Beef Stew

wamozart12 had a baby! The wamozart12 family has relied on the kindness of other people to stay fed for the past 4 weeks. wamozart12 enjoys speaking in the 3rd person.

Last night I made dinner for the first time since FC was born. I started the dinner, then FC needed to eat, so Clint finished the dinner, and we cheated and had Pillsbury Grands biscuits instead of homemade biscuits (but boy are those Grands tasty!)

Beef Stew, adapted from a Pioneer Woman recipe

2lbs stew beef
1T olive oil
1T butter
2 onions, chopped into medium-sized pieces
2 cloves garlic (which I skipped, no garlic here)
1t Penzey's northwoods seasoning (supposed to be paprika, we're all out)
1t sugar
1t salt
2T Worcestershire sauce
1 bottle stout (or other dark beer)
2oz tomato paste
4 cups water (beef broth is ideal, I had none)
2 parsnips, cut into chunks
2 carrots, cut into chunks
1 sweet potato, cut into chunks (we left it unpeeled)
mushrooms (we didn't add, but I wish we'd had some to add)

heat up the butter and oil in a large pot or dutch oven, then add the beef and brown a few minutes. Remove the beef and set aside, and saute the onions and garlic for a few minutes, until translucent. Add the spice mix, sugar, salt, Worcestershire and tomato paste and saute for a minute, then add the beef, stout and water (or broth). Bring to a boil and reduce to very low to simmer for 2-2.5hours. Add more broth/water periodically if the liquid boils off too much.

Then add all the veggies and cook for 30-45 min more.

Optional: if you'd like it thicker, place 2-3 ladlefulls of the stew liquid in a small boil and add 2-3T flour. Whisk thoroughly and then add this paste back to the stew, stir and cook for about 15 minutes more. (you can also add the flour directly to the stew pot, but then you're more likely to get lumps.)

Serve with the store-bought biscuits or some crusty bread, or if you don't have a newborn in the living room, get ambitious and make your own biscuits!

beer + chicken = yum

That's kind of exciting, right?

I recently renewed my subscription to Cooking Light. Gal A (thanks to Gal M for our new monikers) gave me a subscription a few years ago for my birthday, and I kept it up until maybe 6 months ago, when I decided to let all my subscriptions lapse in an effort to save money. Now my etsy shop is doing better, so I took my hard-earned sewing money and renewed. 2 weeks ago, 2 issues arrived together- October, with a cover full of enticing quick breads, and September, full of chicken recipes.

Now, I'm weird about chicken. I like it, technically, but I don't often experiment with it. Don't get me wrong, we have chicken all the time here (mostly because I need chicken stock for so many recipes, so we always have a lot of bone-in chicken in the freezer to make more stock), but it's always chicken soup, tacos, etc. But when I'm presented with a bunch of quick, easy and healthy chicken recipes for dinner... well, who can resist that?

The Beer and Honey Chicken was the main one that caught my eye. And beer... I can get that at work! It's very easy, just saute chicken breasts and then saute onions (supposed to be shallots) and whisk together beer, honey, mustard and soy sauce. For this recipe, I used our Oaktoberfest, which was just recently put on tap. I brought a growler home, since it's $6.50 for the equivalent of almost 6 bottles. Yesss, we could have just opened up a bottle, but I like this beer.

We had this with a CL sweet potato recipe (idea) and it was a great combination. Actually, we liked this so much that after dinner last night (the leftovers), we discussed how sad we were that it was all gone, and decided I needed to make it again tonight. So with tonight's leftovers to eat tomorrow (since I'm working all day), it'll be 4 dinners in a row of beer and honey chicken. This big run of leftovers isn't for everyone, but this recipe is delicious enough that it's great for us!

