It’s been entirely too long since this blog has been updated.  I suppose we’ve been too busy eating, working around the house, and dreaming of our summer garden to write.  This is of course no decent excuse when you consider all those blogs out here on the interwebs that are updated weekly if not multiple times daily.  Well, let’s get back to it, shall we?

The most exciting news other than the fact that we’re finally showering in our actual shower and not in the basement (hopefully more on that soon) is our recent foray into home brewing.  I got Max beer making supplies for Christmas, and since then, we’ve been brewing or talking about brewing most any day he has off work.  It’s become quite the obsession!

Our first brew, pictured above, an IPA, was a wonderful success.  It has a lovely hoppy taste and produces a beautiful thick head when warm.  We’ve already drank over a case of it and moved on to our next brew, a stout with the flavors of my favorite molasses spice cookie.  We should be bottling the stout in the next week or so, and drinking it in less than a month.  I’m anxious to taste it and see if the cookie flavor comes through at all.

I’m not going to get into too many details about the brewing process, just recommend two books we found helpful, Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher and The Complete Joy of Homebrewing by Charles Papazian.  Mosher helped us get creative and Papazian taught us to “relax and have a homebrew” throughout the sometimes tedious brewing process.  I will, however, post a few pictures from our first brewing experience.

Lots of recordkeeping.  I swear home brewing brought be back to high school chemistry.  Really a perfect project for a science major and an archivist…

Steeping the grains

Warming the malt extract

Adding hops to the boil (And yes, I’m wearing a Victory t-shirt.)

Transferring wort to the fermenter after cooling

Measuring original gravity

Transferring to the secondary fermenter a week later

Finished beer…if you look closely you can see a thick layer of yeast at the bottom of the carboy

Bottling

And capping

It really is a satisfying process and one we look forward to repeating and perfecting for many years to come.

Way back in mid-December, before all the holiday craziness, we had a big party “celebrating” Max’s impending medical student loan bill.  We served inexpensive eats and asked everyone to bring their favorite cheap beer.  We still haven’t finished the Old German, Schlitz, and Knights Head.  Luckily we also went to a fabulous beer exchange in December and stocked up on two mixed cases of craft beer.  Maggie kindly guarded the beer exchange booty and left the Schlitz and Old German for someone else.

Despite the perhaps lackluster beverages, people seemed to have a good time at our officially christened Repayment Party, and one key element was a chickpea curry that I created for our vegetarian friends.  Many non-veggies enjoyed it, and four or five people asked me for the recipe.

This is heavily adapted from a chicken shahi korma recipe in Curries for a Cause, a small benefit recipe collection my cousin gave me for Christmas a few years back.  All of the recipes are by Indian women and girls, and this particular recipe is by a 15 year old named Jyoti Nehria.  I never could have produced something so sohisticated when I was 15, let alone get it published!

Also, please don’t be scared of all the spices.  Take the advice of Deb Perelman of Smitten Kitchen on her recent chana masala recipe.  If you buy all the spices you need to make Indian dishes you’ll save tons of money in the long run.

Chickpea Shahi Korma adapted from Curries for a Cause

1 cup yogurt (I use 2% Greek, very affordable at Trader Joe’s)
2 15.5 ounce cans of chickpeas, drained and rinsed (I have also substituted 1 and 1/2 cups of frozen spinach for one of the cans of chickpeas.)
2 tsp turmeric powder
10 almonds
20 cashew nuts
2 tsp powdered ginger or more to taste
8 garlic cloves
4 tbsp oil
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
3 onions, diced
1 tsp red chili powder
2 tsp salt or more to taste
1 tsp garam masala (I got mine at Penzeys)
2 cups tomato puree, fresh or canned
2-4 tbsp butter

Mix yogurt and 1 tsp of the turmeric with the chickpeas and set aside.

Grind almonds and cashews into a thick paste in your food processor and set aside.  Next grind garlic and ginger into a paste and also set aside.

Heat oil in a dutch oven.  Fry coriander and cumin for a few second and then add the garlic/ginger paste.  Cook until golden brown.  Next add onions and cook until golden brown, stirring frequently.  Add remaining turmeric, chili powder, salt, and garam masala and cook for about a minute.  Add tomato puree and cook for three minutes.  Finally incorporate the nut paste and cook five minutes longer, stirring occasionally.

Add yogurt/chickpea mixture and then the butter, stirring to melt.  Stir in frozen spinach if using.  Simmer for ten minutes or longer until curry noticeably thickens. 

Serve with basmati rice and naan.

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and we’re gearing up for Christmas on Mintwood Street.  But before we dive into all the cookies and jingle bells, I thought I’d recap some of the exciting things we’ve been up to the past few weeks.

Biggest and best news…for the first time in over three years, we can use the sink and take a shower in our bathroom!  After all this time showering in the basement, I can’t tell you how excited I am to have a nearly complete bathroom remodel.  Max is still working on building the medicine cabinet, but when that’s done I will definitely post pictures of the whole room.

