Acetio | Blogma

From The Star:
"A year ago, Michael Chrisman placed a pinhole camera in Toronto’s Port Lands and aimed it — as best one can aim such a camera — at the city skyline.

For 365 straight days and nights, light has crept through the pinhole, slowly building an exposure on a piece of photosensitive paper."

Full story:
http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1109339

We continue the struggle to get enough protein with a primarily vegetarian diet.

I found a recipe here for lentil meatballs http://www.theppk.com/2011/03/spaghetti-nos-with-mini-lentil-meatballs/ and modified it a bit. It's not very different from falafel except the tomato paste and yeast give it a meatier taste.

Part A
1 clove garlic
1 small onion
1 1/2 cups cooked lentils
3 Tbsp nutritional yeast
2 Tbsp bread flour
2 Tbsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp tomato paste
1 tsp olive oil
2 Tbsp water
1 egg (this and the cheese make it non-vegan)
1 Tbsp parmesan cheese
---
Part B
1/2 cup breadcrumbs
1/4 cup flax meal

(Without thinking, I measured 1 1/2 cup dried lentils and now we have enough cooked lentils for a week.)

Chop and dump everything from part A into a blender and mix it up. I probably went overboard and got pure paste. I would have preferred a bit more texture. Take the results and mix in Part B to make a dough. Add more breadcrumbs until the dough is dry enough to handle.

Make a few dozen little balls and fry them enough to get a crust and then bake for about 20 minutes.

They can get dry so serve in a sauce

I made 4 more infusions, cilantro, fenugreek, nutmeg, and dill. None would have been my first choice, but I'm getting to the back of the spice cabinet, and thought there might be some surprises.

Cilantro:
- Attractive yellowish grass green color
- Unidentifiable smell - definitely not the smell of cilantro, but if anything it smelled like chicken soup - very odd
- Almost flavorless
- Ethanol flavor very present
* Not a contender

Fenugreek:
- Had to use ground
- Pale yellow color
- Strong maple smell. Adding water brought out a smokiness. It really smelled like breakfast at a diner
- Mild smoky taste. Not bad but not interesting
- Mild ethanol harshness
* Also not a contender, but both of these give me ideas for using them in cooking

Nutmeg:
- Had to use ground
- Cloudy orange color
- Pleasant nutmeg aroma
- Turbid when water added
- Harsh ethanol flavor
- Camphor taste reminiscent of the cardamom extraction
* Also not a contender, with confirmation that chai extraction is definitely out

Dill:
- Very deep green color
- Very clean aroma, slight dill, mostly just clean, a bit like thyme
- Slight dill flavor
- Alcohol harshness/heat cut significantly
* Should be added to mix based on color, clean aroma, and mellowing quality

So, the dill extraction was the only good one, and the biggest surprise. It could be good just on its own. Imagine a martini made with Hendricks gin and a dill-based liqueur. It would taste like a dill pickle.

My final recipe as of now is:
3 parts tarragon
2 parts coriander
2 parts dill
1 part laurel

Hudson - Against The Grain from Dropbear on Vimeo.

In the continuing effort to create my own amaro/bitters/digestive (in the style of Fernet or Campari or Gin or Angostura Bitters) I've been infusing various herbs in alcohol to help me decide which to add to my master mixture.

I bottled a few 2 weeks ago and tried them yesterday and today.

The tarragon was very nice and could be a very good infusion just on its own. It will have a dominant place in the mixture, just as juniper has a dominant place in most gin recipes. The Laurel added good aroma but mostly was notable for how it mellowed the harshness of the alcohol, a quality that most of the herbs didn't have. The thyme didn't really offer anything but the smell of thyme. The rosemary leeched a lot of proteins into the infusion, making it cloudy. The color and aroma it added were not good enough to overcome the cloudiness. So tarragon 'yes', laurel 'probably', and the other two 'probably not'.

If I were to make a bunch now I would use 3 parts tarragon, 2 parts coriander, and 1 part laurel.

Sage, nutmeg, and ginger will be the next to try.

Matt

Evolution is one of the other craft breweries in Delaware. They have some decent beer, but my favorite is their porter. Cooler autumn weather always makes me want a nice porter or stout, just like I suddenly start craving heavy foods such as stews and mashed potatoes.

