Beer of the Week: Flying Fish Exit 16

By Iron Chef Leftovers

Another beer that I really was excited to find on my last NJ excursion was the Flying Fish Brewing Exit 16 Wild Rice Double IPA. I read a review of it a couple of years ago and had really wanted to try it since it was different – an IPA brewed by a craft brewery, with rice as one of the ingredients – not something that you see every day. The added plus is that the beer is actually named Exit 16 – playing off the joke that folks from NJ are familiar with – when you meet someone from NJ for the first time, you ask them what exit rather than what town. I had this beer in a 12 oz. bottle.

From the Flying Fish website:

Although usually identified with landfills and pipelines, the Hackensack Meadowlands is an amazingly diverse ecosystem providing vital animal and plant habitat. In a nod to a once common food plant here, we’ve brewed this beer with wild rice. We also added organic brown and white rice, as well as pils and pale malts.

Rice helps the beer ferment dry to better showcase the five different hops we added. Lots and lots of them. We then dry-hopped this Double IPA with even more–generous additions of Chinook and Citra hops to create a nose that hints at tangerine, mango, papaya and pine. This beer pairs extremely well with spicy foods and all kinds of seafood. And of course, it’s quite enjoyable all by itself.

Malt: MFB pilsner malt
Other: Wild Rice, Brown rice
Hops: Citra, Columbus, Centennial, Simcoe, and Chinook
Original Gravity: 6.6 Plato
Alcohol by volume: 8%
IBU’s: 62
Formats: 12 oz. bottles, 1/2 kegs, 1/6 kegs
Availability: Year round

The beer pours light golden in color with a creamy white head. There are moderate notes of citrus and hos with backing notes of grain, yeast and rice – it vaguely smelled like a domestic American lager. The beer starts out mild on the palate with a very light sweetness and a touch of grain and rice before slowly delving into a deeper IPA profile. First a mild bitterness appears, then it is coupled with a dry mouth feel before finishing with a pleasant medium citrus note with hints of floral orange blossom – I was expecting a slightly bigger hop profile from the beer considering it is a double IPA. There is a very mild touch of alcohol at the back end of the throat after a short finish; nothing terrible or off-putting, but definitely noticeable. The beer is layered and fun with some interesting characteristics that you don’t find usually in a craft beer, but I was expecting something with a bigger IPA profile, and got something that was approachable and restrained. It was enjoyable and worth seeking out just for the novelty of the ingredients.

Flying Fish Exit 16 turns on its blinker and heads to the ramp with 3 New Jersey Turnpikes out of 5.

EarthBox – Shade Cloth Hoop Houses

by A.J. Coltrane

It’s supposed to get warm the next few days, possibly into the high 70’s at our house. Today seemed like a good day to put the shade cloth over the cool-weather vegetables.

I’d previously purchased the shade cloth. The bag said it was 6′ x 50′. I unfolded the cloth into what looked like a 6′ x 25′ length and cut. The intention was to get two 6′ pieces off of one end. What I got was two 9′ pieces. No idea why. 9 doesn’t divide evenly into 50..

As it turns out, I only had enough dowels to do two boxes, so I did this:

The shade cloth is held in place by large binder clips.

(L-R)

Half-barrel Container: Shallots, Arugula, Fernleaf Dill

Left EarthBoxes: Little Gem Romaine Lettuce, Spinach

Center EarthBoxes: Parsley and Cilantro (both mostly hidden) and more Spinach.

Right EarthBox: Tulle covered, formerly home of the Pak Choi before it bolted.

I was feeling pretty clever! We’ll see if it actually helps.

Creamy Nettle Soup

By Iron Chef Leftovers

Soups are a great meal since they don’t generally require a ton of ingredients, are easy to make in a large quantity, are easy to make from a technical standpoint and don’t require a ton of attention. One of the simplest and most delicious soups I have ever come across is the creamy nettle soup at the old Le Gourmand space in Ballard. This soup was so good that I think it might actually be the best thing that I ever had there. Unfortunately the restaurant is long gone, but the chef, the great Bruce Naftaly, still runs cooking classes and shows you dishes that he served in the restaurant. Since we are approaching the tail end of nettle season, I figured that this would be a good one to put out there, especially considering the somewhat unpredictable Northwest spring weather. Not sure where to get nettles? Try Foraged and Found – they are at the U-District Farmer’s Market on Saturdays and Ballard on Sundays. You probably only have 1 or 2 weeks left in nettle season though, so you many want to hurry.

