Fermentation Nation- Beer Bread

Bread is nice. Beer is better. This was quick (for bread) and easy (for bread) Good Eats recipe. There is no extra yeast, or rising time, or kneading.

The goods! Please note the thick grated cheese. This cheese should be grated by you! Don't buy shredded cheese- it has cornstarch added to it to prevent it from sticking together and that stucks. Don't be that person, shred your own!

All purpose flour and whole wheat flour are added by weight because we do things the Alton Brown way here.

Baking soda, salt, sugar and dried thyme...because fresh is harder to fine. Alton used a whisk to mix this up and incorporate the grated cheese.

 Now for the fun and fizzy part! We used Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. It was delicious.

First a glass for myself.

 And then one to the dry goods.

And fold together as quickly as possible. I don't know why but AB says to. Quick hands!

 Baked for less than an hour but don't get excited. This sucker takes for-ev-ver to cool down.

And then you have to cool it again. But its totally cool to pick at the bits in the back.

And finally. Bread. Beer bread. Cheesy beer bread. It was good by itself and even better with beer. Absolutely no butter needed.

We paired with butter garlic sausage, homegrown mustard greens, and Steven's homemade IPA (one of the last ones!)

Henry ate carrots frozen into the shape of a shot glass. Because shot glass molds are the only ice cube trays I have. Classy.

Beer Bread by Alton Brown

I followed the above recipe aside from using dried thyme instead of fresh because I couldn't find it and I had already been to the grocery store twice. I also used a smudge more cheese because I'm a woman of action!

I plan on making this again over the Thanksgiving holiday. We are celebrating with my in-laws a day late with a hearty soup instead of the traditional turkey. When I make it again I'm going to mix the dry ingredients up really well before adding beer. I kept finding baking powder pockets in the bread. Rookie mistake. 

Age of Asparagus - Steamed Asparagus

Alternate title: The Cop Out

This is so easy it feels like cheating. But it is so good! But it is so easy! I'm not even a giant fan of asparagus but we are going to be making it a lot more now. Its there-isn't-even-pots-to-clean easy.

I have no idea if this is a pound of asparagus. Its a lot of asparagus. I already cut the ends off at this point and I cut a generous amount off. I hate the ends

So pretty.

Just wrap the asparagus up in a wet paper towel, sprinkle some salt, and nuke it for around five minutes. Alton Brown says three to four minutes for a pound of asparagus. But I think I had more than a pound in there and I hate when asparagus is stringy so I upped the time to five. This is literally the easiest thing I have ever done.

 The microwave gets really steamy which is totally the point. 

This was cooked really well. There was no mush on the tops like what happens when I try to steam these over a pot of boiling water. I thought the ends were still a bit too fibrous so I didn't eat the last inch but my husband did. We used this as a side for salmon and it went well together. My husband also had a banana nut muffin which didn't go as well....obvi. No pots were used in this entire meal so clean up was minimal.

Total Time: um like seven minutes? not even.

Steamed Asparagus by Alton Brown

Roh-Ruh

H has become increasingly clingy and will only allow me to hold him, so any cooking adventures have been on the back burner lately (heh).   I've been reluctantly letting H nap on me and in an attempt to make those quiet hours productive, have made a progress sheet of the Good Eat's recipes. 

Holy crap AB cooks a ton.  I knew there were 14 seasons of Good Eats but had no idea how much food this blog will eventually hold. There are about 630 recipes on food network dot com for the show. That is an overwhelming amount of Good Eats. We have just started and already I feel in over my head. Easy tiger, this is all just for fun. 

This is H in lieu of any food. The photo was taken with a camera much better than mine by a photographer much better than me so don't think the quality of pictures are going to get better around here. They aren't.

Happy eating!