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I made another recipe from the Samuel Adams website…Cornish Hens in Sam Adams Cream Stout.  The recipe called for four Cornish game hens, but there are just two of us here.  So I took the leftover two hens, as well as leftover veggies and gravy, and made what I call a cross between a pot pie and a shepherd’s pie.

You may not have enough gravy for this, but you can always make stock from the game hen carcasses, combine that with whatever gravy you have, to make a thick veloute sauce to coat the meat and veggies.  You should do this even if you do have enough gravy (you will need about two cups or so of sauce).

I picked the meat off the leftover two Cornish hens, it came to about two cups.  I put the carcasses into my 3.5 quart slow-cooker, threw in a chopped carrot, a chopped celery stalk with leaves, and an unpeeled onion, quartered.  I also threw in a bay leaf, and a couple of sprigs of fresh thyme.  Added water to cover, and cooked on LOW for several hours.  Strain out the solids, put the liquid in a saucepan on the stove, and boil it down until you have about 2 cups of concentrated stock.  This can be done in advance, and if you don’t need the stock for the shepherd’s pot pie, you can refrigerate or freeze it for future use.

Next, you need about 3-4 cups of leftover vegetables.  I had peas, carrots, and corn…the frozen variety is fine.  Place the veggies and the meat in a baking dish (I used a 9-inch square one), combine well.

The Cream Stout gravy will likely thicken up in the fridge.  Mix it with some of the stock to make 2 cups or so, you need just enough to cover the contents of the baking pan.  This should be thick enough on its own if you have enough gravy.  If not, make a roux by melting 3 Tablespoons butter, mix in 4 Tablespoons flour, then pour in the hot stock/gravy mixture.  Cook until thickened.  If it’s too thick, add a little more stock.

Now pour this sauce over the meat/veggies in the baking dish, just enough to cover.

The Cornish hen recipe suggests serving it with mashed potatoes, which I did.  So, in lieu of a pie crust for a typical chicken/game hen pot pie sort of thing, I did the shepherd’s pie route, and covered the top of the dish with the leftover mashed potatoes.  Refrigerated mashed potatoes can be hard to spread, so warm them gently in the microwave until they are of a spreadable consistency.

Bake at 400° F for about 20 minutes, lower the temp to 350°F, bake for another 15 minutes or so, until heated through, and the potatoes on top have turned golden brown.  Remove from oven, let sit for five minutes or so, then spoon up and eat.  Perfect for a cold day, when you are tempted to run south of the border and look for the best weight loss surgery Mexico has to offer! It’s okay, you can get out and run and lose the weight in the spring!

Here is the recipe for the Cornish hens with Cream Stout…

4 Cornish game hens
Salt & pepper
2 Tablespoons butter
1 medium onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 pound mushrooms, sliced
1/2 teaspoon finely chopped juniper berries
1 bay leaf
1 (12 ounce) bottle Sam Adams Cream Stout
1 cup heavy cream

Season the hens generously with salt & pepper. Melt the butter in a large Dutch oven over medium heat, and brown the hens on all sides, until golden brown, about 10 minutes. Remove the hens to a plate, as well as all but 3 Tablespoons of the fat.

Put the onion and garlic in the pan, and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the mushrooms, stir, cook for 2 minutes. Stir in juniper berries, bay leaf, and Sam Adams Cream Stout, and bring to a boil. Add 1/4 cup of the heavy cream, and the hens, and bring to a simmer. Cover and cook 30 minutes, or until the hens are done.

Remove the hens to a warm platter, and skim off any fat from the sauce. Add the remaining 3/4 cup of cream, and cook until it just begins to thicken. Season with salt & pepper to taste, and serve.

Notes: if you can’t find juniper berries (they are hard to find around here for some reason), throw in a splash of gin, or just leave it out. And I confess that I didn’t use Same Adams Cream Stout, I used Guinness. That was what I had on hand, also, the store I went to did not have the Sam stout.

