Beer and Bratwurst! Beer and food and pure love

I really love to cook, and one of the great simple things in life is to make something simple.  Poaching sausage with just some simple onions does the job, but what if you could combine bratwurst and try different beers?

I decide that when I was viewing some recent threads on BeerAdvocate.com, a place I spend probably far too much time on.. there was a good discussion on cooking with beer and bratwurst.

I get great sausage from my farmers market from a place called Smith Meadows.  I really REALLY love their Sweet Italian Sauage but I digress...

I bought some of their bratwurst and decided that I should try to cook them, trying and tasting them with different beers and seeing how the results went.  I picked a very common light produced mass lager, a true great German Pilsner,  DC Brau's the Corruption IPA, and finally the grand daddy of them all, one of my all time favorite beers, Aecht Schlenkerla Eiche, a very malty doppelbock that is smoked with oak.

I loved this beer so much I decided to make a gravy with it also.  The results of this cooking experiment were quite fascinating.  I video taped my experience (they make tapes?) and the experience is below, feel free to watch my experiment below.

CHEERS!

Easter and beer, and a fun seasonal from Het Anker

When it comes to Easter, my first thoughts go to what I am having for dinner.  Being that I grew up just having excuses to cook a big meal on holidays that I was never exactly "one to observe" so to speak, I was never one to complain.  Holidays meant an excuse to eat and drink well, no matter your disposition.

However, I got quite bored and even more disgusted with the signature disk on Easter and that is of ham.

Ham I grew up with was the typical overly pink, water injected, and as I soon experienced coming to the DC area, can be hell on earth that is salty.  One Christmas I went hole hog into it and bought what I and my family will only refer to as "the salt lick" of death.  Long story short, it was a Christmas ham I wish I could forget.  "You making another Mongolian salt mine again?!" my dad sent in his email when I told him the plans I had.  If there was anything it would have to be the amount of ridicule that probably got me more motivated. I refused to be mocked, I wanted revenge on this beast, I am going to destroy this ham!

I went for it again this Easter, while in the back of my thoughts I was thinking duck... just so I could be different.  Since a duck around this time let alone a good one is probably not the most easiest to acquire, and pork was in abundance, ham just made me cave in.  My mind panicked as to how badly I would either, a) Hate this thing with strong compassion or b) how badly I would screw this up.

I grabbed a good ham from my organic farmer's market, a Mulefoot butt roast.  Huge hunk of meat, and also a huge hunk out of my wallet.  I figured this is a real bad way to screw up an expensive piece of meat at $9.99 a pound.  Examining the picture I'll let you guess how much that thing weighed (then do the math).

I closed my eyes and handed over my credit card, dreaming of the glaze that would come, the oven that could handle it, and the salt lick past ready to bury into oblivion.

A few hours of prep the day before (scoring the ham and a bit of marinating, the next daya glazing of honey and mustard and vinegar, smoke that filled my house for 30 minutes as I seared it for 20 minutes at 425 first before turning it down, I had lift off, once my instant read thermometer took nearly 4 hours to get to a good internal temperature.  ARE WE DONE YET?? I kept asking myself while friends nibbled on a turkish meze of celery root and carrots with homemade pita bread my wife made.  The die was cast, WE EAT NOW!  Friends could partake, and boy did we ever.

Pictured left was a big dent we put in it, as the jewels of fat glistened everywhere.  I grabbed my latest gadget, an electric carving knife.  My god this is my favorite kitchen items and would describe it as the best tool ever in a kitchen.  Nothing makes a man feel like a man after 4 hours of slaving a hot roast, having fat burned on your arms, lifting a giant pan, and ripping into the beast with a chainsaw to extract a hard slaving work of cooking and basting.

Along with all the food I also took part in enjoying an Easter Ale beer from Het Anker, which is a seasonal beer released specifically around this time.

Wonderful match and interesting take on a Belgian Strong Dark Ale.  Malty but also a big candy licorice and perhaps even some mint and menthol like action on the finish.  Certainly an interesting beer to imbibe on Easter.

But nope, not done.  Enter crepes again and for Easter more beer.

Chimay Bleu rounded out the evening of some beer imbibing fun.  These crepes I didn't actually prepare myself, it was from our friend (who also added Noir dark chocolate hazelnut spread from Belgium too).

Beer and Easter just works in the most peculiar way I must admit.  Now I have 8 days of ham to eat for left over.  Pork... so dam good, and take that SALT LICK!

Breakfast and beer, Belgian Crêpes make it happen

I love crêpes to death.  As a young kid raised on loving pancakes with maple syrup and butter, my mom would make crêpes mostly on Christmas Eve as a special treat.  As I got older my sweet tooth really disappeared (probably because I had 8 cavities and root canal by the time I was 12) and I would love stuffing crêpes with ham, cheese, shrimp and seafood.  There is no limit to the imagination what you can stick in a crêpe.  But better yet why not use beer to make them?

I came across a Belgian crêpe recipe in the Washington Post, and used a great Belgian Pale Ale called Troubadour Blond to make them with.  Watch the video below to see how you can make these wonderful tasty breakfast meal.