jeniac42

I did notice that the ones that haven't been refrigerated yet (we don't have the space!) are a little... fizzier. Hm. Anyone have any votes for what we should do next? I get to do a batch myself and would love to try an all-grain but ha, ha, I don't think that's a great idea, do you? My favorite beers to drink are the Belgian dark strong ales, but I think generally I would prefer something more malty than hoppy.

Oh, that is far too cute, Helen. Lucky I probably can't buy it here in the US. Thanks for bumping the thread up, too - reminds me that I'd meant to post a picture of my bento from earlier in the week. A friend gave me one of the Zojirushi Mr. Bento lunch jars. I've decided it needs another container, though!

Great blog idea! I myself am two and a half weeks into quitting. I broke down on Friday and smoked three cigarettes after I spent two and a half out of three hours waiting for a $&*%&!@# bus to show up while I was carrying a lot of things, and was then stood up by the friend I was meeting. But after my small trip-up I donated the remainder of the pack of cigarettes to the bartender to bum out to people. I tried to quit about five times last year with no luck. This time I mean it. And it is much nicer; I walk about three miles a day for commuting purposes and I'm starting to notice that I don't end up wheezing as much. I'm still waiting for my sinuses to clear out but I think allergies are doing me in on that front. I was trying to do WW at the same time but it was too difficult so I gave up on that for the time being. Go eGullet newly-minted-nonsmokers!

How do you keep the chocolates from melting if they're near the bath? I would like to prescribe myself an evening of beer, cheeseburgers, fries, and a milkshake (uh... maybe not all together) but I don't even have the time for it. To piggyback on this thread: What do you do when you'd love to cook for stress relief, but don't have the time? What do you eat when you're ticked off and operating under the World's Worst Schedule?

Gosh, I envy you - baking AND gardening? I am hoping to start a garden this year but I don't expect much from it. I'd love to pick wild plants to eat but even in my own yard, I'm terrified of what they might have picked up from the soil in my (rather dirty) urban environment. The chickweed is pretty!

I am envious of all your baking! It really makes me want to get out the KitchenAid, and my boyfriend was just complaining that I needed to make blueberry muffins again soon. I'd like to make cookies, though I have to admit that they're not my favorite thing to make or eat! Those lime meltaways sound fantastic, though. I wonder if I could make a little bit of time this weekend to bake. I've wanted to make the orange chocolate crown for a long time - I'm sorry to hear it didn't taste that good!

Oh, also, we seem to eat a lot of soft pretzels here. Also the hard sourdough kind. Stuffed cabbage?

Don't forget the coleslaw (vinegar style) on your Primanti's-style sandwiches. You could also add a fried egg. They're just sandwiches on regular white bread, kind of thick slices. You could use whatever meat you'd like, but JUMBO (aka bologna) might be a good choice n'at. They have a web site - primantibros.com. Is the buffalo dip the same kind I make, which sounds (and frankly, is) really foul but also like crack, as mentioned? I got the recipe from my friend, and it's cream cheese, blue cheese dressing, chopped celery (which I skip - who wants VEGETABLES in their artery clog?), Frank's Red Hot, and cubed cooked chicken? Because that. stuff. is. good. You could try to involve lots of Heinz ketchup somehow (and if you go to their site, they have a "Red Zone Recipes" section which purports to contain the Steelers' favorite recipes - doubtful). There's a thread in the PA forum about Pittsburgh food. You could also have pierogies. Also, Clark bars, chipped ham (especially chipped ham barbeque), Klondikes, and Iron City (aka Iron Shitty) all come from the 'burgh. The Iron City brewery (at the bottom of the hill my boyfriend lives on) also brews Augustijner. Me, I'll probably start the afternoon eating chicken wings at Gooski's in Polish Hill and then moving to a bar with bigger TVs to watch the game. edited to add: PIXBURGH'S GOIN TO DA SUPERBOWL!