The garden is pretty much done for the season, but we did experience some unusually warm weather in November with some interesting results out front. Not only were the irises pushing up through the soil, but our yellow rose bush started blooming again.

This photograph was taken the day before Thansgiving.  I can’t get over that!

Also very exciting…the batch of sauerkraut (our first ever) that I started in late October was ready and perfect.  We enjoyed our first taste of it with leftover turkey and are looking forward to hot dogs piled high with sauerkraut and winter dinners of pork and sauerkraut.  Yay for home fermentation!

I also wanted to take a moment to highlight one of my new favorite cookbooks.  I checked out Karen DeMasco’s The Craft of Baking before Thanksgiving and knew I had to make the loaf cake variation (teaser image above) of her gingerbread cupcakes.  This moist and spicy recipe includes beer, coffee, and chocolate…need I say more!

I ended up sharing the cake with both my family and Max’s, and it definitely went over well.  It was so wonderful to see everybody, especially the littlest member of the family.  My tiny cousin is the first baby we’ve had around since me!  Here’s the cutie with his doting aunt.

Just a little over a week until Christmas!

As the subjects of this blog would suggest, we’re definitely homebodies here on Mintwood Street.  Yet somehow the past three weekends have found one or both of us away from home.  First there was a conference in New York over Halloween weekend and a trip to see family back in York County.  Then this past weekend, Max and I visited Penn-Roosevelt State Park outside State College for a last-minute camping trip before it got too cold.  All three trips were filled with wonderful fall sights and smells, delicious food, and our fantastic friends and family.

There was amazing cheese, beer, and Polish honey vodka with my old friend Alex and her family in Brooklyn.

The scary (but mostly sweet) costumes in the Park Slope Halloween Parade.

Bagels and new friends at the New York City Marathon.

Perfect beer at Victory Brewing Company in Downingtown.  (This is the Donnybrook Stout, I believe, but my favorite was the Harvest Pils made with fresh, local hops.)

Church bake sale pie.

Holly bushes and old barns on the family farm.

Sunset on Mount Nittany.

And a well-built campfire under the stars.

Weekends away are certainly fun, but I’m looking forward to a weekend at home before we head back to York again for Thanksgiving.  I’m also looking forward to getting back into my own kitchen and finishing up some nagging projects around the house.

Chocolate mint simple syrup…more on that in a bit…

It seems quite contrary to start a food/gardening/renovation blog when two of those activities are winding down, but less work around the house and in the garden just means more time for everything else.  I was out and about in New York City last weekend (hopefully more on that in a post soon to come), but in the two or three weeks before that, much time was spent cleaning up the garden and using up what was left behind.  The veggie garden, which looked like this just a few short months ago now looks like this:

Neat and tidy, but a bit too bare, don’t you think?

During the clean-up, I came across the biggest earthworm I have ever seen.  Funny to think back to high school biology, when I was somewhat squeamish around these.  Now I’m just so happy to know they’re munching away on my soil and compost, making it rich and healthy.

Max, my partner in crime, has been busy with intern year of his medical residency, so most of these early projects will be one woman shows.  When Dr. Max isn’t around, I seem to get crazy urges to can things.  We started canning about a year ago, but this summer I went all out:  tomatoes, jams, relishes, fruit butters–whatever I could do in a boiling water canner.  Oddly enough, I own a pressure canner, but a furry little thief made off with one of my valves.  So until we get that replaced, no low acid canning for me.

My most recent and probably easiest canning project was a few jars of mint infused simple syrup.  I found this summer that I love making a Tom Collins with fresh mint and wanted to keep that flavor available even when fresh mint is not.

So I collected some chocolate mint from our garden (yes, it does have a subtle chocolate flavor!) and got to work.  I looked at a lot of different recipes, but this description from Marisa at Food in Jars captures well what I ended up doing. Equal parts sugar and water (10 cups each in my case) plus several handfuls of mint equals mint simple syrup. I ended up with about five pint jars, which I processed for 5 minutes.

Feeling I was on a roll here, I also went ahead and made some chocolate mint syrup.  I was originally planning to can this too but was saved from that potentially fatal error by my trusty Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, which warned against canning chocolate in a boiling water canner. No worries here. I think it will store nicely in the fridge.

Mint Chocolate Syrup adapted from About.com

1 cup cocoa powder
1 1/2 cups water
1 1/2 cups sugar
a handful of mint leaves

Combine cocoa, water, and sugar in a saucepan over medium heat.  Whisk until smooth.

Add mint and bring to a boil, stirring frequently.  After the mixture comes to a boil, turn it down and simmer for a few minutes, until it looks thick and glossy.

Remove pan from the heat and allow to cool.  Then strain the syrup through a fine mesh sieve to remove the mint leaves.

Use it wherever you would use Hershey’s chocolate syrup.  Chocolate milk, sundaes, cake–you name it!