The Software

1 tablespoon of unsalted butter

1 medium leek, dark green part removed, quartered and rinsed and cut into ½ inch pieces, about 8 oz.

½ yellow onion cut into 6 parts, about 8 oz.

2 shallots peeled and quartered, about 4 oz.

1 Yukon gold potato, quartered, about 6 oz.

2 cups chicken or vegetable stock

¼ cup cilantro, roughly chopped

6 oz. nettles, washed

Salt and pepper

Nutmeg

The Recipe

In a heavy bottomed stock pot, melt the butter until it stops foaming over medium heat. Add the shallots, leek and onions and stir. Cook for about 15 minutes or until they soften, stirring occasionally. If the veggies begin to brown, lower the heat slightly, you are looking to sweat them, not brown them. When the veggies are soft, add the potato and stock. Cover and cook over medium heat for about 20 minutes or until the potatoes are cooked (you can pierce them with the tip of a knife with no resistance). Add nettles and cover, cooking for 6-7 minutes until the nettles are wilted (this will also take out the stinging quality of the nettles). Remove from heat and puree in 2 batches, adding ½ of the cilantro to each batch. When done pureeing the soup, if the soup is too thick, stir in water or stock in small quantities until the desired thickness is achieved. If it is too thin, add some additional cooked potato puree to thicken it. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve hot or warm with a few grinds of fresh nutmeg and some nice bread.

Notes

If you can’t find nettles, use spinach instead. It won’t be as good but you will be able to make the soup all year round. The recipe will feed 4-6 people and scales really easily and can be served as either a main course or an appetizer. It will keep in the fridge for 2-3 days but freezes well and reheats easily, so it makes for a nice meal in a hurry. This soup is ultra creamy and luxurious, and, best of all, involves no actual dairy and can be made completely vegan by using veggie stock and olive oil instead of chicken stock and butter.

The Next Generation Of Soccer Players

by A.J. Coltrane

The Colorado Rapids came to town this weekend, and the Sounders smoked them, 4-2. Free haircut when the Sounders score 3 or more goals!

Through eight games Clint Dempsey is leading the league in scoring with 8 goals. (2nd place is 6 goals, then there’s one player with 5 goals, and eight more players with 4.) The Sounders are tied for 1st place in the Western Conference. Last years’ “shaky goalkeeper issue” has been resolved… Things are looking good around here.

But here’s what inspired the post: Marvell Wynne II plays for Colorado. For those of you with long sports memories, you’ll remember his dad playing baseball in the 80’s. Dad couldn’t hit, but he could run fast and play Centerfield, and he carved out a seven-year MLB career based upon those two skills. Marvell II is now in his 7th year of professional soccer, and he’s still only 27 years old..

Any time I see the “kid” connection it always gets me thinking about the future of soccer in America.

I think it’s obvious where the next wave of “kids” is coming from, and when.

Playing in the NFL is brutal. Many players leave the league with permanent, even debilitating injuries, or they can’t think straight anymore because of the repeated head trauma. The “football concussion” thing is a big sports story right now.

So what if even a few of today’s Linebackers, Defensive Backs, and Running Backs steer their kids away from football, and into another sport that rewards speed and size. It’s a sport that easy to pick up and play. It doesn’t require any special training to go out and have fun. You get to run around on grass without getting the crap kicked out of you.

I’m guessing 20 years from now we’ll see the “football concussion” pushback wave arrive. That’s when it’s really going to get interesting for American Soccer.

———————————————————–

Unrelated Thought: The name “Marvell Junior” would almost sound like an oxymoron, wouldn’t it? I think “Marvell II” was a wise idea.

2nd Unrelated Thought: One of the ESPN guys wrote recently that the NBA should start a new advertising campaign: (paraphrasing) “The NBA! You can watch it without guilt!”