Beer and Honey Chicken
recipe from Cooking Light

2 chicken breasts, cut into 2 super thin pieces, a horizontal slice
1T oil
salt and pepper
2 shallots, minced (or I used one onion and 2 garlic cloves instead)
6 mushrooms, sliced (my addition)
1/2 cup beer, I used our new Oaktoberfest from the winery, CL recommends something like Blue Moon but I would go with something a little fuller.
1T whole grain mustard
1T honey
2T soy sauce (preferably low sodium)
2T fresh parsley

In a large pan/skillet (I used my Le Creuset braiser, love that thing), heat the oil. Season the chicken with salt and pepper, then place in pan. Cook on both sides until cooked through (about 6 min total). Meanwhile, whisk together the beer, honey, mustard and soy sauce. Remove the chicken from pan and add the shallots, onion, garlic, mushrooms, whatever you're using. Cook a couple minutes, then pour in the beer mixture. Bring to a boil and simmer for 5 minutes, until the liquid is reduced almost by half. Put the chicken back in, turn to coat with the sauce all over every so often, for a couple minutes. Top with parsley, and it's ready to eat!

We served it with a mashed sweet potato idea/recipe from the same issue.

Chipotle Lime Sweet Potatoes
recipe from Cooking Light, this link actually takes you to a variation but it's pretty much the same, just different flavors
(this is a halved recipe, which makes 4 servings)

2 sweet potatoes
1.5t lime juice
1T milk (we used apple cider the first time)
1.5t brown sugar
1/2t minced chipotle in adobo
1/2t adobo sauce
pinch of salt

Prick the sweet potatoes a few times with a fork, then wrap each in a damp paper towel and microwave on high for 8 minutes, turning each over halfway through (it should be soft, if not, cook longer). Cut in half and scoop the insides and place in a bowl with the rest of the ingredients and mash together.

This is our favorite, and was also (fortunately!) the healthiest option in the "Sweet Potatoes 4 Ways" article. The other ways were brown sugar pecan, sage parmesean and something with bacon. I want to try them all!

It took about 30 minutes from pulling out the ingredients to sitting down to eat, which is just lovely. And it's tasty!

I'm considering a pork version of this, although our growler is almost empty.

Cross Country Travels, I

Monday: Day 1 in Washington, DC.

Over the weekend we were in CT and NJ, and had a variety of good food. We had dinner at Max's Burger Bar on LaSalle Rd in West Hartford, CT. Our meal was very tasty (and filling) and only a little pricey for the amount of food. Clint had the "Grateful Veg" quinoa burger, and I had the tuna burger with julienned veggies and sriracha aioli.

And we wondered, which is healthier: a veggie/quinoa burger with cheese, or a standard hamburger without cheese?

After a surprisingly easy trip (I supposed to make up for the difficulties in embarking on said trip (starting with the cat getting sick and needing to get to the vet asap (small infection, she should be fine, the worst part is not being there to verify that she's improving, and having to call up the people caring for her in our absence for daily reports) and ending with forgetting several things, including the money at home in MA), we arrived in Washington, DC at 11am and got our hotel room right away. And... proceeded to nap. And walk around in the oppressive heat, and nap some more. By the time we were finally ready to venture out for dinner, it was 7:30. Clint voted for the Brickskeller, a restaurant specializing in an impressive selection of beer that he'd been to in 2001, when he was here for a conference.

Clint said they had a lot of beer. I thought, meh, whatev. Like 20 kinds? Nice, but not impressive. I did not expect this. Scroll through that. Have fun. We

'll see you in a few hours.

At such a restaurant, which apparently has been granted a very unfair 2 stars (I guess people give stars based on the food variety? Come on, it's an American pub), I decided it would be wrong, nay, insulting, to not order a drink from their impressive menu. They had a number of mixed drinks using beer (Snakebite (lager and cider), Black Velvet (stout and champagne), Ruddy Mary (bloody Mary with beer, not vodka), and an intriguing concoction of Scottish beer, whiskey and drambuie), I ordered a Sam Adams cider- and immediately felt guilty. Yum, cider (that's not the issue), but it's Sam Adams, my local brewery. But I'd never heard of it. Fortunately, before I could decide whether to feel content or guilty, the waitress returned to say they were all out (is this why there were only 2 stars? Yes, they were out of a number of beers on the menu, but come on, if you can't find something else y

ou want, you have more problems than eating at a sub-par restaurant), so I went with a Blackthorne Cider. Yum! It's more full/bodied than Woodchuck, and just about as good as Magners.

Then... since Clint was going to get a second drink (he started with an Estonian beer, and then had the Ace of Hearts El Salvadorian beer), I had a beer.

The Pyramid (Seattle, WA) Apricot Ale. Yum. I need to get more of this.

