Bah – this is an ad on tv, and I wish I could actually show you the thing itself, but I can’t find it anywhere. There’s some lady wandering around her bathroom, super-excited about the very scientific-sounding and vague “serums” that make her so pretty. (Also – fine – maybe serums come from milk or plants too, but it’s still something grosser than what that lady in her bathroom is imagining.) I don’t know why this pisses me off so much, but it feels really smug to me. Like somebody really thinks they’re pulling a fast one, or something. Like Don Draper deciding to start calling the tobacco “toasted” or like Cheerios suddenly putting a big sticker on the box that says “non-carcinogenic!” or something.
I’m watching Yo Gabba Gabba! for the first time ever. I realize I’m late to this bandwagon and everybody already is all up on its nuts, but…I just wanted to announce its greatness. Jack Black is teaching us how to disco-dance in this episode (EDIT: later, a robot reciprocates by teaching him how to do the robot). He rides a flying, talking motorcycle, and thinks Tudi is the greatest jumper ever, and just made a bunch of new friends and is singing about it. There’s a party in his tummy. No really. He said that. I’m going to dress up like every single one of these characters next Halloween. If you have not seen this show yet, DO SO.
Also, there’s a horror movie coming on in a half-hour that an imdb contributer describes thusly:
In Grovetown, there is a series of suicides after the suicide of an outcast teenager Sean (Shiloh Fernandez). His brother Aidan (Thomas Dekker) waits for the return of his cousin Sadie (Margo Harshman) to the family house for the funeral. When Dylan (Kelly Blatz), who is the fanatic Christian son of the reverend, beats up on Aidan, the undesirable youngster is helped by Dylan’s girlfriend Lindsey (Elizabeth Rice) that drives him home. They talk about Dylan’s mother Candace Spindle that had a grimoire to worship her pagan gods in a creek and was blamed by the god-fearing locals of murdering a man; then she died in a suspicious fire. Lindsey and Aidan befriend each other and sooner she finds that Sean has cursed the town with his own sacrifice unleashing an evil force that is leading the inhabitants to commit suicide. When Lindsey is chased by her evil image, Aidan decides to help her to stop the curse; but the price to be paid is high.
Ugh – I just spent the past 10 minutes searching for a video or an animated gif or something of Betty Draper shrieking “What is going ON?!?” but couldn’t find one. Google, why do you keep failing me tonight??
This is becoming slightly incomprehensible, I realize. I blog a lot, and incomprehensibly, when Ian is out of town. Blame him.
More soon, surely, as I get boreder and drunker! But for now, goodbye, goodbye!
GODDAMNIT, INTERNETZ, QUIT FAILING ME. IS THIS SERIOUSLY THE BEST VIDEO OF THIS YOU CAN GIVE ME???
Whatever. Here it is without the annoying kid, but also without Jack Black, but also with a reference to balls, so – even?
Found this at the good local beer store the other day:
And actually, since it’s a new kind of beer, and apparently from a smallish local (Massachusetts) brewery, it’s a shame I can’t buy it since IT’S STOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOPID. Ugh. They’re not even well drawn! They seem to have been done by a confused and talented 15 year old girl in the back of her Spanish notebook! Like, I want to say this transcends Feminist Rage – it’s just dumb, ugly marketing. Like I can’t even explain how or why. I just hate that it exists.
Cutest effing packaging, evar. I am not the only onewhohasnoticedthis. (Most of those are, like, sewing blogs, too. I’m a stereotype.) Also, though, yumtastic. The Red Rice Ale FANTASTIC. And I just cannot bear to throw away one of these caps. Someday I will find something cute to do with them.
Also, it is my great sadness to have to alert you to a beer tragedy:
Is this the beginning of my downward spiral??? (Or was that the Nutella?) But tonight – arg – I appologize! Tonight I simply do not have a photo of What I Ate for Dinner Tonight!! I do have this, if it helps:
That’s right! For dinner tonight I had cake! And beer. Not undergrads. Though they were present at the time, and I’m nearly positive that at least two of them were flirting with me. Like six if you count the ones who weren’t reeeeaaally flirting with me, but hugged me, anyway. It was a work party. (Then I why am I so drunk, you ask? Shut up, I say.)