Enjoy!  And waste not, want not!

If you’re a Bare Escentuals fanatic like me, you know how wonderful their mineral veil product is.  The only way I could have thought of to make it any better was to add SPF to it.  And now, it’s here.  Check it out!

So now, in addition to giving your face that airbrushed, finished look, you can protect your skin from the sun at the same time.  As someone who likes to go to lots of baseball games in the summer, and who burns easily, this is especially important.

I actually already have a container of this stuff…it came with the Sea Yourself kit that was a “Today’s Special Value” at QVC last year.  The kit is still available at the Q, albeit at a higher price than the TSV offer.  Most of the products in the kit have some SPF protection, which was why I bought it.

All BE foundations have an SPF of 15.  When I used the foundation together with the 25 SPF mineral veil, it worked VERY well.  If it worked well for me, it will work well for anyone.  I really hated the idea of putting greasy sunscreen on my face (which was pretty much the ONLY way, until I discovered BE).  But the minerals are NOT greasy at all, nor do they dry out your skin.  Perfection!

Also, you can never apply too much mineral veil.  Carry some with you, perhaps in this compact, and you can reapply as needed during the day.  That way, your face will always be protected from the harmful rays of the sun!

I’m very happy that this product is now available on its own…I would not want to keep buying whole kits just to get this one item.  If I had to do that, I’d have to break out the job search paperwork so that I could afford this! But the 25 SPF product is the same price as the regular mineral veil, $19. That may seem like a lot, but one container will probably last you all or most of the summer.  As with most BE products, a little goes a long way!

Last night, on the local news, I saw a piece about an intriguing new website called EatYourBooks.com.  You can see the piece here.  Too many of these so-called “news” pieces are about the same-old, same-old, stuff like fda approved diet pills. This is definitely “news I can use”.

This is not just another online recipe search engine.  EatYourBooks.com is designed for people who have a lot of cookbooks (raises hand), but like the convenience of an online search (raises hand again).

There are no actual recipes posted on this site.  You get the recipes from cookbooks that you actually have in your own home.  Here is how it works…

First, you sign up for an account.  This is a pay site, I’ll get that out of the way right now.  The cost of $25 a year, but for a limited time, you can get a lifetime membership for just $50.  However, they offer a 30 day free trial period, so you can give it a whirl, and decide for yourself if the site will be of value to you.  And there is absolutely no risk, they do not ask for any credit card info for the free trial.  So you don’t have to worry about trying to cancel when the 30 days are up, and getting billed if you don’t want the service.  You only pay when you make the decision to join.  I like that feature; too many companies offer “free” trials, but require payment info up front.  Then they make it difficult to cancel.

Okay, so once you sign up, the next step is to add cookbooks to your online library.  I found that the easiest and fasted way to add books is to search by author…if you’re like me, you have favorite cookbook authors, and have most, if not all their books.  So if you do a search for, say, Julia Child, all of her books that are listed at EatYourBooks will come up.  You just check off the ones that you own, and they will be added to your Bookshelf.

Not all the cookbooks in the world are listed and indexed here.  Many books are listed, but not yet indexed.  You can add those to your Bookshelf, and then put in a request to have that book indexed.  Only recipes from indexed books will show up in search.  A simple coding system tells you if a book is indexed, waiting to be indexed, or needs you to request it to be indexed.  This site is very new, but I’m impressed with the number of books that are indexed thus far.  Even if a book you have is listed but not indexed, add it to your Bookshelf anyway, it may become indexed in the future.

So, once you’ve added books to your Bookshelf, now what?  It’s time to decide what to cook for dinner tonight!  Say you want to make chicken noodle soup.  So you search your Bookshelf by typing in “chicken noodle soup”.  It’ll come back with a list of all of the chicken noodle soup recipes from all of the indexed cookbooks that are on both your online and real bookshelves.  Then you just go and find the book to get the recipe.

