Beer brewing/pumpkin carving party food spread

My husband brews beer. Every few weeks he has his brew buddies over to brew a new batch. He has gotten very technical with all of it and now our basement is filled with two chest freezers with temperature controllers to have the beer brew and condition at the proper temperature as well as a lot of other peripheral brew equipment. The newest piece of equipment saw its debut a few weeks ago. We had a group of people (mostly physicists) over for beer brewing and pumpkin carving. The equipment is a plate chiller and is used to cool the boiling wort to yeast pitching temperature. Unfortunately, we didn't have the proper fittings to hook the hose onto the plate chiller, so they brainstormed and came up with a way to gravity feed the water from our second floor bedroom through the plate chiller to cool the beer. You can see pictures of this adventure at my friend, Robert's, blog. After all the shenanigans, I was glad I made a lot of food!


The entire spread


Dehydrated banana bread, from Practically Raw
It tastes just like banana bread, and only has a few ingrediants. Delicious!


Chocolate kale chips, also from Practically Raw
This is a pretty similar recipe, although I used raw cashews, maple syrup, cocoa powder, and no chia seeds or lemon juice. The massaging of the kale took the longest time. These taste like crispy bits of chocolate. You cannot taste the kale at all. The Practically Raw cookbook has an entire chapter on kale chips and another one on hummus. It is a fantastic book. I need to just buy it, I have been using the library copy for the past few months. The perk of being a graduate student, I get to check out books for as long as I desire.


Hummus, baba ganoush, pineapple, guacamole
All pretty standard recipes.


Homemade pita bread
I used a recipe from Whole Foods for the Whole Family and cooked them on a cast iron griddle in a 400 degree oven. I had the oven heating up to 500 degrees, but the smoke detector went off. Obviously, something was burning off the pan, but 400 degrees worked out fine. I got into quite a rhythm while I was making them. I divided them out into 12 balls. Rolled one ball out into a round with the rolling pin. Put it in the oven. Rolled out the next ball. Turned the first pita over. Put the second one in the oven. Roll out the next ball. Take the first pita out of the oven. Turn the second one over. Put the third one in the oven. I was so happy that these actually puffed up in the oven, it was great and amazing.



Notes
Everyone enjoyed the spread and we only had minimal leftovers. I would say the day was a hit!

The day after the beer brewing/pumpking carving, we were hit with the outskirts of Sandy. School was cancelled for Monday and Tuesday, but there wasn't a lot of damage in the area, thank goodness, and we never lost power. We did, however, see a pack of wild turkeys wander in our backyard during the worst of the wind and rain. They hung out for an hour and then moved onto whereever they were going.

Tofu Scramble

Last Thursday, I woke up early enough to have a leisurely breakfast while my husband was still sleeping. We had some tofu in the fridge that needed to be used up, so I made a tofu scramble. My throat also started hurting that day, so I thought I would try and soothe it with some hot water, lemon, and honey tea.

Ingredients

extra-firm tofu

onions

garlic

spices - chipotle powder, salt, pepper, rosemary

kale

hot sauce

Method

 Saute the onions and garlic in olive oil until browned.  Crumble up the tofu into little bits until it looks like scramble egg.  Stir to mix up the tofu, onion, garlic, olive oil.  Add spices, soy sauce, nutritional yeast, etc - anything you think would taste good on the "eggs".  You can even add black salt at the end.  It gives a sulphur flavour that is reminiscent of eggs.  A few minutes before everything is to your liking, add the chopped kale, pour a tablespoon or so of water in the pan and over with a lid.  Allow the kale to steam for a few minutes until tender.  Mix everything together, taste for seasoning, and serve with a delicious hot sauce.

I picked up this  hot sauce at the grocery store randomly a few months ago and just got around to trying it.  I love it.  It has heat AND it has flavour.

Notes

This was very good. I haven't made a tofu scramble in a while and it was exactly what I wanted. I served it with some Tuscan bread from the new Trader Joe's!


The cat has been a good cuddle buddy while I have been sick the last few days.

Freezer Meals: Pesto, potato, mushroom pizza

It will take one more day to finish of making all the rest of the freezer meals. I think we have three more to do. I'll post a picture of the inside of our freezer when it is done. We aren't making allll our meals for the freezer, just about half of them. Although, we did have a friend over tonight and ate both of the pizzas we had frozen, so we aren't going to make it quite all the way to the end of the month with our recipes.

For those that are lost, my husband and I are trying to cook a good majority of our meals in advance and then freeze them. We are using recipes from Once a Month Mom. All the recipes we have tried so far, have been fantastic.



