Eating My Wife's Sweet Warm Pie

...with ice cream. It's one of my favorite things to do...

Kick-Ass Steak and Stout Pie

The last 48+ hours of ball-freezing weather we received in Boston has really been an experience. We had hoped Saturday to travel south to Somerset to my cousin's annual Christmas Caroling Party but the 24+ hours of winter storm prior to the party left me little doubt that the safe play was to stay off the highways for 60+ mile drives. Damn. I was looking forward to the food, the beer, the company, the beer, the glogg, the beer, the caroling, the beer, the whiskey, the beer, and the beer.

As a humble donation to the festivities, we had made a steak and stout pie. It's one of my favorite dishes, great pub food, and perfect on a cold winter's day. We have a recipe we use, and it is not written down at all. Until now. I will tell you up front. Make this. It is so good, you won't know whether you should eat it or hump it.

You'll need:

1 lb top round, cut into bite sized pieces
4 strips bacon, chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
2 large carrots, cut into bite-sized pieces
2 tbsp all purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1 tbsp light brown sugar
1 tbsp worcestershire sauce
8 oz stout
Broth - beef or chicken
Pastry - either short crust or puff pastry.


Fry bacon and onions together until the onions are done (translucent, but not browned). Remove and set aside, leaving as much fat in the pan as possible. Working with the big iron skillet, I needed to add some olive oil to make sure I'd have enough to brown the beef. Mix flour, salt and pepper in a large bowl.


Dredge the beef in the flour mixture and immediately place in the hot oil to brown. When browned, return bacon and onions to the pan. In this case, I transferred the entire contents of the skillet (including the brown crusty bits - they make it yummy! - to a large pot. Add carrots, worcestershire sauce and stout, and then add broth to just cover. Set heat to medium and simmer for several hours. We cooked this one for about three hours, but we've done this previously when we simmered it all day; the longer you can leave the mixture on, the better! Replenish liquid - using either broth or water - as it cooks off. We find the carrots are a good thing - if the stout you use is an overly dry kind (like Guinness Extra) the sugars in the carrots will balance it out nicely. Plus, they allow you to say "Hey, this is healthy...see? I put carrots in!" The brown sugar is optional and can be used to cut the bitterness of the gravy if you wish. We haven't done that before, but we were using particularly strong stout (the final, flat 8 oz of the Poszharnik Imperial Stout) and it needed it, so after about 90 min of simmering we put it in. When done, you want to have a rich, thick (I mean thick!), dark filling - then it's ready to put in the oven.


My favorite way to do this is to make a deep-dish, two-crust pie with a traditional short crust. This time we simply put it in a baking dish, covered it with pre-made puff pastry, brushed it with milk and put it in a 400° oven until the crust was done. We had to cover the edges with foil after about 30 minutes to keep them from over-browning.


It's great as the meat in a "meat and three". Enjoy with a nice, hoppy ale. Tremendously satisfying, as the last steak and stout pie I had was a pre-made frozen one in a "pub" near the hotel I was staying at across the road from Heathrow Airport in October. Very disappointing to be in England and get a piece of crap like that!


This recipe will serve four. Two if you want seconds. One if you're a pig. I didn't have seconds yesterday, but I did polish off the last two servings (like a piggy) today. The coffee flavors in the Pozharnik was evident in the gravy, I was surprised to taste it, but even more surprised that it really enhanced the flavor of the whole dish.

Apple Crisp, Imperial Stout and Quantum Theory

I'm a sucky photographer in general, but believe me, it tastes awesome! I haven't done a food post in a while, and as I'm too distracted to do much else, that's what you get to read tonight...

My wife made an amazing apple cobbler last night. So amazing that between her, my son and I we nearly wiped it out. We ate it in an "English" style, pouring fresh cream over it, though we lamented the lack of vanilla ice cream. Today, when I was shopping for some din-din, I bought some vanilla ice cream.

Plain vanilla ice cream is good, but it's best when you have something warm and baked to eat with it. Since I din't feel like making a crust for a pie, I decided to make an apple crisp since it's soooooooo simple.