Again, thanks to everyone for their help. We tried some of the beer on Sunday. It's definitely drinkable, but it tastes a little bit like burnt sugar (did we perhaps scorch the malt?) and is waaaaay carbonated, so it kind of reminds me more of a cola than beer! Still, like I said, it's drinkable. Eric gets to plan and concoct the next round and I'll be making pickles and perhaps sausage in the meanwhile; after that I get a go at the brewing myself. Has anyone ordered from morebeer.com?

Wow, thanks for all the advice, everyone. I ended up not starting the nukamiso last night, because I was worn out by the time I got home (and I still had a couple hours' worth of homework to do). Helen, the nuka ingredients just say "rice bran", so I think it's plain ol' nuka with no additives. I haven't opened the packages yet, so I'm not sure of the smell, but I had been planning to put it in the oven to dry a little bit. So let's see. I think I will be adding the konbu, and some dried mustard powder. I only have the English kind at present but I can probably pick up some karashi when I get the konbu. I have a question about the container. I don't have easy access to any wooden or ceramic vessels; would it be OK to use plastic, or would that cause the pickles to develop an off flavor? It looked like Helen's pickle bed was in a plastic tub on her blog but I couldn't quite tell. I would like to get a nice container to use eventually, though - will I be able to transfer the pickle bed without killing it? I'm excited to eat some pickles that I made... in the meantime I picked up some takuan (I think it was amai takuan or something - the package is at home - but it was the only one that wasn't violently yellow) and some shibazuke. I'd also love to make umeboshi but I just don't think I can get the fresh ume here. Also, I want to get one of the tabletop pickling devices, and plan to do so when I can find one! Oh, I forgot to say: We brew our own beer, so its yeast is still alive. I wondered if it might make the nukazuke taste like beer, but I guess not - maybe I'll give it a try.

Primanti Brothers sandwiches, and/or coleslaw plus french fries on any sandwich. Hoagies (Eye-talian only). Chipped ham, chipped ham BBQ. Pirogies, of course. Haluski. Fish fries on Fridays. Pork and sauerkruat? Hot dogs at The O (which may be out of business soon, but which has a sign advertising that Dan Marino has been eating their hot dogs for 35 years). Cheese and meats from Penn Mac. ROETHLISBURGERS, heh. These vary depending on where you go; at the place near my house, I think they're just bacon double cheeseburgers with pepper jack, but other places have monster sandwiches with ham and eggs and crazy stuff on them. Pittsburgh is kind of not the best city for food.

Well, the few that I have found in English indicate using nuka, 15% of its weight in salt, and water, then adding konbu (for the glutamates, I suppose), red peppers, and then anything from ginger to beer to iron nails(!). So I suppose I could start it tonight and add the konbu in two days, and it would be OK. I wish I could read Japanese better, so I could find more instructions! I'm working on it slowly but surely....

Beautiful kitchens - both of them! I haven't been in southern WVa in a few years, and it might be time to go back for a visit. It's gorgeous down there, and not unreasonably far from scenic Pittsburgh. Looking forward to reading your blog. Maybe it will inspire me to use my KitchenAid for some baking again soon. The last thing I made was blueberry muffins, and that was a week and a half ago!

I went and bought packages of plain nuka today, with the intention of making the nukamiso tonight, but I forgot that I am out of konbu and didn't pick any up! 困ったね! I guess I'll have to wait until Thursday when I can get to the store to buy konbu... unless I could start the process without it.

Thanks to this thread and helenjp's pickle blog, and my undying love for takuan, I am going to try some nukazuke pickles soon. Tomorrow I will go to the grocery store to buy the nuka, and I will need to find a good container. I hope it goes well! I plan to ask my Japanese teacher (who I frequently pester with cooking questions) if she has made nukazuke pickles and if she has any advice for me, as well. I'm really excited, although I don't expect them to be great at first.

Thanks for the thoughts. I wondered if I might get in an early spring sowing for the takana and daikon - we've been having a really mild winter so I suspect the last frost will come early this year, and it might be worth chancing it. The daikon variety was advertised as "All Season"; I wonder if that matters? I've been poking through GardenWeb and feeling slightly overwhelmed, but I did get a couple of recommendations for books to look into. I'll let you all know how the experiments go.