Also:
Those are underpants!! What is happening to my neighborhood! Or, at least, what happened like two days ago that I somehow missed??
You know how pretty much everything is healthier if you make it yourself from scratch? So, does that mean that our dinner of butter, bread, and beer was healthy? (Ian has a cute thing about how all of his favorite foods are made by microorganisms. Ask him about it. Someday when I’m not around to have to listen to it.)
Anyway, inspired by this post which was inspired by this post, I’ve made this post. Apparently you can make butter. Who knew? All you have to do is make a bonnet and live in 1832 and OH HAI WE BOUGHT A STAND MIXER FINALLY. All you do is stick some cream in there and then fall asleep from boredom.
First it becomes whipped cream:
Then it becomes ruined whipped cream:
Then it “seizes.” You can see the buttermilk just beginning to separate.
Then it suddenly all the sudden changes from “gross thick cream substance” into “butter” and “buttermilk.” The buttermilk tasted exactly like skim milk. The butter still tasted like cream, actually.
Pour off the milk and save it! I guess. Then knead the butter in cold water, like bread dough. It’s gross.
Blerg.
Whip that shit some more, and add some salt. Edible!
Ian made bread to go with it. Bread is kind of gross-looking, too. I guess this post is awfully full of gross, for a bunch of things that tasted really fucking delicious. Anyway, dough in the mixer looks alive. It’s weird.
And risen dough feels like old-person skin.
And sometimes this happens when you’re making bread.
<ian> Not that I really have to justify fellating a baguette on the internet… but in case you’re interested, I was having trouble stretching the dough out by hand, so I decided to utilize gravity as you see in the video. </ian>
(Incidentally, this is a joke that gets made every single time we have a loaf of bread shaped like this in the house. It’s never not funny, right? Right?)
Not gross! But weird – this is just out of the oven. You can hear it crackling.
Ian doubts the veracity of most of this.
<ian> Verdict? Oh, man, SOOOO much better than my first attempt at a baguette. The texture still isn’t quite there, and I’d like to work on the crust a bit, but it was all in all quite good bread. The butter was pretty good, too, though next time I’d like to try it with some underground unpasteurized cream. Incidentally, the beer there was the first sixer of my fourth batch, which just finished bottle conditioning. It’s a California common ale made with an East Coast yeast strain rather than the usual California ale variant. Zymurgy! </ian>
It was called East Coast Elitist Ale. And I don’t know what he’s talking about with the crust – it was really effing good as it was.
Ian and I have long had this idea for a restaurant called “Ian V Jessica.” We would have two versions of everything on the menu: one made by him, and one made by me. You could order one version or the other, or a half-and-half plate. For instance, the Ian grilled cheese would be super-fancy expensive cheese on fancy bread with goofball pink dead sea salt or something, and mine would be just the perfect extra-buttery fried-ass grilled cheese with sliced Kraft on white. But, like, they aren’t all just “Jessica likes trashy white Midwestern crap” dichotomies. Like, Ian mashed potatoes would have green onions in them, and mine would have a bunch of sour cream and wasabi. Or his pancakes would have pepper in the batter and be covered in sour cream and hot sauce and cheddar cheese, and mine wouldn’t be totally retarded. Etc.
Anyway! Tonight we tried our first Ian V Jessica experiment! The whole point of the restaurant, obviously, is to see who wins. The contest tonight was one of bartendership: Gin!
Ian’s recipe: The Curious Case of the Cucumber-Cantaloupe Cocktail!
Extract cucumber and cantaloupe juice as follows. Finely dice two cucumbers and half a cantaloupe, adding each to separate pans. Heat until the fruit breaks down a bit, and then blend in a blender and run through a sieve. Put in freezer for a few minutes to cool off the juice. Add one shot of each to one shot of gin with a touch of fresh lime juice and half a shot of tonic water.
It was totally grainy and kind of not very good.