Beer of the Week: Bad Jimmy’s Habanero Amber

By Iron Chef Leftovers

It is both a good and a bad thing to be a brewery in Ballard these days. Having 10 breweries in a one mile radius means that from a consumer standpoint, I can hit multiple breweries on a single trip. The bad thing is that it leads to the inevitable comparison of beers between the breweries. The newest kid on the block is Bad Jimmy’s Brewing, tucked away in a garage behind the Bourbon and Bones BBQ restaurant, just across the street from Hales. They have been open since late last year with the idea that their mission “is to reinvent intensity as it exists in the craft beer world.” One of the beers that they produced to keep with their mission is the Habanero Amber. I am a lover of spicy foods but there have been very few pepper based beers that have been worth drinking – they all tend to be overpoweringly spicy and miss their mark.

The beer pours dark red in color and smelled like stale beer on the nose with hints of ground pepper. The beer starts out with just a hint of grain before the pepper sets in, building in quickly and completely overwhelming everything else that might be in the beer. While the spice is pronounced and dominating on the first sip, it becomes completely overwhelming on the subsequent sips through a cumulative effect – the spiciness from the previous sip lingers on the tongue and does not fade before the next sip, so it just continues to build with each subsequent sip, becoming completely intolerable, so much so that I couldn’t finish a 5 oz. taster of the beer due to the overwhelming heat. One note and completely unbalanced, this is one of the least enjoyable beers I have had in a long time.

Bad Jimmy’s Habanero Amber attacks the senses and sprays you in the eyes with just 1 pepper sprays out of 5.

Beer of the Week: River Horse Hop-A-Lot-Amus

By Iron Chef Leftovers

Despite being one of the most densely populated states in the country, New Jersey beer, is, and I am being nice here, not exactly some of the best in the country. Sure, there are a couple of beers that are worth while, but as a whole, they generally aren’t anything to write home about. One that did come recommended to me was Hop-A-Lot-Amus from River Horse Brewing. I am always skeptical about IPA’s that are not produced on the west coast, let alone double IPAs from a brewery in NJ. I have found them lacking in general compared to the ones you find out west. Given that this was accessible from my trip to NJ, I figured that I would give it a shot. I had this beer in a 12 oz. bottle.

From the River Horse Website:

Style – Double IPA

Malts – Pilsen, Munich, Melanoidin, Caramel 15, Caramel 60, and Carapilsen

Hops – Chinook, Simcoe, Cascade, and Cenntenial

ABV – 8.5%

Continual hopping during boil gives our Double IPA tons of hop flavor and aroma. Pine and citrus notes are backed by rich malt base.

The beer poured deep orange in color with a creamy tan head. Strong notes of grain with surprisingly subtle citrus show on the nose. The beer starts off with a very mild sweetness on the palate before completely changing direction and quickly moving into a building bitterness with very light floral hints. The bitterness starts slowly and continues to build with great depth until finally fade in in a long finish. The sweetness becomes slightly more noticeable throughout as the beer warms and the beer has bester balance and structure as it warms – it felt out of balance and overly bitter with an alcohol harshness when first opened but it mellowed and smoothed out as the beer progressed. It lacked the deep citrus notes I have come to associate with a west coast IPA, but this beer was surprisingly easy to drink for its ABV and style. It is not going to make me give up west coast IPA’s but it was a nice beer in its own right.

River Horse Hop-A-Lot-Amus comes charging out of the river with a scary 3 Hippopotamus amphibius out of 5.

Celebrating Hank Aaron “The Old-Fashioned Way”

By Blaidd Drwg

Yep, baseball “purists” just can’t let the steroid thing go, even when we should be celebrating achievement, like the anniversary of Hank Aaron’s 715^th HR. The guy was receiving tons of hate mail and death threats during his pursuit of Ruth’s record and that did not stop him. Apparently kept all of the letters, I really hope they get published someday, it would be an interesting look into the racism that existed in the early 70’s, but I digress. There were speeches and videos to commemorate on April 8^th, and this stupid comment by Braves chairman Terry McGuirk

“[Aaron] set the home run record the old-fashioned way”

…

“You will always be the home run king of all time.”

Yep, Aaron set the HR record the old-fashioned way, by loading up on greenies (which he admitted to) and possibly other things of a performance enhancing nature. Enough of the sanctimonious bullshit with players prior to 1987 being clean. They weren’t, but let’s not have the truth get in the way of a good story. Until MLB basically wipes 1987-2004’s stats off the record books, the single season and career home run record holder is Barry Bonds, whether you like it or not. Just deal with it.