You can even narrow a search by entering keywords of ingredients that you have on hand.  This is a very useful feature for when you are too tired or lazy to go to the store.  So you type in “chicken, noodles, green beans, corn” and it’ll come back with recipes that use those ingredients.

If you do have to go shopping, there is a feature that makes up shopping lists for you, from your desired recipes.  This site does almost everything buy the actual shopping, cooking, and washing the dishes!

The site also has a community aspect to it, with chat groups, friends’ lists, and such.  It’s like social networking for cookbook junkies.  You can also buy cookbooks that you want and don’t have yet through the site…EYB is partnered with Jessica’s Biscuit, an excellent cookbook seller that offers some deep discounts.  It’s also a great place to find some out-of-print cookbooks.

There’s a lot of features to play with on EYB, more than I can go into here.  So why not go and give it a try?

No, not a site that will help you find the top eye creams! This is a cool site that lets you search your own print cookbooks…online! How cool is that?

The site is called EatYourBooks.com, and I first learned of it on the channel 4 news earlier this evening.  This is a pay site, but it does offer a 30-day free trial.  Right now, I’m playing around with the free trial, deciding for myself if it’s worth ponying up the bucks for.

A full review of this site will be posted shortly.

Most of us have cooked with wine…but have you ever tried cooking with beer?  Or considered food & beer pairings?  Well, if you are new to this, a great place to start is SamAdams.com.  The site has a whole section about food and beer, including recipes.  The site uses Flash, so I can’t link directly to the section.  So, once you access the site (after verifying that you are legally old enough to buy and drink beer), click on World of Beer –> Food and Beer –> Cooking With Sam.  From there, you can view the recipes, and print out the ones you want to make.

Last night, I made the Pasta & Eggplant dish, with Sam Adams Boston Lager.  This is a great place to start, as the Boston Lager is Sam’s flagship beer, and therefore the most widely available.  Even the Skeevy Corner Store, normally a haven for the swill beer drinker, carries it.

But if you go to a store that carries better beers, it’s likely you will find many of the other beers and ales that Sam Adams brews.  We’ve tried most of them, and they are well worth seeking out.

Anyhoo, the eggplant pasta was very tasty.  Don’t fret over the 1/2 cup olive oil…I know it seems like a lot, but eggplant absorbs a lot of oil.  Plus, this is olive oil, not butter, so no need to worry about breaking out the weight loss supplements. Olive oil is good for you!

This dish is a great way to use leftover ham, but if you don’t have any leftover ham, just buy a small ham steak, save whatever’s left after weighing out the six ounces called for, for another use.  Maybe chop it up and make omelettes for breakfast the next day.

Also, I see no reason why you can’t make this a vegetarian dish by omitting the ham.  Eggplant has a nice meaty texture to it…not very flavorful on its own, but it absorbs the flavor of whatever you cook with it…in this case, it soaks up the flavor of the olive oil and the beer.

1 cup Samuel Adams Boston Lager
1/2 cup olive oil
1 medium eggplant, peeled & diced
6 oz. smoked ham, cubed
1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary or 1/2 teaspoon dried
1 cup fresh or frozen peas
1 pound large tubular pasta, such as penne, cooked
Salt & pepper
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese

In a large skillet, heat the olive oil over medium heat. Place eggplant in skillet and add salt/pepper to season. Stir for about 10 minutes, until it becomes soft. Then stir in ham and fry for 2 minutes. Add beer and rosemary, bring to the boil. Reduce the liquid by half. Add the peas, reduce to a simmer, cover, cook 2 minutes. Pour the cooked pasta into the sauce, toss it all together, and cook for about 30 seconds, until heated through. Transfer to a serving bowl, sprinkle with Parmesan cheese, and serve.

This recipe calls for one cup of beer, so there will be four ounces left in a 12-ounce bottle.  Whoever does the cooking gets to drink it!  Serve the dish with the remaining beers from the six-pack!  Cheers!