Tonight, we decided to break out the frozen pizza. From frozen, it cooked in a preheated 350F oven for about 10 - 15 minutes. Before we froze the pizza, we had parcooked the crust for about 8 minutes before adding the toppings and freezing.

Ingredients
Kale Pesto
1/2 bunch kale
1/2 cup slivered almonds
a couple of garlic cloves
salt
black pepper
olive oil

Mushroom bits
12 oz mushrooms sliced
2 T olive oil
2 T maple syrup
1 T soy sauce
1/2 t liquid smoke

pre made pizza dough - just the usual dough for about 12 inch pizza
Any other toppings you desire - we added garlic, potato, and onion


Method
Kale Pesto
Process the kale, almonds, and garlic in a food processor until chopped up. Add seasonings. With the processor processing slowly drizzle in the olive oil until it is the desire consistency. Adjust for any seasonings.

Mushroom bits
In a bowl, mix the mushrooms with the liquid ingredients. Allow to soak while the oven is heating up to 400F. Spread on a cookie sheet lined with foil (for easy clean up). Cook in oven, stirring occasionally, until crispy. I didn't really get these to a crispy stage, just cooked well. Set aside to cool.

Pizza
Roll out the dough to desired size. We divided the dough into two pieces and rolled them into their own pizzas. We needed to make the dough fit inside of a gallon size freezer bag. Also, a pizza made from all the dough is usually too much for one meal for two people.

Place the dough in a preheated 400F oven for about 8 minutes until the dough is mostly cooked through. Spread the pesto on and top with any topping you desire. At this point, you can wrap in plastic wrap and put in a freezer bag and freeze until needed, or you can put it back in the oven and cook until the toppings are heated through the bottom of the pizza is brown.


Notes
I was a little bit wary of the pesto, when I tried it after processing it, we both thought it tasted like the way fresh cut grass smelled. The flavor mellowed out on the pizza and worked really well with the kind of sweet mushroom topping. The pizza over all was delicious. It was really fun to come home and have a frozen pizza that didn't have a bunch of weird ingredients in it. Both my husband and the friend we had over, loved the pizza.

Of course, we topped our pizza with a drizzle of sriracha.

If the freezer meals continue to be awesome, we are doing this next month and every month after that. It's like eating frozen meals from the grocery store, but they don't have a bunch of things in there that you don't want and it took three days to put all the food together! We are loving it.

Orzo Pasta Salad and New Lunch box!

I like to bring my lunch to school everyday, partly because I don't like any of the restaurant choices here and partly because it is cheaper. I have been on the look out for a good, useable lunchbox for a while now and I think I have found one that is fantastic. A Planetbox!

So far I have only used it for one day, but I really really enjoy it. There is room enough for food for my lunch and an afternoon snack. My husband also said that he had more than enough food for him. So it is not just for children! I wish that the carrying bags came in other colors, but that is a minor fault.



Ingredients
Orzo
onions
garlic
cremini mushrooms
sun-dried tomatoes
kale
basil
lemon juice
sriracha


Method
Boil the orzo until tender, about 8 minutes. Drain.

Sauté the onions until softened, add the mushrooms and garlic and cook until those are soft. Add the drained orzo and kale. Mix around until the kale is wilted and the orzo has taken up some of the oil in the pan. Remove from heat, add the lemon juice and sriracha. Stir to combine and garnish with fresh basil.

Eat immediately or cool in the fridge and eat at room temperature.

Notes
This was a perfect lunch box salad. It tasted great at room temperature and held up well in the container.

Also in my lunch box is homemade hummus, black olives, plums, carrot sticks, and Late July mini peanut butter cookies.

Once again, my lunch box rocks. It even has rocket magnets on the front. I love it.

Risotto

Unfortunately, I made this about a month ago, and I can't remember how I did it. I do remember it being freakishly tasty though.

Looking at the picture I believe the ingredients are:

Arborio rice
Better than bouillon vegetable paste
shiitake mushrooms
onions
garlic
kale
fresh oregano

I know that I followed the standard recipe for risotto - heat up a pot of broth to simmer and add 1/2 cup measures to the rice/vegetables. Maybe it was using the farmer's market veggies that made it so tasty.

I remember us talking about this meal all evening and my husband telling the guys on the game he plays how tasty it was. So make risotto, it is good.

Corn Soup

I might or might not be obsessed with sriracha sauce. It just makes everything taste so much better. It is not that I want that taste all the time, it is I want that level of hot all the time and it is the easiest way to do that.

The soup below shows the amount of sriracha I put into a bowl of corn soup.





I followed the same recipe as I posted about previously and added some kale at the end of cooking.