The Cider Experiment

Happy at how the first batch of cider turned out, we decided to lay down not one but two bottles of cider. One was the same "Simply Apple" Apple Juice and the other was Mott's Fruitsations Apple Juice (I checked, it was clam blood free). For the "Simply Apple" we used Morgan's Lager Yeast. We'd read that lager yeast provided a more cider-y flavour and said "Hey, why not." For the Fruitsations, we decided to try an experiment and added honey and cinnamon to it, while using the champagne yeast from last time. For that one, we decided to do the balloon trick for an airlock – a white balloon with a pinhole in it. The fact that it's white will have some later significance. We had added more water than we were supposed to the yeast last time, so this time we added just enough. It turned the yeast into a solid (a colloid?) and made it very difficult to scope the yeast into the cider. That done, we put them downstairs in the closet.



Soon after I had the following conversation with my roommate.
Roommate (excitedly): I have a great new idea. Can I use some of your friend's honey to make fermented honey?!
Me: You mean mead?
Roommate: Mead?
Me: Yeah, that's what that's called.
Roommate: Nerds. I thought I had invented that.

As you saw above, there was a lot of fermentation in the experimental bottle and a bunch of the cinnamon had been kicked up into the balloon itself. However, when the balloon had deflated enough we decided to try it. It was gross. Like really gross. It tasted watery and sharp and bitter and a grim parody of cinnamoness. An idea struck me and I added some of my roommate's mead to it. It still wasn't great, but it really complemented it well. The mead filled out the watery taste and took away the bitterness. Seeing inspiration, we dumped in the rest of the mead and capped the bottle.

We decided to taste the other bottle and it was actually pretty good. It tasted more like cider than the first batch did, with a nice crisp apple taste and a gentle fizz.

Heartened by the good cider, we decided to check on the experimental cider. When we opened the lid, it vesuviused all over the place. I starred at it in horror for a couple of seconds as it foamed all over my floor. I suppose we should've predicted it. After the foam out, we tasted it and it was even grosser. So we threw it out.

We have since drank all our cider, but we have part 3 fermenting downstairs as I write this. We used lager yeast and a bit of honey, so we'll see how it turns out.

I knew a girl and her name was Julie...

I was on a plane recently (Perceptive readers may be able to guess where from) and so had a bunch of movies to chose from to watch. I ended up watching Julie & Julia or, as it might be titled, Women With Supportive Husbands Learn About Food And Their Feelings. Snark aside, I did enjoy it. The movie follows Julia Child and Julie Powell. One of them is a famous chef who served in the OSS in China during WWII, wrote a groundbreaking cookbook and became, perhaps, the first television cook. The other is a food blogger. So there is a bit of a disparity in terms of interestingness – certainly I did muse during my viewing that it might have been more interesting as a Julia Child biopic rather than cutting back and forth with Ms. Powell.

Still, as a food blogger, it is kinda neat to see a movie about a fellow food blogger. Now, in terms of blogging we are very different: she scorns vegetarians and I think she uses way too much butter and other unhealthy stuff [also, she had lots of readers --ed]. It is interesting what the movie shows about this type of blogging though. Her blog had a schtick, she would make every recipe in Julia Child's cookbook. That means that her blog had a lot more influence on her life than mine does. It's really a tail wagging the dog type thing, where she is always preparing meals to suit her blog. I don't really do that, if I haven't made an interesting bloggable item than I'd do something like, y'know, put up a post about a movie I saw. That said, I have made some meals to have something to blog about when I otherwise would have made something simpler.

The movie also shins a light on the inherent narcissism of blogging. Although, if you think about it, there is an inherent narcissism in writing. At least with food blogging you get, say, a recipe for chickpea soup rather than "Putting my tweets on facebook! #twitter #facebook". Julie becomes more and more obsessed with the blog and her readership that she neglects the real life relationship she has with her husband. I don't really have any comparable incidents, though I do like looking through the site statistics to see where my readers are coming from.

Amy Adams did a good job as Julie Powell and Meryl Streep did an excellent Julia Child. There was a lot of physical comedy just based on Child's height relative to everyone else. The food looked good too, there was an interesting article in The Atlantic by the person who made the food for the movie on her tricks of the trade (though I would be interesting how they did the scene where Julia Child cuts a small mountain of onion). I don't know if it's as entertaining as this (I linked there before, but it's still funny).

The House Cider Rules

My roommate has been thinking about making alcohol for a while. I like the sentiment, but beer seemed like it required too much of an infrastructure to start. Plus, we don't have a basement that could absorb any hypothetical explosion. Just when things seemed darkest for the possibility of homemade alcohol I discovered The Paupered Chef's three part series on making hard cider (Parts I, II and III).

Not a lot was required: apple juice, yeast, a container and an "airlock". An airlock is a mechanism that lets gas come out of the container while stopping bacteria from getting into it. A balloon with a pinprick in it could suffice and, as that sounded whimsical, we decided to make that our airlock.