Some porters are indistinguishable from lighter ales or heavier stouts, or are overly heavy and malty or smoky. Lucky 7 is the right balance of all those qualities.

http://www.evolutioncraftbrewing.com/mainline-lucky.htm
http://www.ratebeer.com/beer/evolution-craft-brewing-lucky-7-porter/102835/
http://beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/19897/49500

I've made beer about ten times. Only one of the batches was what I would call good. And unlike years ago, there is so much good craft beer available now, it's no longer practical for me to homebrew. Besides, I don't need the calories.

I made wine once (once on purpose, a few times by accident) and it wasn't good. Not bad, but not good.

The next step is to home distill, which I've done successfully once. The contraption was quite a sight, as well as a quite a fire hazard. After weeks of prep and hours of work, I got about an ounce of rather harsh, but genuine moonshine.

Thinking of the cheapest and easiest way of doing some kind of DIY booze, I decided to try infusing vodka.

My choice of infusor (as opposed to infusee) was chai tea. Of all the gimmicks and trends with booze generally and infused vodka specifically, I hadn't seen chai tea - infused vodka. So I got some cheap stuff and dumped in a bunch of chai tea (the real stuff with whole cloves and cardamoms, etc.). The result was very smooth but not that tasty. Something in the mix (I think the cinnamon sticks) helped mellow the bite and there was no heat from the alcohol. But I'm not a fan of the flavor of cinnamon outside of apple pie, and something else in the mix gave the flavor an astringent quality. The problem with chai is that there are so many ingredients I couldn't identify the good bits from the bad.

The next step was to do batches with individual ingredients from the chai so that i only used the subset of ingredients that contributed positively.

Vodka worked OK but then I learned/realized that vodka (the cheap stuff, anyway) was essentially industrial ethanol mixed about 50/50 with water. I can buy grain alcohol (chemically the same as the stuff Brazilians use to fuel their cars) for about $10 for a half gallon.

I decided to infuse small amounts of grain alcohol with cardamom, cloves, corriander. I took small bottles and poured in 1/4 cup of the grain alcohol and one teaspoon of the spices (whole, not ground).

I let them sit a few weeks and then tasted by filtering out the bits (with a coffee filter) and mixing the now-infused alcohol with water (1 part alcohol to 2 parts filtered water. I had tried 1:1 but the alcohol burned too much) making it about 30% abv by my estimation.

The results:

All came out slightly yellow, like urine in the bowl, basically.

- Cloves: Far too harsh and bitter. This was surely at least part of the problem with the original chai vodka

- Coriander: This was a bit of a lark since I did not expect it to be good, but it was the best of the bunch. A slight grassy taste but more complex than that. I would use this again, perhaps as bitters in a cocktail with other ingredients. It was pleasant by itself too - not sweet.

- Cardamom: Also harsh and similar to camphor. It tasted like cleaning solution. I had high hopes for this one since I think of the taste of cardamom to be an essential part of chai tea.

Every herb and spice release different flavor compounds depending whether they are soaked in water, oil, or alcohol - and some end up better than others. This is why vanilla extract is an alcohol solution while clove and orange extract are usually sold in oil form.

So I'll try more but keep coriander in mind as one to do again.

We've been doing a lot of family breakfasts at home lately and I've had a chance to perfect my pancake recipe. The oats make them very tender (I tried once using mostly oats and the pancakes were tender to the point of falling apart) and this recipe uses more baking powder and egg than most other pancake recipes I've seen. The powder make the pancakes lighter and the extra eggs help hold the oats together.
These are also sweeter than other pancakes.

blend:
1/4 cup oats
1/2 cup flour
2 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp baking powder
pinch salt

add:
3/4 cup water
2 Tbsp oil
2 eggs

whisk and fry in 1/4 cup dollops. Makes about 10 light, smallish pancakes, enough for 2 adults.

Serve with:

Honeyed Yogurt:
mix 4 parts plain yogurt with 1 part honey
(this is super easy and a great general sweet topping)

and /or Peach Tarragon Compote:
(great if you have old, bruised, overripe peaches. The tarragon is subtle and makes the peach flavor more complex)
2 peaches
Rub off the peach skin (as much as is practical. You can leave the skin on if you want or are lazy) and dice it
1 tsp or so of dried tarragon (it has a slightly anise/fennel aroma but won't make your food taste like licorice, which anise and fennel can)
Put it all in a small lidded pan and heat over low for 15 minutes or so. The peaches will soften and release a lot of liquid.
Add a tablespoon of sugar and stir it in until the sugar is dissolved

Compressed 02 from Kim Pimmel on Vimeo.