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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!

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!

Yep…it’s the EZCracker.  (WARNING:  website has annoyingly loud auto-play audio/video which I saw no way of turning off)  All it does is crack eggs.  Seriously, how hard is it to crack eggs?  So, it comes with an egg separator attachment.  Big whoop-di-do.  I have an egg separator gadget.  The only reason I even have that is that it came with a set of measuring cups I bought; I doubt I’d have gone out of my way to buy an egg separator.

And a free bonus of an “egg scrambler” that is allegedly a $20 value?  Give me a break!  For one thing, this thing is probably made of 10 cents worth of cheap plastic, and for another, whatever happened to just using a whisk or a fork to scramble eggs?  Sheesh!

I had posted a couple of weeks ago about dumb kitchen stuff.  But when I heard of this egg cracking gizmo, I knew it warranted a post of its own, it’s so stupid.  I had not seen the commercial for this, but @homebrewchef did, and he Tweeted it:

Just saw a commercial for a egg cracker for $20. Really? Www.ezcracker.com. Hands don’t work anymore. Alton Brown would die if he saw this!

Alton Brown would have been the first person to come to mind if I had seen that commercial, too.  Alton, as you may know, is a leader in the war against kitchen unitaskers, and this gadget is right up there with the worst of them.  I’d rather sit through hours of commercials for colon cleansers, acne treatments, and the best night cream, than look at dumb crap like this.

Who buys this stuff, anyway?  I guess somebody must, otherwise, they’d not be selling it.

By the way, if you are interested in beer and food, both cooking with beer, and what beer to drink with your food, please check out The Homebrew Chef’s website.  Lots of great recipes and info there!

Well, I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!  Our dinner went really well, everything I made turned out to be very tasty!  We especially loved the turkey cooked with beer…we’ll definitely do it again next year, maybe with a different beer.

So now, I’m thinking about Christmas dinner.  What beers to have, what food to cook.  I like to cook duck for either Christmas or New Year’s…by then, we’re all turkeyed out and want something different.  I don’t want to have so much turkey sitting around, that it will still be there when I’m ready for Medicare supplement insurance!

I saw Lidia Bastianich cooking a duck on her TV show, and she served a dish of lentils and rice with it.  I might try that for a holiday dinner.  The recipe is in her new book, Lidia Cooks from the Heart of Italy, which I just ordered.  Not just for the duck recipe, but because I love her and her books, and wanted to get it anyway.

I also pre-ordered Julie & Julia on DVD, which is due to be released on December 8.  Just $9.99, can’t beat that price!  No extras, I hear, just the movie, but I’m happy!

Here it is…our official Toikey Day menu for this year.  You can click the image to see bigger, it should open in a new tab/window.

All of the shopping is done. I hope I didn’t forget anything; I’d rather travel all the way to Texas and have dental work done, hold the Novocaine, at the best implant dentist Plano has to offer, than have to go into a supermarket in the few days that precede Toikey Day.  Seriously, that is how bad the supermarkets are in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, Sunday is really the last day to go, while it’s still reasonably sane.

First of all, if you like this menu template shown here, you can download it and other cool holiday templates for free HERE.  This includes the one I used last year.  I chose to use this one, this year, because the text that I wanted to use didn’t fit on last year’s template.  And yeah, it’s not true to color, the color cartridge in my printer is going, I need to replace it soon.

So now, let’s talk about the food.  The first course is a twist on the one from last year.  Instead of serving the Old Sturbridge Village Gourd Soup in small bowls, I’m doing a fancy restaurant thing and serving it as shots.  Only I don’t own any actual shot glasses, so old tasting glasses from the Maine Brewers Festival will have to do.  So that makes it a bit more than a shot, but who cares?

You can find the recipe for this here:  Butternut Squash Soup Shots with Candied Bacon.  It includes a recipe for the squash soup which is slightly different from the OSV one, but I’m sticking to the recipe I love best.   I just wanted the recipe for the candied bacon.  Ooooohhh….BACON!

Recipezaar is a great site, in part in that it helps take the guesswork out of reducing or increasing a recipe.  Twelve soup shots are definitely too much for the two of us.

