Beep Boop Muthafuckers

Strange things are afoot in Boston beer retail. I have, somehow, been maneuvered into place as the replacement for one of Boston’s top beer buyers, Nick Blakey, at Bauer Wine & Spirits. Nick, who’s true passion is music, is moving on to perform booking duties at a local establishment that’s changing hands and names, right after he gets back from a short stint touring Europe with The Nightingales. This week has been a crash course in what it’s like to run the entire beer section in a store known particularly for its craft/specialty beer selection. I know I’m up to the job, but it’s a lot to take in while also getting a feel for the flow of a new store, and I’m still sort of stunned to have been offered the position in the first place.

So, while in the shower, thinking about what to make for dinner, I got this bug up my ass to make a cold salad with corn and chipotle peppers. I then realized that meant going to a grocery store on my day off. Never a pleasant prospect. Rather than pop down to TJ’s, which is the last place I want to go on my day off, it was a toss-up between Star Market—a heinous wasteland of surly clerks and befuddled customers—and Whole Foods. I decided on the latter. Now, I should make it clear that I’ve never been in a Whole Foods in my life, largely because I’ve always viewed them as a magnet for trend-hopping yuppies and neo-con ex-hippies (who, truth be told, also make up a large part of the Trader Joe’s demographic). Not surprisingly, I was partly right. There were plenty of regular, everyday humanoids there, as well, shambling about in search of something frozen for dinner.

Anyway, the thing I was most struck by was the prices at Whole Foods, and how outrageous they seemed compared to what I’m used to. I mean, sure, they’ve got some nice products, a mind-shattering produce selection compared to anyone else in the area, and I’m sure it costs a lot to outfit an entire grocery chain with wood laminate and chromed steel shelving from Ikea, but c’mon! I walked out of there with eight items for just barely less than $20. I could have picked those same items up elsewhere for somewhere in the $12 range.

From now on, I’m doing all my day-off grocery shopping at Super 88. Even if it means I have to live on dried squid and fermented soybeans (which would be no problem, believe you me).

BTW - I’m making figs in a North Coast Old Stock Ale reduction for dessert. Because I can.

It looks like, as of tomorrow, I’ll be going back to working two jobs. I recently asked Nick, beer manager at Bauer Wine & Spirits, if he knew of any stores looking to fill a similar role on their staff. He pointed me to a little shop in Brigham Circle, Dara’s Wine & Spirits, from which the beer manager (of sorts) had just departed. It’s a little family-run place, with an impressive selection of brews for such a small shop. After talking to the owner’s son and the previous beer guy, I landed myself the gig as his replacement. The craft beer selection could use some tweaks, possibly thinning out the selection from some breweries and expanding the selection of imported offerings. You don’t really need to offer the IPA from every single brewery at the expense of not having a single saison or altbier. Nor do you need to have several breweries imperial stout in the middle of summer. More depth, less breadth, as it were.

With a bunch of our banana anadama bread left from last week, we decided to put it to use in making breakfast on Saturday. Hilary got up early and soaked a half dozen thick slices of the somewhat stale bread in a mixture of milk and eggs, allowing them to absorb a good deal of the liquid before I finally dragged myself out of bed. With a pot of coffee brewing, I got to work on a sauce for our French toast. The sauce started with the remnants of a bottle of Mount Gay Eclipse rum, perhaps ½-cup or more, to which I added a few tablespoons of dark brown sugar, a dash of bourbon vanilla extract, and a thick pat of unsalted butter. I let this simmer a while, ’til it reduced by about half, at which point I added a thinly sliced banana. As Hilary finished cooking the bread in a skillet, the sauce continued to reduce, allowing the bananas to caramelize nicely. Once ready, we layered the slices of French toast on our plates, drizzled them with the banana rum sauce, and dusted them lightly with powdered sugar. Amazing! This was quite possibly the best take on French toast I’ve ever had. The sweet fruit and sugar flavors of the sauce combined quite nicely with the savory egg character of the bread. Truly delicious.

Today being my day off, I made a much more salty/savory brunch. I cooked up a simple batch of scrambled eggs, with roughly chopped cremini mushrooms (AKA: baby bellas) and garlic, fresh ground pepper and a hint of paprika. We toasted up a few slices of yogurt & green onion bread, on which Hilary (who made it home from jury duty just in time to get in on this meal) spread a thin layer of chèvre. I also halved a handful of mini pearl tomatoes to serve alongside our eggs and toast. This was quite a flavorful meal, but I think the memory of the aforementioned French toast will overshadow all other dishes for some time to come.

Having a couple funky old bananas around, we decided to try our hands at a yeast-raised banana bread (of sorts) last night. After a lot of frustrating attempts to find a recipe on Recipezaar that wasn’t written for the bread machine crowd, we decided on the banana anadama recipe from Bakingsheet. It took some time, what with all the raising, but was well worth it. My only complaint, initially lodged by Hilary this morning, is that it could be more banana-y. Alas!

Anyway, it makes for a nice piece of toast, to go with the sautéed maitake mushrooms and  scrambled eggs I made for breakfast. Not too sweet, but enough so to contrast the savory flavors of the eggs and mushrooms. Tasty.