So now we needed to go out and buy these products. We went to the Valumart to buy the apple juice, it would have to be one without preservatives. I originally misremembered this as without pasteurization which, as you can except, was not being sold. After a while of looking, I realized that everything in the store was going to be pasteurized and we ended up getting a 1.75 L bottle of "Simply Apple" Apple Juice. We also got a pack of balloons and, unrelated to this post but still pretty cool, a 10 lb sack of potatoes for $2. We weren't sure where to get yeast and briefly toyed with the idea of using baker's yeast. Thankfully, my friend Emma's dad pointed us to Danny's Wine and Beer Suppliers which is on the bus line.

I was in class all day, so my roommate ventured out to Danny's to purchase the yeast. We got Lalvin EC-1118 Champagne yeast (or, rather, yeast from the Champagne region). While there he decided to spend a few bucks to make an airlock, so we ended up not using the balloons after all. The mouth of the Simply Apple bottle was too big for the airlock, so we cleaned out an old pop bottle and poured the juice into there. Then we activated the yeast, which involves adding some warm water and waiting for about 15 minutes. The yeast packages are intended for bigger batches than we had, so there was a lot of improvised math. We erred on the side of too much yeast, because the supply of sugar was fixed and that was what was important. Just meant more sludge. So we tipped in the yeast, and let it ferment!

It was always fun opening up the closet we stored it in and watching the bubbles. Still, there was a bit of a pungent smell in said closet which did not bode well for the future. After a week was up, we opened it up and decided to taste it.

It was... actually pretty good. It tasted like a dry white wine with a hint of apples and, at least in the beginning, a nice fizz. Several of my friends tried it and expressed surprise that 1) it wasn't terrible and 2) that we did not go blind. It was especially gratifying even the slapdash way we went about making it. It's almost all gone now, but tomorrow we're probably going to get some more apple juice.

What will we do differently? Well, the way we did it wasn't terribly cost effective. It was a test run so we used a smallish bottle. For the next time we'll buy a bigger bottle of apple juice. Also, instead of champagne yeast we'll try lager yeast, which apparently creates a more cidery type flavour. We're also thinking about adding some honey to one of the batches to see what happens with the extra sugar and honey flavour. It's pretty good honey too – given to me by my friend Megan from her family bee farm. Maybe we'll ferment these ones in sanitized wine bottles to give it a classier touch than a pop bottle. Whatever we do, I'm looking forward to experimenting more with cider.

Restaurant: Samuel's by the Park

Perhaps the oddest thing about Samuel's is their wine pricing scheme: glasses cost less than bottles. Now, that statement by itself is obvious: of course, a glass of wine is going to cost less than a bottle. The surprise at Samuel's is that the relative cost is cheaper. You get 4-5 glasses per bottle and, for example, a glass of Jackson-Triggs costs $6 and a bottle costs $33. Even if we go for the higher 5 glasses per bottle, it still costs $3 less to get the equivalent amount of wine in glass form.

But aside from the oddity of the wine pricing (and, for the record, I did not get the Jackson-Triggs) you might wonder how the food was. That question is hard for me to answer, as I'm not really the target audience for this restaurant. The place is not what you would call "vegetarian friendly" as the dinner menu has no vegetarian options. Now, I was here at a big family dinner (17 people) so they had set up a prix fixe menu for us, which did include a vegetarian entree.

The bread they brought out was good, but the olive tapenade that accompanied it was amazing. Definitely the best I've ever had. So often they're too oily or too salty, but this was perfect. I checked the prix fixe menu, which had been printed out for all us on paper. It had "Mr. [one of my last name's] Menu" at the top, which made me think that I was sitting in my uncle's chair. After a moment's investigation, I discovered all the menus thus entitled as he had been the one who booked it. We had a choice of a starter, an entree and dessert. The two starters were caesar salad and the soup of the day (that's another oddity, when they printed up the menus presumably they knew what the soup of the day was. Why make extra work for the waiter who had to identity the soup to us all?) neither of which was vegetarian. The soup was made of chicken stock and the salad had anchovies and bacon in it. So that was a bit annoying (especially as a quarter of the party was vegetarian).

My entree was a spinach risotto with julienned vegetables and shaved asiago cheese. It wasn't bad, but I wasn't terribly impressed. The risotto was a little too chewy and not creamy enough, I couldn't taste the spinach or the asiago and every now and then it tasted burnt. My sister got the same thing and said there was no burnt taste on hers, so its possible I just got the bottom of the pan. Again, I'm not really their target audience so I guess they don't have a lot of experience making vegetarian food not bland.

The dessert was a delicious chocolate cake – the icing was perfectly done, rich and creamy and sweet (without being sickly sweet). I ended up having more than one piece as I got half of my aunt's (she was finished) and part of my sister's (she had left).

Bottom line: the bookends of the meal were excellent and the carnivores seemed to like their meals. I just don't think I could recommend the place to my vegetarian readers [yeah, your many vegetarian readers in Victoria, BC --ed].