<ian> Arg… TOTAL FAIL. The problem is that I have successfully used the above method to extract grape juice from old grapes, so I assumed it would work for cucumbers and cantaloupes. This made an ass of mostly me. Whereas the grapes don’t have pulp, these fruits were pulp-tastic, and the extracted product was riddled with it. I might have been able to further filter it, but I didn’t bother. I suck. </ian>
I think the tonic water was part of the problem, too. He said he wanted it to add some sparkle and carbonation, but the quinine flavor didn’t work with the fruit. Ginger ale might have been better?
Jessica’s recipe: Jubilee Gin Mojito!
Make a mint-infused honey simple syrup by boiling one cup of honey, half a cup of water, and a handful of half-crushed mint leaves for a while, then cooling it down. Crush a couple mint leaves at the bottom of a glass. Add a shot or two of gin, a half-shot of lime juice, a half-shot of cherry juice, and a half-shot of honey simple syrup, and stir. Fill glass with ginger ale.
Then drink it, joyfully, because it is SO GOOD.
Jessica FTW! The mint-honey simple syrup (which I keep trying to spell “symple syrup,” incidentally) and the cherry juice were both things I’ve never tried before and were superyummy.
Now to just try to find a way to make the mango-black-pepper vodka we bought last week palatable….
Yesterday was the day we’ve all been waiting for! Yes, that’s right! BEER DAY!!
You have to dress up for Beer Day.
Ian poured the first glass.
<ian> I must admit, I was a bit worried about the in-bottle secondary fermentation, but it apparently worked like a charm. Look at all that carbonation!!! BEER DAY!!! </ian>
But then he let me taste it first!
It was good!
<ian> It was!!! I mean, it certainly wasn’t the best I’ve ever had, or really anywhere near the best. It was, though, perfectly respectable as a mid-range wheat. It needed a bit of citrus, though. Maybe next time I’ll add some lemon or some grains of paradise. The lesson learned from brewing this batch is that even the bare-bones, frill-free boiled extract method produces something decent to drink. I can’t wait to see how my next two batches turn out… more later! </ian>
Other than that, it’s mostly waiting. …A lot of waiting. Did you know that making beer actually takes the lifetimes of four natural-born men? It’s a beer fact!
So anyway – Ian got a bunch of beer-making equipment for Saturnalia this year.
<ian> BEST GIFT EVER! </ian>
(I told this to some of my co-workers. One of them said something like, “Oh, once he realizes how much work it is, he’ll get bored and never make a second batch,” and I replied, “Well, I dunno – he’s a scientist and a cook, so he seems to be enjoying it.” And a third woman hissed vehemently, “You hold on to him!” like I was Rachael McAdams or something.) The first batch he made was from a kit (actually, the first two were, but we’ll get to that later…). It was for a simple American wheat beer, pre-hopped, which, though I’m sure Ian will step in here and explain what it really means, means, basically, it was made by boiling cans of sticky goo, rather than boiling bags of flaked barley and hops and stuff.
<ian> That’s pretty close. The fact that we’re boiling with cans of sticky goo just means that we’re “extract brewing.” This means that rather than extracting sugars from malted grain directly (called “mashing”), we’re using a syrupy reduction of extracted sugars produced at a huge facility somewhere (in this case, Australia). The “pre-hopped” term indicates that hops (floral plants that add bitter flavor and aroma) were added at the facility, so we don’t have to include any in the brew process at home. Extracted malt is also available in a dried, powder form that tastes remarkably similar to malt powder that you’d put in a malted milkshake. </ian>
This was malt-wheat-extract.
<ian> I.e. extract made from malted wheat rather than malted barley. For the record, “malting” essentially means getting the newly harvested grains wet and then warming them up in order to get them germinating, which produces enzymes capable of breaking down the sugars contained in the grains. Without this, there would be no sugar for the yeasties to gorge upon. </ian>
This stuff smelled like sweet-syrup-bread, which maybe sounds stupid because it’s obvious, but it smelled so good we practically wanted to eat it on waffles.* And this stuff was malted barley, which also smelled really sweet and edible:
Anyway, you boil all that up for a while, then cool it down in an ice bath to a temperature where yeast can live, then dump it into a giant jar and add water.