This morning, while contemplating doctoring my coffee with a couple cardamom pods, I picked up a jar of star anise I recently purchased and was inspired to tweak my oatmeal. Pulling a single star from the vessel, I placed it in the water in which the oatmeal was cooking. In short order the mixture began to put off a nice anise/licorice aroma. As the oats neared completion, I removed the star anise from the pot and added a small amount of butter and Grade B maple syrup. There was still a nice aroma to the oatmeal, but I was curious to see how much flavor was imparted by the addition of just one star. Surprisingly, it wasn’t an insignificant amount, and I was glad I hadn’t popped two or three stars into the water, which I’d originally considered.

I’ll probably apply this technique to making rice sometime this week, an idea I came up with while eating a rice pudding–like dish recently. I’ve got it in my head that I should add a couple star anise and some cardamom pods to the rice, while also replacing at least 50% of the water with coconut milk, if not more. Then I can toss together some sort of stir-fry with tempeh and vegetables—and plenty of spices—to have with it. Or maybe I’ll give saag paneer a shot.

This afternoon I stopped into my local packie for a 6-pack of Bigfoot, to take the edge off the little Nor’easter we’re experiencing, and was surprised to find bottles of Southern Tier’s Jah-Va Imperial Coffee Stout in the singles cooler. I hadn’t intended to pick up anything other than the Bigfoot, but Jah-Va is sort of like crack. Crack that leaves you with heartburn the next day—but is oh, so worth it! It’s possible that combining coffee and beer should be illegal, but then, I’d hate to see the practice outlawed. I’ve had a few coffee stouts, including Lagunitas Brewing’s Cappuccino Stout and Brasserie Dieu du Ciel’s Péché Mortel, among others, but this is possibly my favorite. Admittedly, there are a couple others I’ve heard are better in one way or another, but as it warms, I find Jah-Va to be one of the more balanced coffee stouts, with enough malt sweetness to take the edge off the acidity of the coffee. I’m not sure if they changed the recipe this year, or if my palate has just changed a bit, but it seems that they’ve eased off the coffee just enough to make it seem slightly less acidic than last years brew. Regardless, I see myself drinking plenty of this throughout the winter and spring. The only thing that’ll keep me from buying metric shit-tons of this is that I can get Smuttynose Imperial Stout for like $2 less per bottle at work.

Okay, I work at Trader Joe’s, and I know the place has a cult-like following who swear the company can do no wrong, but I’ll be the first to tell you that some of our products are seriously fucking flawed. Take, for instance, our “fresh” pizza dough. Normally I buy the pre-baked pizza shells (similar to a Boboli shell, for the non-TJ’s enthusiasts), but I occasionally feel a bit frugal, or want to get more involved in my pizza making, and pick up the super-cheap raw dough. The thing is, tonight was the third time I tried making pizza using said dough, and it’s the first time I haven’t ended up throwing the dough in the trash. I suspect, were I to try, I could make a pizza dough from scratch that would be perfectly workable. However, this TJ’s pizza dough is consistently less than workable, which I believe has a lot to do with it being “ready to use,” or whatever the packaging says.

Since we (read: Hilary) did manage to get the dough rolled out this time, I figured I might as well top it and toss it in the oven. And then things just got retarded. I swear the package directions said to leave the pizza in the oven for 6-8 minutes @ 425º, which seemed unrealistically hopeful, and in fact was unrealistically hopeful. Something like 20 minutes later, the pizza was finally done. The only problem was that it wasn’t fully cooked in the middle of the crust, and even the thinner sections were still doughy and unappetizing. I seriously hate when food comes out all fucked up like that, and have now sworn off this shelf-stable pseudo-dough.

The dirt-cheap TJ’s marinara sauce I used for the pizza was acceptable, however. I just wish I still had some of my dad’s pesto left in the freezer, ’cause I’m sort of done with using red sauce on pizzas at home.

This evening I prepared my modified mushroom barley soup (I added sweet red Italian peppers, shallots, scallions, and spices to the original recipe). While it was slowly simmering away for a final 20 minutes, I prepared some of the bread we baked last night as a side. I cut some nice ¾” slices from the loaf, gave them all a brush of light truffle oil from Trader Joe’s, sprinkled on some thinly-sliced scallion greens, and topped them with a liberal amount of grated gruyère and fresh-ground black pepper. It was a very, very tasty combination. I’m sure the truffle oil and gruyère overpowered some of the more delicate flavors in the bread, but it was a good side, and I’ll enjoy the bread in its more natural state when I have some for breakfast with just a little butter.

For dessert, we finished off a container of TJ’s Triple Ginger Snaps, dipping them in leftover chocolate-orange dressing from the cake Hilary made for her birthday. Classy!

Since my PowerBook shit the bed, I’ve been stuck listening to the same music that was on my iPod at the time. It’s not that I don’t like what I’ve got on there, but I do get kind of tired of listening to the same shit every day. At this point I just leave it on shuffle, so as to maintain a certain level of unpredictability. One track that comes up from time to time is More Is Enough, by Epic Man & Plan B. It’s a sick number, with these sort of classic rave stabs and claps, and Plan B just throwing down on top of it all. Choice. I could still use some new tunes, however.