid malt extract)
3 oz Northern Brewer
2 oz Nugget
2 oz Cascade
1 oz Czech Spaz

HOP SCHEDULE

60 minutes
3 oz Northern Brewer
2 oz Nugget

30 minutes
2 oz Cascade
2 oz Czech Spaz

 

Poor man’s lox: smoked sardines

I love fish, which seems to be a shame considering I was born and raised in the inland desert. While smoked salmon was a treat growing up, it has always been an unaffordable luxury in my adult life. Fortunately, there are many alternatives, including one of my favorite fish: the sardine.

Two of the three sardines in a can sit on English muffin halves, straight from the can.

Two of the three sardines in a can sit on English muffin halves, straight from the can.

Lightly smoked canned sardines may not have the exact taste, or consistency, that smoked salmon does. They certainly do not have the nice presentation it does. However, they are cheap (around a dollar a can for three sardines) and make for sustainable and delicious cheap eats.

 In this case, I have been using English muffins as the base, although bagels or bread would certainly work as well. That and some cream cheese. Two adjuncts, capers and red chopped red onions, as seen in cream cheese and lox preparations, make good companions. Sometimes I like them, sometimes I like it plain.

That’s all there is to it. Kippered herring is also a good choice, as are other smoked canned fish.

Three sardines come in a can but usually one sardine is sufficient to cover an English muffin so I save the third for the next day.

The sardines' supple flesh has been spread over the muffins.

The sardines’ supple flesh have been spread over the muffins.

(Yellow) Curry fried rice

Since I’ve been unfortunately bereft of cash, I’ve moved much of my diet over to the produce that’s on sale for the week and brown rice. Brown jasmine rice, to be exact. The other part of my diet is using up whatever I have in the refrigerator. Recently it has been small dill pickles.

Eating so much rice quickly (soon I will move on the quinoa and the bulgur wheat I have stored) means I have to mix up what I’m doing with the rice. Early in the month, I made a conglomeration of black beans (I had cooked in the slower cooker,) chorizo and brown rice with ample amounts of onions, (home-made) salsa and Taptio (not home made.)

Curry rice with a wee bit of cilantro on top.

Curry rice with a wee bit of cilantro on top.

I then moved on to the stir-fry route with a failed General Tso’s chicken, made with broccoli. The sauce (made with apricot preserves) did not come out at all. (The point of the dish, to me, is the sauce, not the meat.) I considered it a failure. That left me with extra rice and no eggs. I didn’t want to just fry the rice — no eggs. Instead, I dug through the quickly-emptying refrigerator for my big container of yellow curry paste. Two pounds, to be exact, of spicy goodness. I poured some oil into the cast-iron skillet, put the curry in, let it disintegrate some and then threw in the rice.

Curry paste

Curry paste!

Had I other vegetables, or had I remembered the just-bought sack of onions sitting with the potatoes, I would have thrown them in. Good contenders range from potatoes to eggplant to broccoli and sprouts, peppers and tomatoes and squash. I then made a hole in the center of the rice, cracked for eggs, cooked and mixed them into the rice. I cut up cilantro I had bought for the purpose and threw it in, leaving a little extra to be used as a un-cooked garnish.

It serves its purpose. Now only, if I had vegetables left.

If you’re looking for a little extra somethin’-somethin’, then consider making some dill-heavy tzatziki to go with the curried rice.

The Voltron Ale

This article was originally posted on March 29, 2013 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

Leo, Bryce and I are products of the late 80s and early 90s. When we were born has informed both our choices in diction and our nomenclature decisions, aka, references. The banality of evil is certainly, to a degree and extent, borne out of the History Channel of our childhood’s and its devotion to World War II. Certainly, the time I spent in Germany and my obsession with the German language and culture has influenced both our brewing and our terms, too.

Leo has said the three of us make up, through our various quirks and proclivities, interests and designs, gesticulations and interests, a single 1950s wife.

What this has to do with beer should certainly be explained: Leo wanted to make a domestic (American) golden ale. Not even a pale ale with its higher alcohol content, but rather, a domestic American beer. He made up the recipe extemporaneously at our local homebrew store. The beer was supposed to be a domestic. Together, we three brewing brothers, make up . . . domesticity itself. I’ve been told countless times I’d make a very good wife to some man some day, because of my love of cooking, of hosting, child-rearing, etc. Not to say I disagree. I don’t doubt I’d make a great housewife. I even love a good soap opera, albeit, in German, the language of true Liebe.

When it came to brewing Voltron, the three of us combined into . . .

We wrote the ingredients down and the process was the same as always, except we did not write the yeast down. We’ve assumed, through elimination and cross reference with the one-gallon cider batches fermenting in my closet, that the yeast was the Burton Ale Yeast from White Labs but we’re not sure. Maybe it’s the London Ale Yeast.

Regardless of which yeast it is, the beer itself (a truly beautiful amber color) has been infected. It’s not a bad infection, it’s a pleasant, sour infection but an infection none-the-less.

The beer is carbonated and kegged and has been quite a hit so far, although, it seems everything in the keg that doesn’t taste terrible is a hit.