Well, I think I might be in the same house all year this year, so I can actually have a garden. I'd love to grow some Japanese vegetables and herbs, because they're expensive to buy in quantity (and I'd like to make pickles out of a lot of them) and because it would be satisfying. My yard is quite small and the neighbors use part of it for their garden bed, so I'd likely have to grow things in containers. I have a balcony that's probably at least 80% shade and probably a little piece of sunny backyard - I'll have to observe the sun patterns next time I'm home all day. I was thinking of buying the tsukemono pickling garden from Kitazawa Seed, as well as some red and green shiso. The vegetables included are pickling melon?, takana mustard, oblong eggplant, cucumber, daikon, turnip, and cabbage. I haven't done any gardening in a long, long time and fear I might be totally inept. I hope to enlist my father's assistance - he's got quite a green thumb, and recently lost his job of 30+ years, so I hope it will give him something else to think about. I plan to grow the shiso in containers in as sunny a spot as I can find. Perhaps if I use "window boxes" hanging from the edge of the roofed balcony, they will get enough sun? I think everything will have to go in containers, though. I've never had good luck growing tomatoes in containers, so hopefully these veggies will fare better.

Just a couple of pictures of the process, in case anyone was curious. First we have Eric pouring the wort into the primary fermenter: And then from Friday night, Eric capping the bottles (we used mostly Straub and some Dogfish Head bottles, scrubbed and sanitized):

If we're talking about the red-skinned variety, the solution is very simple - a light brush with oil, sprinkle with salt, oven-roast; split them open and eat with sriracha. One of the best foods I've ever known. Equally, the sweet potato fries mentioned upthread, with a sauce made of sriracha and about a metric shit-ton of minced garlic = makes you want to die delicious. Since the original post is about real yams, I'll have to confess that I've never prepared one myself.

We bottled the beer last night (it was the first time we had a couple of hours to get to it!) and hoo, boy. It seemed like it would be so simple, but we ended up with half-fermented beer all over the floor and the counters and the outsides of the beer bottles.... Lessons were learned, and next time should be easier. First, we had trouble getting the siphon to work in order to take the beer from fermenter one to fermenter two (the one with a tap on it). Any suggestions? We tried putting water in the siphon hose and that seemed to work in the end but it was really tricky. For the bottling, we had a tube with a little pin on the end, so when you press it to the bottom of the bottle it opens and when you lift it up it seals off. That made things easier, I think. I still felt like there was more air getting into the beer than there should've been, though. Practice makes perfect, and at any rate we should be drinking our own beer in about ten days! I took some pictures; I'll post a couple of them tomorrow.

I haven't seen the homebrew myself in about a week (school started again so my free time is, oh, non-existant), but Eric wanted me to ask a question. He believes there is still yeast on top of the beer. I asked him to describe it and he said it's not a foam, but something like pieces of "solid material" floating on the top. I believe the bubbling activity in the airlock stopped some time ago. We're looking to bottle on Thursday so we just want to make sure everything seems OK. I may be able to take a photo of it tonight for clarification, but any ideas?

I won't claim to be a great bread-baker, but as far as the anpan goes... my understanding (and experience) indicates that if you allow filled yeast breads to rise a little longer on the counter before you bake them, there's less "oven spring" and so less chance of the big gap between filling (which doesn't rise) and dough (which does). Also, I don't know if anpan calls for it, but some eggwash seems to serve as a binder between the filling and the dough, at least during rising. These two hints combined (can't recall where I picked them up) seem to make for a tighter swirl-type bread when I make it.

I just wanted to say thank you for this wonderful blog! I look forward to reading it throughout the week....

Last night I got to drink some good beers again, because Eric had a DJ gig at a bar that serves them. I had: - Gouden Carolus Christmas - good, but I like the Grand Cru better - Anchor Christmas 2005 - a little too bitter for my taste buds last night. Eric really liked it and said it had a lot of spice but I wasn't picking that up. - Anderson Valley Winter Solstice - WOW. This tasted really good, like vanilla.

It looks like Amazon is again shipping this book within 24 hours, so I'm about to order it and join the ranks in this thread.