As for the turkey, gravy and stuffing, you may be asking, “what’s a Märzen?”  Well, it’s a German/Oktoberfest style beer, and there are many to choose from, as you can see HERE.  Consult this list if you can’t find the Flying Dog beer where you are, if you want a good alternative.  I chose this one from the Flying Dog Brewery, simply because I saw it at Bert’s Better Beers on Saturday, I like the way the label looked, so I said, what the hell?  This beer has won several awards, and you can learn more about it HERE.

I got the idea to do this, from this article on HopPress.com.    Now, I like the way this Mario Rubio dude thinks!  You need at least three bottles of the Märzen of choice…the first you pop open, pour into your favorite glass, and drink while you cook.  The second bottle goes into the roasting pan with the turkey, and the third is for the gravy.  Having more than three bottles, of course, would be good, as you might want to drink them with the meal!   And, as Mario suggests, you may also want to use this same beer to moisten your stuffing.

Use your favorite turkey/gravy/stuffing recipes for this.  This year, I’m keeping it relatively simple…the roast turkey and gravy from Julia Child’s The Way To Cook, using the beer where wine or stock is called for.  For the past few years, I’ve used Alton Brown’s Good Eats Roast Turkey recipe, complete with the brine, and it’s excellent.  But Julia’s recipe is simpler, and as for brining, I’m just going to use a plain water/salt/sugar brine.  I really want the flavor of the beer to come through, and not fight with any additional brine flavorings.  Just a warning – if you buy a Kosher turkey, or a Butterball® one, do not brine it at all, these already come brined.  If you buy a cheap frozen one for 47¢ a pound (as I did, from Shaw’s), definitely brine it.  It really does make a difference!

The stuffing recipe I’m using is a very basic, New England traditional one, using Bell’s Seasoning.  You’ve probably seen the stuff in the spice section of the store, it’s the one with a picture of a turkey on the box.  See it, right over there?  The stuffing recipe is on the back of the box, but you can also find it HERE.  This makes enough to stuff a 5-pound bird, you can double or even triple it if you need more.  We don’t stuff the turkey anyway, we just bake it up in a casserole dish.  The amount given in this recipe will be plenty for the two of us.

I’m tweaking it in two ways…instead of sauteeing the onions and celery in butter, I’m going to render some bacon fat, and use that, reserving the bacon.  Then when I mix it all together, I’ll add the crumbled cooked bacon.

In keeping with the beer theme, I’m going with this recipe for Roasted Garlic IPA Mashed Potatoes.  This was linked to in the article about beer and turkey that I linked to above.

For this recipe, I am choosing to go with Gritty McDuff’s 21 IPA.  IPAs (India Pal Ale) are hoppy and on the bitter side, and not to everyone’s taste, for sure.  But this recipe only uses a few spoonfuls, too much would certainly overpower the dish.  And since it only uses a few spoonfuls, guess who gets to drink the rest?

There are many great IPAs out there.  I went with Gritty’s 21 because I’d had some at both the Maine and New Hampshire Brewers Festivals, and I really liked it.  It’s a bit hard to find near where I live, but I did find it on our visit to the aforementioned Bert’s Better Beers.

The Brussels Sprouts with Sweet & Sour Bacon Dressing is a repeat from last year.  And butternut squash makes an encore appearance, in this simple Baked Butternut Squash.  Click on the links to access these recipes.  As for the rest of the menu, the cranberry sauce is out of a can, and the pumpkin pie was store-bought.  I’m just not too good at making pies!

But, speaking of pumpkins, one of the stars of the show promises to be Pugsley’s Signature Series Smashed Pumpkin Ale, a very special seasonal brew from Alan Pugsley, the brewmaster of Shipyard Brewing Company up in Portland, Maine.  I could not wait to try this once it first came out, as I LOVE pumpkin ales.  I had it for the first time, on tap at the Great Lost Bear up in Portland over Labor Day weekend, and was NOT disappointed.

This is sold in 22 ounce bottles, and has been flying off the shelves.  I had heard that Shipyard’s retail store had sold out, but on the way home from Labor Day weekend in Maine, I did find exactly two bottles in Federal Jack’s retail store, in Kennebunk.  The Shipyard store has since restocked, and so has Federal Jack’s, and you can bet I stocked up, before it’s gone for the season.  Also, I saw a decent amount of it at Bert’s Better Beers, in Hooksett, NH, the other day.

Who needs homemade pumpkin pie?  This is better!

Happy Toikey Day to all!