1541 - 1-2-3 Ginger Beer

For hot summer days, I made home-made ginger beer. 

Here's how:

You need glass bottles with built-in stoppers.  For each 750 ml - 1 l  bottle you need:

1. water to fill the bottle
2. 1 ½ inch of ginger root
3.  ½ lemon
4. 1 tsp sugar
5.  ⅛ tsp yeast

Bring the water to a boil, using as much water as you have bottles to fill.  Simply multiply the dry ingredients by how many bottles you are making.

Use a food processor or a grater to grind the ginger into a pulp.  Juice the lemon.  Put the ginger, sugar, and lemon juice into the water.  Turn down the water and simmer for 15 minutes.  Your kitchen will smell wonderful!  Allow the mixture to cool.  

Put the yeast in your bottle. Using a strainer, pour the mixture into the bottle, trying to strain out as much of the solids as you can.  Don't seal the bottle with the stopper!  Instead, place the stopper gently in the hole and cover the top of the bottle loosely with plastic cling wrap.  

Place the bottle someplace cool and dark for three days: 1-2-3.  A closet works well.  After three days, you can stop the bottle properly and store it in your fridge. If there is sludge in your drink, after three days it will have settled to the bottom of the bottle. 

The ginger beer is very strong with sweet lemon and tart ginger.  It's slightly fermented, so it has some kick.  It definitely quenches your thirst.  A little vodka turns it into a great evening in the back yard.   




 

1520 - "Happy B Day"

Had I not misplaced this image, I would have presented it sooner since it's my 'birthday cake", and my birthday was several days ago.

Backstory: A month previously I'm sitting in our local Chinese restaurant (it's very good, by the way) with my friend Ted.  We're sipping at scorching hot wu long tea served in little white ceramic crucibles that are far too hot to touch.  We look at the menu and naturally the conversation turns toward wondering why the Chinese don't make lasagna.  

We reason out the most likely list of ingredients: marinated barbecued beef, shredded.  Chinese vegetables and peppers for roughage.  Wonton or tofu wrappers to make layers, and cooked tofu on top.  Instead of tomato sauce, black bean sauce.   

Then my birthday arrives, and I'm invited over to Ted's place.  Staggering all belief, he's made the Chinese lasagna we had imagined, and I took a picture of it.  Ted wrote "Happy B Day" using Shanghai noodles.  

Of course since I'm the birthday boy, I get to have the first slice of this new cuisine.  My hosts look at me the way scientists peer through a solid foot of plate glass into a locked test chamber with the subject strapped to a steel table: perhaps after tasting this I will explode or turn inside out, or maybe the house will need to be quarantined.

Honestly, it was pretty darned good!  I'd eat it again. 

1491 - Sourdough Pancakes

Pastoral. Bucolic.  Sourdough pancakes.  I've continued my sourdough kick into breakfast food.  I don't have a real technique for these, all I did was replace the milk in the basic recipe with sourdough starter.  This turned out so well, I don't think I can go back to regular pancakes anymore.  

1485 - Visiting Boudin's

In my previous JSVB Post, I mentioned the historic Boudin Bakery on Fishermen's Wharf in San Francisco.  Boudin is especially famous for their excellent sourdough bread.  

It's a large facility, more of a factory than most bakeries I have seen.  The centerpiece is a gigantic bread-making robot the size of a semi truck and trailer.  Boudin started simply in 1849 with a recipe and deep knowledge of French baking.  The Boudin sourdough mother has been in use continuously since then.  

Half of the Boudin Bread Machine.  This motorized rack assembles and prepares sourdough loaves.

With almost unprecedented stupidity, I inquired if Boudin sold their starter.  They laughed.  It would be like asking Batman for the keys to the Batmobile.   

AS it is, sourdough starter is only slightly less complicated than the Batmobile.  There is a delicate balance between the wild yeast Candida milleri and the bacteria Lactobactillus sanfranscisensis that preserves acidity and sugar content: it turns out these two constituents help each other within the dough by providing symbiotic benefits.  Then there are considerations like protein and ash content in the flour and the temperature and liquid level of the dough.  

So, a well-cultured mother is valuable to a bakery.  There are so many variables that if the mother were lost, a bakery could be ruined.  Re-creating a mother is akin to capturing lightning in a bottle.  In the great earthquake of 1906, the Boudin Bakery was gutted by fire.  One of the bakers managed to rescue a bucketful of the mother by risking his life in the flames.  Without this brave act, the bakery would never have been rebuilt.  