Filling:
2.5 lbs apples (we used 2 each cortlands, red romes, and honey crisps) - peeled, cored and sliced
2 tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/2 c brown sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp freshly ground nutmeg

Crisp:
1/3 c each of flour, sugar, rolled oats
1/2 stick butter (cold, unsoftened)

Toss apples and lemon juice. Mix brown sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg, add to apple/lemon mixture and toss to coat. Combine dry ingredients. Cut up the butter and cut into mixture until you get a crumbly mix. By the time you're done cutting the butter in, the apple mixture should be nice and wet, with a small puddle of syrupy mixture in the bottom of the bowl. Put the apples in a buttered baking dish, sprinkle the crisp mix on top, and pop in a 375-degree oven for 45 minutes or until golden brown. Serve warm with ice cream. Repeat as necessary.

Found here and modified only slightly.

BEER UPDATE:
The Pozharnik Imperial Stout is absolutely UNBELIEVABLE. Most aromas are pretty muted, but the taste is great - initially chocolaty and roasty, with some toffee-like notes, then a hint of sweet vanilla and a finish that brings out the oak and whiskey of the barrels it was aged in. Drink chilled, not cold, the character changes wonderfully as it warms. In a wine glass or snifter. I opened it yesterday, resealed and continued today. Most of the carbonation is gone (evident in the photo), but it's still amazing to drink. This is my holiday brew. I am definitely getting some of this to cellar for a year.

OH WAITAMINIT!!! Look at today's history note. It's the 108th birthday of Planck's Theory that the energy of a photon is quantized and proportional to it's frequency. E=hν baby!!! Without ol' Max, we wouldn't have this here blogging thingy we love so much...

Holiday Platters Now Available!

That's right, Thanksgiving is right around the corner, and Christmas and New Year's after that! And what holiday party would be complete without a Holiday Platter from Cthulhu's Family Restaurant?

My first Photoshop project...I was looking at a Play-Doh cutter that my kids had - a pineapple shaped one, and thought it would look a bit like Cthulhu if it were inverted. So I went with it and made a "Cthulhu head". Then I put it on a cracker with some cheese and voila - a Lovecraftian Hors D'ouvre! Photo courtesy of my wife.

Enjoy!

This Thursday, You Can Shove Your Carbon Footprint Up Your Ass

Did you know that stuffing with sausage generates 4x the carbon of vegetarian stuffing? That pie a la mode is not environmentally correct?

Thanksgiving is, generally, not an environmentally friendly holiday. But it can be.

Hey, at least I can drink wine from Europe and not feel bad about it. So I'm going to make sure I do the wrong thing and drink wine from Australia - wine that has to come here by ship and then drive across country. Oh, and screw the environmentally friendly Thanksgiving. I want to eat a shitload, drink, watch football, and pass gas. You know, that methane stuff all the cows are already making from feeding them the corn that they are not genetically designed to eat.

But seriously, this article makes me think...

The modern industrial food chain seems ridiculously unsustainable. From both the production and consumption side. Each calorie of food produced (non-organic, though "big market" organic isn't a whole lot better!) consumes 10 calories in petroleum energy - in fertilizer, in transportation, in packaging, you name it. That's a lot of energy if everyone in America was just consuming the average daily requirements posted in the article. But since when has America done that? The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows that Americans consumed nearly 4000 calories a day on average in 2000-2002. Think that number's gone down in the last six years? Now I'm not pointing fingers or being holier than thou - I will readily admit that I can consume with the best of them - but that is simply ridiculous.

I'm not even thinking about carbon footprint here, just the total amount of petroleum energy that gets used producing 4000 x 300,000,000 = 300 BILLION calories of food a day (by my very presumptive swag) or more, considering how much gets thrown out. And I'm thinking about the known health impacts of over-consumption on the average individual, given that America is a mostly sedentary nation.

