I try to make it a point to try a beer I've never had before every time I make a visit to the godsend Beers of the World.  Sometimes I have a little trouble getting away from my tried and true, but once in a while something just reaches out, taps me on the shoulder, and says "buy me, or else".  I couldn't ignore a Belgian style beer called "La Fin du Monde".  Brewed by Unibroue microbrewery from Quebec, this beer is a bit sweet, very aromatic.  It pours with a huge head and just looks beautiful in a glass.  If I knew la fin du Monde were on its way and only a few minutes were left, one might find me sitting on my porch thoroughly enjoying a beer much like this.  Tonight I enjoyed it with the splendid duck and port dish to be added soon.

Just got back from Thanksgiving in Conn. with Laura's family.  We all know what holidays with family are like, and that was topped off with the six hour drive back in the snow today.  We had no choice but to light a fire and chill out with a couple of our favorite cocktails in front of the fire for the evening.  An Old Fashioned for me, a Vodka Martini for Laura.

His Old Fashioned

1 Orange Slice
2 Maraschino Cherries
1 tsp sugar
4 dashes Angostura Bitters
1 splash H2O
Bourbon to taste

Place orange, one cherry, sugar, and bitters in a double old fashioned glass.  Muddle (crush and mix the fruit) with the back of a spoon or some other blunt instrument.  Add a splash of water to help dissolve the sugar.  Fill to the top with ice.  Add bourbon, stir, and garnish with other cherry.  In my opinion, it should be very obvious that this is a bourbon drink and not a fruit cocktail.  The primary flavor should be the bourbon, with hints of sweetness and citrus.  Experiment with the amount of bourbon until you discover what proportions you like best.  Do not put in more than a tiny splash of water, and make sure your clueless bartender doesn't either if you're ordering this out.

Her Dirty Vodka Martini

3 oz Stolichnaya Vodka
1/2 oz Dry Vermouth
2 Plump Green Olives
1 tsp Olive Juice (from olive jar)

As with any martini, cold, cold, cold, is the key.  Chill your cocktail glass with some ice and water.  Measure your liquid ingredients into a shaker with lots of ice.  Stir until thoroughly chilled.  Strain into glass.  Add olives on a toothpick.

Short write-up tonight.  I've had way too much Rioja to be coherent for more than a couple minutes.  This dish was quite nice.  The key is the great marinade listed in this recipe.  I'm sure the recipe is superb, as is, with the beef.  But I've never made it that way.  Tonight I just marinated some thinly sliced chicken breast in the listed marinade and served it over stir fried baby boc choy, orange bell pepper, onion, wild mushrooms, garlic, and broccoli.  You really don't need to marinate chicken that long with this marinade, so it's a pretty quick dish.  I stir-fried the veggies with a little fresh lime juice, fish sauce, chili sauce, and coconut milk. 

Home alone tonight and feeling a bit carnivorous on the way home from work, so I stopped at the Balsam Market to pick up one of their great steaks.  Grilling steak and making these potatoes are both really simple processes, but do have some room for error.  There's tons of advice on grilling steak correctly on the web so I won't be redundant.  Just get your grill really hot and let the steaks come to room temp before cooking.  (ok, I couldn't resist being a little redundant)  This meal totally hit the spot.  Laura would chastise me for the lack of green veggies. 

Thyme Butter

Ingredients

1 Tbsp soft salted butter

I don't care what all the food shows and books say, I use salted butter.  It just tastes better to me, and I've never had an instance where the salt in the butter made a dish too salty.  It seems to keep better too

Instructions

Mix ingredients together and put it in the fridge for a while.  Top your grilled steak with a spoonful of this.  You can also prepare a bunch of this, wrap it up in a cylinder shape in wax paper and throw it in the freezer.  Then slice off a bit whenever you need it.

Butter Encrusted Potatoes

I know it sounds weird, but this really seems like the best way to describe these potatoes.  Boil some fingerling potatoes in salted water until they're a couple minutes from being done.  If you cook them all the way, you'll end up with a yucky mush that tastes good but looks crappy.  Heat a generous portion (at least 2 tablespoons) of butter over HIGH heat in a non-stick skillet.  Add a little oil as well.  The butter will brown/burn but that's the idea.  Drain the potatoes and cut into bite sized pieces on the bias.  Yes they're hot, but you can deal.  Throw these potatoes in the skillet with a little salt and pepper and sauté on both sides until you get a nice golden crust of tiny burnt butter bits.  Don't crowd the pan too much or they won't brown as easily. 

This web site has been a real incentive for me to try some of the things I've wanted to try for a while, but for various reasons never got around to it.  These endeavors either seemed too time consuming, too difficult to get right, or I had something that worked and didn't want to risk changing it.  Now, every time I risk horrible failure trying something new in the kitchen, it's just another possibility to have something interesting to write about.  I simply must keep my thousands...er hundreds...er two readers entertained.  Plus now I can document what I did wrong, and improve the next time.

Now, about those mistakes.  Well, first I went out to buy a pasta machine this afternoon.  It was much less expensive than I thought ($30), and when I got it home the quality of the machine was great.  Made in Italy, and it looks like this thing will last a hundred years.  No apparent mistakes yet.  The first problem was making the dough.  Make a well in some flour, put some eggs in, mix in flour from the sides with a fork until it's blended enough to kneed.  Easy enough.  Well Jamie Oliver said I really wanted the freshest "organic" eggs.  (Whatever that means!  Are other eggs from android chickens?)  Anyway the brown eggs marketed as "organic" seem to have much more brittle shells than android chicken eggs, so consequentially some bits of shell fell into my well, oh hell!  I figured that was ok since they were organic and all. 

Next came the breach in the well wall.  Egg poured out onto my work surface and tried to make a break for the floor.  The flour national guard managed to make a flour levee just in time to avert total disaster. 

Dough was formed into a ball, wrapped in saran, and refrigerated for an hour.  The rolling out of the pasta with the new machine, was actually very easy.  Go through on the largest setting about five times, each time folding the dough back on itself.  This makes a rectangular pancake of pasta the width of the machine.  Now simply keep cranking the machine down one notch at a time and sending it through once, until it's the desired thickness.  Pukka!

More mistakes.  I split the dough in four parts to send individually through the machine, as Jamie Oliver suggested.  In the future I will not just pile these freshly made sheets, folded, on top of each other while working on the next one without at least a generous dusting of the surfaces with flour.  The bottom sheet more or less ended up reverting to the primordial dough from which it came. 

I used this pasta to make a Naked Chef dish "Pappardelle with Mixed Wild Mushrooms".  Pappardelle is strips of pasta about 1 1/2 inches wide.  Very fun to eat and look at, and really easy to create this pasta from rolled sheets.  Despite the missteps, the pasta did turn out quite good.  The texture of fresh pasta just seems so much nicer than dried to me.  The dish however, left me a bit disappointed.  I won't post the recipe, since it's not mine to post, but the gist is mushrooms, garlic, chili pepper, lemon juice, parmesan, and butter.  My intuition told me it was a bit lacking in depth of flavor, but I followed the recipe with some trust, only to learn that my intuition was right on.  A little white wine in there next time.