Samuel's by the Park
655 Douglas St. Victoria, British Columbia

Restaurant: Bangkok Pad Thai

So this post will have less pictures than usual because I forgot to bring my camera (image from website). On the plus side, the food was excellent. I had almost gone to Bangkok Pad Thai with some friends a few weeks ago, but we went to a pizza place instead. On Sunday, I remembered it looked good and went there with my friend.

We started off with an order of edamame, which is always fun. There were a lot of good looking entrees but I ultimately decided on the Pad Kee Mao Veggie (which, I learned later, means "drunken noodles" for some reason). The Pad Kee Mao contained some of my favourite vegetables for stir-frys: broccoli, baby corn, bamboo, water chestnuts and carrots cut into whimsical shapes. It was served over what the menu referred to as "rice noodle" and topped with a spicy chili garlic sauce. Spicy-for-white-people spicy, but still spicy.

For dessert we had the deep-fried ice cream which is an amazing concept. I definitely will have to go back sometime, I've heard the green curry is excellent.

Bangkok Pad Thai
735 Richmond Street, London, ON

Curried Chickpeas and Tofu

One of the classic "workhorses" of my diet has been this simple chickpea and tofu curry from the Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home. I don't eat as much of it now, but there was a time I'd have it at least once a week. In fact, my copy of the book is broken open at this recipe. It's a somewhat stripped down version from the cook book, mainly because it calls for a little bit of tomatoes and I don't usually have tomatoes in that particular amount.

Curried Chickpeas and Tofu

1 medium onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 chili pepper, minced

oil

2 teaspoons curry powder

2 teaspoons cumin

1/2 block tofu, cubed

1 cup cooked chickpeas

salt

Sauté the onion in the oil until translucent. Add the cumin, curry powder, garlic, chili and tofu a cook for a few minutes. Add the chickpeas and a 1/4 cup of their liquid if you cooked them from dried or water if you didn't. Simmer for 5-7 minutes or so and serve over rice.

Serves 2.

I have been experimenting with adding the chili later to maintain the heat, I probably should have added it even later (maybe with a few minutes to go?). Speaking of chili peppers, the one for this meal was the last from the garden. With its picking, my garden is now officially de– I mean taken to a nice farm where it will have lots of room to run around and such. Actually, the garlic is still there – I have to decide when to harvest it, and where to store it (maybe ask my landlords if I can use the garage?) Still its kinda sad, I guess I'll pull out the stakes supporting my dead tomato plant.

The Nachos

The International Day of the Nacho occured last week, and how better to celebrate than a post on nachos?

Nachos are probably my favourite pub food. I wouldn't pretense to call myself a connoisseur, but I've had a lot of nachos and have many fine memories of some of the best like my friend Jeremy's multi-layered Super Bowl nachos or The Gem Bar & Grill's refried bean dip covered nachos. I also have bad memories of the worst nachos I've ever had: at a crappy place on St. Clair Street that will go unnamed. Even though I didn't know that International Day of the Nacho was last wednesday, I ended up having quite a few nachos last week. First up, I made myself some bareboned nachos in the hotel room using nacho chips, cheese and salsa. There wasn't a grater, so I sliced the cheese up with a sharp knife. They were okay, but they didn't have the wide range of toppings that the professionally done nachos I had at two different restaurants:

Christie's Carriage House Pub
Christie's had an impressive number of beers on tap, including the awesomely titled "Back Hand of God Stout". It was a tough choice, but I ended up going with Phillips Blue Buck, a local Victoria beer.

The name came from a contest after a lawsuit was threatened over their previous name "Blue Truck" (it was alleged as being too similar to a Vancouver craftbeer named Red Truck). While Christie's had a fair number of vegetarian options, I decided to go with the nachos:

I liked the nachos, but they had a central flaw: the cheese was baked in. Now, I'm all about baking nachos, but I think that nacho cheese should have a gooey consistency. This was the opposite, the cheese was embedded into the chip. In one way though, the picture doesn't do them justice as you can't see the jalapeños and tomatoes that were in the dish. Still, definitely not the best nachos I've had.

Ein-Stein's
'Stein's does not have the range of beer that Christie's has. Indeed they are the "local drinking hole" I mentioned here that prompted me to give up cheap beer. One thing that 'Stein's does very well though is pub food. Naturally, we had to order the nachos:

They were amazing. The cheese was perfectly melted. This was no accident, such is the dedication to detail of the chef that after baking he runs the nachos through a microwave to get that desired consistency. There was a good selection of toppings such as jalapeños and olives and they were well distributed. At some places after a while you start just getting plain nacho chips. At 'Stein's there is an abundance of cheese and toppings and no chip is left behind. We ended up ordering another, bigger, plate of nachos later in the evening. Traditionally, if my friends and I are ordering pub food at 'Stein's we get the party platter but I think that nachos should be the new paradigm. They are excellent.

Christie's Carriage House Pub
1739 Fort Street, Victoria, British Columbia

Ein-Stein Café and Pub
229 College Street, Toronto, Ontario