Birdfeeding

Today is cloudy and warm.

I fed the birds.  I've seen house finches and doves.

I gathered butterfly milkweed seeds and planted them in the wildflower garden.

EDIT 8/6/21 -- I gathered butterfly milkweed seeds and planted them in the first patch of little bluestem in the prairie garden.

Recipe: "Cooling Cucumber-Tomato Salad"

I made this today.  :D  It turned out quite well.

( Read more... )

Batch Brewing Company

My partner Doug tipped me to the Batch Brewing Company in Detroit. In addition to many interesting beers, they also have an unusually diverse menu.

BONUS BEAT - Blood orange wheat beer w/ coriander 5.6% 16 oz DRAFT $6.00

This one made me smile, because it's a cooking beer. Now once upon a time, it was common to make cooking ingredients and medicinal materials in an alcoholic base. They weren't meant to drink for flavor. Over the years, this gradually dwindled, and what survived was a much narrower range of beverage alcohols. Enter the artisan brewers. These people not only experiment on their own, they're highly prone to research old recipes. But the old recipes often are not marked as to purpose -- people just knew -- and modern brewers don't always realize when they've picked something that wasn't meant to be a beverage. Sometimes this results in rather wretched beverages, which would still be excellent for cooking. The clue in the above example is that it includes a fruit and a spice, which is a very common combination for culinary brews. You'd use it to make a fruity holiday bread or a salad dressing or a beer-butt chicken. There's even a good chance that modern version has been tweaked to be drinkable, but it would probably still work as a culinary beer.

I love history. And I love kitchen chemistry.

Promoting Heritage Months

Food Network Magazine (September 2021) has a promotion on page 18 about Hispanic and Latinx Heritage Month (starting Sept. 15). It consists of a cocktail recipe, a meat recipe, a list of cookbooks, a list of cooking classes, and a search tag (supported by Yelp and Momento Latino) for locating Latinx-owned restaurants.

( Read more... )