Food: we split onion rings (delicious, and not greasy at all), and Clint had a pulled pork sandwich (he loved). I satisfied by my veggie cravings with a dressing-free cobb salad (all super fresh ingredients, so nice). The food was good (onion rings were great), but the beer was simply wow.

Also, we passed Hello, Cupcake! On the way. I will now do my cupcakerie research so we're prepared next time we leave the hotel.

Chili, and more bread

I woke up this morning and thought, what bread shall I make today? Then I joked to my husband that when I worked primarily on yeast for my research in grad school, I never made bread, and now I make it all the time- I think it's because I miss my yeast.

Today required a little more searching before I could get started. What to make? I made raisin cinnamon bread (which could be improved upon), cheesey sesame seed bread to get a break from all the nutella sweets, then rye bread, solely because we'd found some rye flour in the baking cabinet. But what about today?

As usual, I made a recipe from my King Arthur Flour cookbook. In flipping through the "yeast bread and rolls" section, I found a number of good looking recipes, but the Simple Sweet Bread page caught my eye. I ended up making Swedish Cardamom bread.

Step 1: in a medium-sized bowl, combine 1 cup lukewarm milk with 1 cup flour, whisk together, then add 1 heaping tablespoon yeast. Stir a bit, then leave alone for a little while- 45 minutes today.

Step 2: add 2 eggs, 6T softened butter, 1t cardamom, 1.5t salt. Then at 3.5-4 cups of flour, one cup at a time. Knead for 4 minutes, let rest for a few minutes, knead 4 more minutes (I kneaded all in the mixer, as usual), then place in a greased bowl, cover, and leave in a warm spot for about 2 hrs.

Step 3: punch down the dough, and divide into halves, then each half into thirds.
Roll each third into a snake, and braid each set of 3 dough snakes- for 2 braided loaves.



Step 4: let rise again, covered, for an hour. Brush with melted butter and sprinkle with cinnamon sugar. Bake at 350oF for about 30 minutes.

Then eat.

We also made more chili. This is the same recipe I used (with some minor alterations, frozen corn instead of canned, chipotle powder instead of cayenne pepper) on Super Bowl Sunday. I adapted Sunny Anderson's Interstate Chili recipe.


In a crock pot, combine:
2 red peppers, diced
2 jalapeno peppers, sliced
3 cloves of garlic, minced
2 yellow onions, diced
3T cumin
2T oregano (dried)
1T cinnamon
1T chili powder
2t chipotle
3T worcestershire sauce
1T tabasco
2cups chicken broth
1 bottle dark beer (we used Long Trail Hibernator)
1 giant can kidney beans (or 2 regular cans)
2 cans diced tomatoes
1 6oz can tomato paste
1 bag frozen corn kernels

While your husband's doing that, brown 1.25 (or so) lbs ground turkey and 6-8oz sausage (smushed into bite sizes bits, and we used some sort of smokey spicy delicious-smelling portuguese sausage) in a pan, then drain off the grease and add the meat to the crock pot.

Stir it all around. Cook- last time we cooked on low for 5hrs, this time we're trying it on high for an hour, and low for 2-3hrs, until we feel like eating.

Serve with shredded cheese, sour cream, and cornbread.

Cornbread: 1 full recipe, in an 8x8 dish.

1.25 cups flour
3/4cup cornmeal
1/4 cup sugar
1/2t salt
2t baking powder
1 egg
1 cup milk
1/4cup vegetable oil
1/2 cup thawed frozen corn kernels

Whisk together first 5 ingredients, then beat together eggs, milk, oil, and add to the dry ingredients. Stir in corn. Bake at 325oF for 25 min in an 8x8 baking dish.

More than one way to have a beer

I did some cooking worth mentioning this weekend... two batches of cookies on Friday, but also some cookies before Friday, which I meant to tell you about because they're quite amazingly good. However, I had a presentation this afternoon, so that sucked away all my time. By now, I'm kind of zombie-ish... therefore, rather than try to work and make some fatal errors, I'll blog instead.

So anyway, on Friday, I made beer cookies.

Beer cookies? you say.

Yes. Beer in cookies. Could there be anything better?