Another disaster was averted in 2016 when San Francisco hosted the Superbowl and there was such a run on sourdough bread that Boudin's nearly used up all of their starter.   It took the bakery some months to recover their stock.  

I discovered that Boudin has safeguards in place to protect their mother.  The main vault is in a secured area separate from the factory floor.  Then there other locations in San Francisco and California that have secondary vaults so that if disaster strikes the primary mother, there are other sister mothers that should remain safe from harm.  

The Vault.  What I wouldn't give to plunder its secrets!

1484 - Ooo, Mama!

I recently inherited a new "mother": a jar of activated sourdough starter.  It's a mix of yeast, liquid, sugar, and flour.  After it's been sitting for a while, the fluidic yeast will bubble up and the carbon dioxide gas it emits sours the mix.  You use this starter as the foundation for very tasty sourdough bread!  

Once started, the mother can be kept alive indefinitely.  There are some mothers that have been passed from generation to generation.  If you are a master baker, you will understand the relationship bacteria have with the yeast in the mother, and you will be able to tweak the growth of the mixture to reach optimum flavour.   Possibly the best of all sourdough comes from the world-famous Boudin Bakery in San Francisco.  Their mother has been in use since 1849!  

The mother I've obtained has been alive for fifteen years, so it's relatively young.  In the picture above, you can see liquid pooled on top: this is an indicator that the starter is ready to go into dough.  So, I made my first sourdough bread:

It's not pretty, but the shell is crunchy and crusty and the inside has that wonderfully tuggy texture and addictive hint of sweet-sour flavour.  This loaf didn't last long in our house!   

1475 - What The Phở !?

For Valentine's Day, I made for my love a big hot pot of home-made Vietnamese soup.  What the Phở !?

(Pronouncing Vietnamese words is my Achilles' heel.  I do know this much: it's spoken like using the swear word at the end of a question so that there is a rising, querulous tone... what the fu...??  but not finishing the last bit of the swear.)

  

1423 - Stein After Stein

Me at the Persephone Brewery on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. 

 

1417 - Birthday Plate

Yesterday was my wife's birthday, I think she's 22 or 23 now.  Something with a 2 or a 3 in it, anyways.  Yesterday was also JSVB Ungood Art Day, so we agreed to put her birthday post a day late.  Happy Birthday sweetheart!  These birthday cake batter beaters aren't half as sweet as you. 

 

1411 - Greek Salad For A Hamster

   Zhora is the name of our new hamster.  She's named after one of the characters from Blade Runner (1992).  She doesn't yet pose well for the camera, so I don't have any good pictures of her so far.  

   My wife wanted to spoil the little critter with a treat from a book she bought called "Happy Hamster" by Mathijs van der Paauw.  Mr. van der Paauw is an accomplished chef for rodents.  He makes tiny little meals that look like human food but are healthy for hamsters.  

   Above is our attempt at a Greek Salad: the bowl is made from the hollowed end of a cucumber, and the salad is chickweed with bits of walnut for croutons, edible flower leaves for colour and a little tiny bit of shaved Parmesan cheese.  

  I set up my camera to take pictures of Zhora eating this miniature delight, but the moment she saw it, she seized the bowl in her jaws and made off with it into her castle hideaway.  I never saw a hamster move so fast before.  Good thing I took a picture of her meal before I put it in her cage! 

 

1406 - Crikey, Crickets!

Today's JSVB Post shows my wife eating crickets.  If this kind of thing disturbs you, don't scroll down.  At least they were cooked first. 

   The Pacific National Exhibition, or PNE, has been reversing dwindling attendance numbers by featuring more and more outlandish thrill rides, thought-provoking exhibits, and exotic food and drink.  I remember in years past the craziest thing you could buy in the park were hamburgers made from ostrich meat (verdict: good, but very lean - a healthy burger!)

   This year it's the latest protein fad, yet one that may presage the apocalypse: fried crickets.  You could eat a cricket burger, but we chose crickets in gravy on french fries.  The gravy was thick and salty and the fries were greasy, maybe all to disguise the cricket-eating experience.  Verdict: it's not all that bad, but it's not all that good, either.  The little guys taste peppery and nutty, which is okay but you're going to have trouble pairing wine to that.  Maybe a fresh Gewurtztraminer?  The mouthfeel of crickets is a bit off-putting, a very delicate and airy crunch with just a million tiny drumsticks to get stuck in your teeth.  They are their own toothpicks. 