The plan is to culture whatever we managed to create and both remake that recipe and also make something new. It’s a good infection, one we can harness into a whole new yeast strain and possibly bacteria strain through washing and culturing. Next up for that combination, we’re thinking, is something with fruit.
This is for a five-gallon batch.

Ingredients:
1 lb caramel 60L
1/2 lb Caramunich
1/2 lb flaked barely

6.6 lbs light liquid malt extract

Hops:
1 oz Fuggles
1 oz Cascade

There you have it. The Voltron. (We’re not sure what the hops schedule is so . . . Make it up.)

The Voltron in low light

The Voltron in low light.

 

An Experiment in Cider Yeasts

This article was originally posted on March 25, 2013 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

One of our local homebrew stores was having a sale on yeasts a month, or maybe longer, ago. The yeasts were about to go out of date so they were marked down and low and behold, they were not many common yeasts. In fact, they were all White Labs vials, four of them to be exact. So, I figured if we didn’t use them immediately for beers, we could also use them in a ciders before they went and and see what happened and then wash the yeast, and reuse it when we’re ready to make X, Y or Z with them.

Our recipe is as follows:

  • 4-ish gallons of Great Value Apple Juice
  • 730 grams of corn sugar (2 lbs per 5 gallons, our normal Apfelwein ratio)
  • Yeast!

The yeasts are:

  • White Labs Berliner Weisse, WLP630
  • White Labs Saison II, WLP566
  • White Labs Belgian Wit, WLP400
  • White Labs English Cider Yeast, WLP775
  • White Labs Belgian Style Yeast Blend, WLP575

I also had a White Labs English Cider Yeast that had been sitting in my refrigerator for even longer but was still well within date.

As for the making itself: I boil the corn sugar with a enough water for 5 minutes, stirring until its dissolved, then chuck it into the cider. Sanitation, sanitation, sanitation.

I took industrial bleach and soaked all of the buckets, which had been sitting our for quite some time, and then soaked an additional bucket, which had somehow had its insides covered in algae  Industrial bleach kills all. We washed them out a bunch of times, put iodophor water in and off to the races we went. First, though, we had to drill holes for bucket lids and sanitize them, as well as sanitize the lids.

So, I picked up 20 gallons and cider with the intention of using the gallons for the soon-not-so-great yeasts. Fortunately, we still had four 4-gallon buckets laying around as well as a 5-gallon. We hatched the plan, for five 4-gallon batches of cider, thus consuming the 20 gallons purchased and consuming the five vials of yeast hanging out in the refrigerator. Our calculations were a bit off: We forgot that, in addition to the sugar’s boiled water, a 4-gallon bucket can’t really take four gallons without spilling out the top. Nevertheless, we soldiered one, made our cider sheets, labeled the tops of the buckets (important, because we hadn’t been doing that as often, leading to a case of unknown-yeast cider in the keg, also remedied by the cider sheets) and put them in the spare room.

Our theory is: if they taste great, we keg them. If one doesn’t taste great, this is a super opportunity to try to start mixing ciders and seeing if we can create something tastier, especially because five different ones have all been started at the same time.

I can happily report they’re all fermenting and pressurized.

We’re calling them

“AW #?”
At this point, we really don’t know what batch we’re on and they’re their own, seperate thing, although they are using the Apfelwein (AW) sugar ratio.

Check back in a month!

20 gallons of cider in four 4-gallon buckets and one 5-gallon bucket.

All of the empty juice bottles.

A Complete Kegerator

This article was originally posted on March 19, 2013 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

After many, many hours of work between the three of us, much hand-wringing over which items to buy and many, many trips to the store to figure out the correct-sized chest freezer, the kegerator, or keezer, is complete.

We’re running a four-tap system which means we have four Cornelius kegs jammed into the inside of the chest freezer. Bryce and Leo constructed a collar for the lid of the freezer to sit on, extending the height of the total unit. This was important because we invested in two 10-pound CO2 tanks with double regulators each. These sit on the hump of the compressor and allow us to interdependently control the level of CO2 going into each keg. Our cider keg is set at a much higher pressure than the rest.

The entire system is a dream and amazing for hosting parties, so long as no one bumps into the taps which, in a cramped space such as mine, is a real issue. We’ve yet to tackle the issue of a drip tray. At the moment, the drip tray could also be called a scrap towel folded and sitting beneath the taps.

Our next project, as the cider keg nears running dry, is to ferment five 4-gallon batches of cider with different yeasts so we can just start putting them in the keg once the past batch has been drunk. This also leaves the option of mixing finished ciders open and allows us to try a series of different yeasts we have but have not yet used.

The hope is, if one of the ciders doesn’t turn out, we’ll be able to mix it with one of the others.

All in call, I suggest a 4-keg system with a collar. At least, that’s what worked for us. Although the financial output at the outset is hefty — very hefty — it’s worth it.

Apfelwein #5 Secondaried

This article was originally posted on Dec. 22, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

We secondaried both AW #5 and AW #5C. These two, unlike any other ciders we’d made before, were made with the Windsor ale yeast suggested to us by our LHBS (Local HomeBrew Store.)

Sadly, everything tasted like salt to Bryce and I. Sadly, we’re not entirely sure why. Which means the jury’s still out.

But over all, it seems to have been a failed 6-gallons of experiment.