We're turning fossil fuel into heart disease - the number one killer in this country. We're killing ourselves with the stuff and it has nothing to do with carbon footprints or air quality. And we are most likely going to continue down this path of production (sorry folks, alternative energy right now probably will NOT be able to sustain food levels needed to feed the country). So, we'll pay more and more for oil (just wait, when the economy starts to recover, these nice sub-$2 gas prices will disappear faster than a drunk co-ed's virginity at spring break) and then we are going to collectively pay huge sums to insure everyone against the ill effects of all the oil we're feeding them.

Depressing.

It's so freaking obvious, but it had never really smacked me in the face that our costs for health care - insofar as paying for treatment for all the obesity-related illnesses that come from over consumption - are tied to petroleum consumption. We eat more and more and more food, sustaining demand for food and driving petroleum prices up (again, assume recovered economy), and at the same time increasing our own financial burden to treat the ill effects.

It would seem to me that the most important part of national health care would be national health. It's going to take more than a federal program to create that. It's going to take a complete shift in the way we think as a people; we do not have a preventive mentality. Some of us do. If we did as a country, we wouldn't be eating 4000 calories a day, we'd be exercising more, we wouldn't need so much goddam gas just to feed ourselves, and we'd be in the hospital less often, not paying as much for health care, and the cost for a basic "national health care" might not be such a big concern.

Just sayin'.

Still...screw yourselves, WaPo. Interesting article, but don't crap all over my thanksgiving. At least one or two days a year, I want sausage in my stuffing and ice cream on my pie.

Gobble, gobble.

Who'll come a-waltzing matilda with me?

Today has always been an important day in our home, especially for my wife, Sarah. 25 April is ANZAC Day, the day the Australia-New Zealand Army Corps landed in Anzac Cove on Gallipoli in a long and ill-fated campaign to knock Turkey out of the First World War.

The landing and the next five days would cost the ANZACs nearly 5,000 killed, missing or wounded, and the entirety of the campaign would claim nearly 9,000 ANZAC casualties. Just a tiny fraction of the nearly 340,000 combined casualties that the next eight months would bring, but the impact of those 9,000 is still seen today.

Two war correspondents, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett and Charles Bean, by documenting and this and other endeavors of the Australian troops, are largely credited with giving birth to the Anzac Spirit

The Anzac spirit or Anzac legend is a concept which suggests that Australian and New Zealand soldiers possess shared national characteristics, specifically the qualities those soldiers are believed to have shown in World War I. These qualities cluster around several ideas, including endurance, courage, ingenuity, good humour, and mateship. According to this concept, the soldiers are perceived to have been innocent and fit, stoical and laconic, irreverent in the face of authority, naturally egalitarian and disdainful of British class differences.

The Anzac spirit also tends to capture the idea of an Australian "national character", with the landing at Anzac Cove often described as being the moment of birth of Australia's nationhood.

Correspondingly, ANZAC Day is a big day there. It typically starts with a Dawn Service at a local war memorial or other prominent place.

The Dawn Service observed on ANZAC Day has its origins in an operational routine which is still observed by the Australian Army today. During battle, the half-light of dawn was one of the most favoured times for an attack. Soldiers in defensive positions were, therefore, woken up in the dark, before dawn, so by the time first light crept across the battlefield they were awake, alert, and manning their weapons. This was, and still is, known as "stand-to". It was also repeated at sunset.

After the First World War, returned soldiers sought the comradeship they felt in those quiet, peaceful moments before dawn. With symbolic links to the dawn landing at Gallipoli, a dawn stand-to or ceremony became a common form of ANZAC Day remembrance during the 1920s; the first official dawn service was held at the Sydney Cenotaph in 1927. Dawn services were originally very simple and followed the operational ritual. In many cases they were restricted to veterans only and the daytime ceremony was for families and other well-wishers. Before dawn the gathered veterans would be ordered to "stand to" and two minutes' silence would follow. At the end of this time a lone bugler would play the Last Post and then concluded the service with Reveille. In more recent times the families and young people have been encouraged to take part in dawn services, and services in Australian capital cities have seen some of the largest turnouts ever. Reflecting this change, the ceremonies have become more elaborate, incorporating hymns, readings, pipers, and rifle volleys. Others, though, have retained the simple format of the dawn stand-to, familiar to so many soldiers.