 

1384 - "BBQ'an"

I really enjoyed the Logan (2017) movie, enough to fashion myself into this tribute poster.  Well, mostly I did this because my barber was out of town on vacation for a month, and my hair and beard grew out long.  I am powerfully loyal to my barber (see JSVB Posts #343 by clicking here.), so I knew it was better for me to wait than find a replacement barber. With long scruffy hair,  I knew if I pranced around in my suit I could re-create the look of Logan.

The hands are a problem, though, since I don't have adamantium claws.  I do have barbecue utensils, though, so close enough.  The cruel irony is that the weather has been cold and gloomy for the past week, and something my wife and I ate has been upsetting our stomachs, so no BBQ.  Quel bummer.

 

1366 - Bucket Of Losers

Here is a bucket of the teams that failed to make the NHL playoffs this year, in chocolate form.  The playoff-bound teams are featured in my chocolate hockey bracket, sort of like an advent calendar for sports fans.  I include this photo in an effort to pad my JSVB post count. 

1365 - Chocolate Bracket

Canadian Tire, of all places (a home improvement and auto parts store), sold bags of Hershey's chocolates in the shape of hockey pucks, each chocolate labelled with an NHL hockey team.  So my wife and I bought all three bags since they were marked down to a dollar each: the chocolates' best-before date was last month. 

Then we made a chocolate hockey playoff bracket.  The winners advance and the losers get eaten, kind of like what the Aztecs used to do. 

I am hoping for Calgary, but I figure Washington versus Anaheim will be the final.  

1328 - Ginger Bloggers

One of the oldest pieces of artistic advice is to portray what it is you know.  Well, the past however many days, I've been getting to know ginger root.  I've had a powerfully upset stomach that doesn't want to settle down, so I've been eating ginger with every meal and as snacks to keep my sails up and my keel down.  It's really good at fighting nausea, as long as you aren't needing to hurl.  

 

1282 - The Consequential Shreddie

Look at this Shreddie.  It's orthogonally unorthodox; it's supposed to be a square.  Instead, it's a single conjoined mega-Shreddie that somehow missed the chop to become two.  An aberration from the cereal assembly line it is, to be sure.

And that's what caused me to think.  There's no easy video or description on how Shreddies are made, so we have to use our best guess.  Somehow, the semi-liquid crushed-grain cereal lattice is laid out, chopped, and cooked into square shapes or diamonds if you prefer the cute advertisements from last decade.  Cooked, yes, but still pliable enough to be sliced into shape without shattering the square.

Seeing as there are two squares end-to-end, that would imply that the Shreddies could emerge from their processor like an infinite roll of stamps through the slot of a stamp dispenser.  A softly outflowing ribbon of Shreddies, one would think.  That enough would be a treasured sight to see, or to be able to sit at the base of the ribbon extruder and allow the warm Shreddie ribbon to stream directly into  one's mouth.  

Logically, though, a Shreddie ribbon would not be efficient, since they could only be cut one at a time.  More likely, it's a Shreddie blanket that gets cut into ribbons or squares.  

A Shreddie blanket.

How can you not want to go to sleep at night under the warmth of a fresh, gently fragrant Shreddie blanket, and then wake up in the morning and eat the bedsheets for breakfast?  Well, obviously don't count hygiene in the equation.  

 

1262 - Stay Frosty, The Sequel

Keeping within the boundaries of the "stay frosty" theme of the previous JSVB post, I'ved pictured the hand-made ice cream sandwiches I made with my wife.  They are incredibly gooey, but they are scrumptious for these scorching hot summer days!

1218 - Pi Pie

Pi Pie... it tastes like chicken. 




 

1206 - Monkey Business

With regards to the Chinese Lunar New Year, I sure do love holidays that have feasts built into them!  

1149 - Get Well Soup

Fortunately, I had some leftover broth in the freezer from the last time I smoked a whole chicken.  I added onion, celery, carrots, and meat to the broth to make soup.  I had alphabet pasta, too, so that when you stirred the soup, it spelled "GET WELL SOON".

1148 - The Fat Elvis Realization

I wasn't too sure I wanted to post this picture, but JSVB is short on posts.

It's a photo I took of my wife eating a snack called a "Fat Elvis".  It's chocolate ice cream, crunchy peanut butter, bananas, and strawberry jam fried inside a brioche bun.  A couple of days after taking this photo, she got really, really sick. It's debatable whether the Fat Elvis had anything to do with that.  

In 1965, The King recorded a single called "Hard Luck Blues", which I suppose would be the intersection of his music and our luck right now.  He had a fantastic voice for the blues, it would have been amazing if he had made more music in that genre.