<ian> The giant jar is called a carboy. The soapy looking foam on the top there is actually leftover sanitizer that was used to make the carboy a place where the yeast would be the dominant species. The cool thing about the sanitizer I used is that it’s edible and doesn’t affect flavors, so you actually leave it in the carboy like that. If you were to wash it out, you would run the risk of recontaminating. </ian>
Next comes adding the yeast, which is called “pitching the yeast,” which is cute…
<ian> For this first batch I used a dried yeast pack. Like with packs of bread yeast you buy at the grocery store, this is just yeast in stasis. They have to wake up and start their life cycle once they’re dumped in the wort (the pre-pitching brew liquid). </ian>
…and then…well, then the waiting begins.
Here is our beer the next morning. Look how dark it is, and look at the giant stripe of heavy malt that settled on the bottom there. You might also barely be able to see a thin stripe of what I guess is yeast above the malt? And no bubbles at the top yet, because the yeast haven’t yet had time to really wake up.
<ian> My subsequent batches didn’t have this band of malt on the bottom because I used a much larger volume of water in the boiling process. The kit instructed me to only use a gallon and a half for boiling and dissolving the malt extract, which means I then had to add three and a half gallons after cooling. This, I think, is what led to the weird band structure here. </ian>
Once the yeast do wake up, they start eating the sugar in the malt and farting out alcohol and carbon dioxide, or something. The gas that they fart out has to go somewhere, or else the glass jar will explode, but you can’t just leave it lidless, because right now the beer is very, very vulnerable to bacteria and stuff. So you use this awesome airlock thing, which I guess is
By that night (day two), the layer of malt was heavily eaten away, there was a bunch of dead yeast corpses and poop there on the bottom, and the whole thing was much lighter-colored and very cloudy.
<ian> Oh, man, it was awesome how quickly the yeast tore through that layer of malt. On the second day the layer went from two inches thick to about an inch, and by day three it was gone altogether. By the way, the layer of foamy junk on the top is called “krausen,” and the layer of yeast and junk on the bottom in called “trub.” Mmmm… jargony!</ian>
<ian> As the yeast do their thing, they release millions and millions of little bubbles of carbon dioxide. These run up the sides of the carboy and make the whole thing look like an enormous bottle of champaign. The carbon dioxide then collects at the top of the carboy and exits through the airlock, as you can see in this video. The airlock is totally ingenious; it uses water and two nested pieces of plastic to let gas out but not in. </ian>
When the bubbling in the airlock has slowed to less than a bubble per two minutes, we bottled it.
The first step, as you can see, was to transfer it into a giant bucket. I think my favorite part of this whole process was the sight of a GIANT FUCKING BUCKET OF BEER sitting my goddamned kitchen. (As you may also notice, this step, too, required beer-drinking.)
<ian> We added a bit of priming sugar (a corn sugar that the yeast like better than regular table sugar) to the bucket in order to turn on secondary bottle fermentation, which carbonates the beer in the bottle. </ian>
Then we transferred it to bottles. Lots and lots of bottles.
Oh so many bottles.
<ian> We got 12 22 ounce bottles and 23 12 ounces filled from this batch. We would have gotten somewhat more, but I screwed with the siphon when it was near the bottom, which caused it to stop. Then I couldn’t get it started again. I’m lame. </ian>
(Here, incidentally, a close-up of yeast corpses and poop:)
We couldn’t fill the last bottle completely, so we decided to taste it.
It was warm and flat, obviously (the carbonation happens in the bottles), but – it totally tasted like beer!
<ian> I turned water into beer. I’m kinda like Jesus, but with better pants. It seems to taste a lot like Boulevard Wheat, which makes me quite happy. The secondary fermentation takes about two weeks in the bottles, so we still haven’t tasted it yet. I CANNOT WAIT. </ian>
* Okay – full disclosure – the next morning, we did eat it on waffles. Not really as good as anticipated, though also not bad.
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