Two Sundays ago, I was at home, watching the Food Network (my normal routine every weekend day that I'm not out of town or in lab). I happened to catch a cookie cook-off, and you can imagine how intrigued I was. I had been planning to put an end to the morning's laziness before then by going to school, but how could I miss a cookie cook-off?! Seriously.

There were a lot (a lot) of really good cookie recipes on this episode, and actually the first ones I made were the grand prize winners, Exotic Spice Cookies (there's a reason they won), but I want to tell you about the beer cookies because OMG DELICIOUSNESS and they're just so unusual. We'll get to the spice cookies later... especially because the only ones left are the burned ones (oops... my two cookie sheets cook very differently, and I forget that a lot...), so I might make some more soon. I'm going "camping" on Saturday, so perhaps I'll make a batch to bring then (not real camping, because there's no way I'm spending the night in the woods in New Hampshire in April).

So, the beer cookie recipe is linked at the top, go there and make them. Below follows how it went.

First off, you get white beer and you boil it with honey to reduce. Note: I am not a beer drinker, but nearly every one of my friends is, and I am surrounded by beer- but I am fully aware that I am surrounded by good beer, what with all the fab microbrews in Vermont and New Hampshire. So anyway, I boiled beer (I used the seasonal Long Trail white beer).

I boiled it, and I boiled it, and I boiled it some more. I boiled it over an hour. I was kind of getting sick of standing there, waiting for it to boil after half an hour- I wish I could fit chairs in my kitchen. However, it smells really good, like warm beer with honey (which... makes sense, that's what it is), but I always associate beer smell with gross frat houses or helping friends clean up the morning after a party. This is enormously different.

There's no indication in the recipe of how long the boiling should take- it tells you that you'll know when it's done, because eventually the sugar will start to boil, and this makes the boiling look quite obviously different, and once the boiling changes, it's done. I suppose you'd look at 2 bottles of beer with 5 tablespoons of honey and realize you need to reduce it 9-fold and that that could take a while, but arg it took over an hour, even after raising the heat a tad. So, that was kind of annoying, but mostly since I wasn't expecting it. It also didn't boil long enough, because I had 1/2 cup of the syrup instead of the indicated 1/3cup, and I kept boiling it past the stage where the sugar started to boil.

But anyway, I got the beer syrup, even if it was too much (I poured off the extra). Then I combined the syrup with butter, powdered sugar (not used to cookies using powdered instead of granulated sugar!) egg, vanilla, orange zest, and then added in the flour, baking soda and coriander. Mix, mix, mix, bake, bake, bake. Watch these cookies as they're baking... anything in my oven always takes the full time in any range of baking times (i.e. it says bake 10-15min, I need 15. 35-45 min, I need 45) but even though it says 20min, but your oven could need anywhere from 15 to 25 min, my cookies were perfectly done by 17min. They were solid, just barely beginning to brown on the edges. They had a different look to them- a slightly shiny finish on the top (my dad suggested a semi-gloss instead of a matte finish, I think this is fairly accurate) and bubbles. This may be the beer, it may be the powdered instead of granulated sugar, I'm not entirely sure. But they look like something you'd want to eat.

Then they cooled enough to grab one without pain, and I eated it. I tasted the beer, my taster did not. However, he's a beer drinker, and I am not (also, he had a cold, so he might have just not been able to taste them as well as he could have otherwise). It's very faint, the rest of the flavor in there is OMG GOOD. Really.

I let them hang out in tupperware overnight, and the next morning I made a glaze, just a simple one of milk, powdered sugar and orange juice (although I used grapefruit juice, having no oj on hand) that's basically what I use to ice all cutter-cookies. I glazed by dropping half a spoonful on top, and then drizzling all of them when the glaze wasn't spreading around as much as I'd have liked.

They're good- just in case I haven't made that clear yet. They're also pretty, I added some orange zest on top.


Warning: these won't last very long, you will eat them all immediately, nom nom nom. I had to divide them up immediately (ones for me, ones for my parents, and ones to bring to a party) so I didn't start getting into the allotments meant for other people.


I highly recommend these. Also, they are the brainchild of a guy getting his master's in food science, which I think is cool.

Edit: ...... I just thought of something. How good could these be with Guinness?? I'm highly intrigued now. Does Guinness complement citrus at all, or would that be weird?