I attended a dawn service eight years ago, when Sarah and I were in Cairns for her sister's wedding. Everyone was there - ages 5 to 85 - reflecting on the tragic event that gave birth to their "national character". It was a truly moving experience, and one that I can see no parallel to here in the United States.

The day is just as significant in Turkey. Dawn services are also held at Anzac Cove itself; this year's was attended by ten thousand Australians, New Zealanders and Turks. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the first President of the post-Ottoman Turkish Republic, was in command of the Turkish forces at Anzac Cove, as a Colonel.

In 1934 Atatürk wrote a tribute to the ANZACs killed at Gallipoli:

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours... you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land. They have become our sons as well.

This inscription appears on the Kemal Atatürk Memorial, ANZAC Parade, Canberra.

In the past, we would usually recognize ANZAC Day by having a dinner of traditional Australian fare - rack of lamb, with potato, pumpkin, and vegetables, and a pavlova for dessert. We'll also listen to Australian music - from folk (like The Aussie Bush Band) to rock (like Cold Chisel, whose lead singer, Jimmy Barnes sings "Good Times" with INXS on the Lost Boys soundtrack).

This year, it kind of got away from us, with everything going on. And that bugs me, for two reasons. First, it's a large part of Sarah's identity; she is a proud Australian, and as happy as we are together, the separation she endures from her home still weighs heavy upon her after 11 years. We also want our children to take as much pride in their Australian heritage as their Lebanese and American heritage. Lastly, it means a lot to me because, as I said, we don't appear to have anything here that parallels ANZAC Day here in America where we, as a nation, take the time to really reflect on our national identity and at what price it was bought. The direct, practiced link between history and today is not ingrained. I felt some of that on Patriot's Day eve, when I attended the Old North Church lantern lighting ceremony, but name the three (yep, that's it...three!) states that recognize Patriot's Day (I mean the anniversary of Paul Revere's ride...not 9-11!).

Wow...it's not even ANZAC Day anymore...does that mean I need to delete without posting?

On a final note, I mentioned we listen to Australian music on ANZAC Day. A big part of it is this song - "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" - written in 1972 by Eric Bogle,

describing the futility, gruesome reality and the destruction of war, while criticising those who seek to glorify it. This is exemplified in the song by the account of a young Australian soldier on his maiming during the Battle of Gallipoli during the First World War.

It can be tough to get through with dry eyes, but it is a beautiful piece.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

-Laurence Binyon

This Week's Special - Pancakes

Sunday has been pancake day in the household for quite some time. Pancakes, eggs, bacon, juice, coffee, the whole ball of wax.

It started simple (and mediocre) with Bisquick Shake 'n Pour or some crap like that, until about three years ago when we traded my wife's sugar cookie recipe for my boss' pancake recipe. That ancient manuscript has long since disappeared, but it is simple enough to remember.

2 cups all purpose flour
1/8 cup sugar
2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
2-1/4 cups buttermilk
2 eggs

Blend liquid ingredients. Sift dry ingredients. Add dry to liquid, mix until slightly lumpy. Cook on greased griddle. I typically use 2 cups buttermilk and 1/4 cup skim milk, simply because it stretches one pint of buttermilk through two weeks. I like my batter a little thin, so I always splash in a little extra milk.

I have a great anodized griddle, but it's getting really old...I need to replace it. And my stove is electric, which I hate - gas very much preferred.

Simple. Which is good. And the best ph00k1ng pancakes you'll ever eat, with a couple of eggs over medium (fried in butter) and some oven-fried bacon. Definitely only a once-a-week treat. I like throwing some blueberries in them - fresh is always better, but I'll take frozen.

Pix on flickr to follow.

Next week's special - RIBS! Those of you attending the Gary Gygax Memorial Game Day (GGMGD) will see what I mean.