Having this discussion with a “purist” is a lot like this:

Beer of the Week: Populuxe Horizon Pale Ale Cask

By Iron Chef Leftovers

As contrast, Populuxe release 2 different Pale Ale casks in consecutive weeks, one that was with Crystal hops and one with Horizon. From the beerlegends.com site:

Horizon will add notes of a floral bouquet to the aroma, as well as provide some essence of citrus fruits. Horizon can be used from beginning to end throughout the brewing process.

The beer pours hazy orange in color with significant citrus and spice on the nose. The beer starts out with light citrus before quickly moving on into an interesting spice – think of black pepper, but subtle, not spicy, before finishing off with citrus oil and orange heel that bring a light bitterness that pleasantly lingers on the front of the tongue with more subtle notes of black pepper at the back of the palate. The beer drinks well with a great deal of complexity, but it moves quickly though its range of flavors, making you want more and more.

Populuxe Horizon Pale Ale Cask sets sail for the edge of the world with 4 sunsets out of 5.

No Knead Bread, The Next Day

by A.J. Coltrane

The next-night-using-up-the-No-Knead-Bread dinner. Grilled steak sandwiches with blue cheese-horseradish mayo, caramelized onions and green peppers.

Messy and good.

[Product recommendation that sort of reads like a plug:] The steak was hit with McCormick’s Steakhouse Seasoning Grinder. It’s a quick and easy way to “add something” that’s tasty but still somewhat hard to define. Hands down my favorite offering of theirs. (From the website:) “A robust blend of green, black, and pink peppercorns with salt, garlic and onion. This grinder jazzes up steaks, burgers, ribs and potatoes.”

I guess I could have put actual effort into the picture, but we were hungry, and I’m not one of those bloggers to spend a bunch of time on the photo and get cold food as a reward. Those people have a sickness. (Initially the colors in the photo were really funky. I think maybe the camera was trying to normalize the yellow cutting board as “white”. Maybe. Placing a white cutting board behind the sandwich helped the camera figure out what “white” really looks like.)

Three attempts at a decent photo is plenty.

Tonight the bread “ends” are becoming garlic croutons.

Beer of the Week: Russian River Pliny the Elder

By Iron Chef Leftovers

The beer is so legendary that it has taken on a life of its own making it one of the tougher beers to find. It does not help that it is only distributed in 4 states – California, Oregon, Colorado and Pennsylvania, and only available once every six weeks or so, driving demand through the roof. It is probably the number 1 beer that was requested in beer trading that I have done. Luckily, a trip to SF a few month back involved a side trip to the Russian River brewery and the ability to pick up 6 bottles of Pliny. Most were distributed to friends, a couple were for my consumption.

The skinny from Russian River:

Pliny the Elder is brewed with Amarillo, Centennial, CTZ, and Simcoe hops. It is well-balanced with malt, hops, and alcohol, slightly bitter with a fresh hop aroma of floral, citrus, and pine. Best enjoyed FRESH! That is why we make it in such limited supply. Actual bottling date is printed on each bottle!

Where did we come up with this name? Back in the year 2000, our friend, Vic Kralj, who owns the Bistro in Hayward, California, decided to have his first ever Double IPA festival. Vic invited 10 breweries, 6 of whom (including us) had to brew something special for him since we had nothing that would fall under this style category. Vinnie had made a Double IPA at Blind Pig in 1994, but was not brewing one at Russian River Brewing at the time. He had an idea for the recipe, but not a name. After much research in beer books, brainstorming, and deliberation, we came up with “Pliny the Elder”. Pliny, the man, lived in the first century- 23 to 79 A.D. According to our brewing references, he and his contemporaries either created the botanical name or at least wrote about Lupus Salictarius, or hops, currently known as Humulus Lupulus. That was a very early reference to an important part of any Double IPA! Pliny the beer has now become one of our flagship brews!Pliny the Elder was immortalized by his nephew, Pliny the Younger, who wrote about his uncle succumbing to ash and smoke during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. while rescuing people. Cheers to the scholar, historian, officer, writer, and Roman Naturalist- Pliny the Elder!

Original Gravity:     1.070

Alcohol by Volume:     8.0%

Color:     Copper

Bitterness:     High

The beer pours hazy orange in color with an off-white head. Extreme amounts of citrus and peel show on the nose and they hit you from a foot away. Upon closer inspection, orange peel, pine, resin and grain dominate the nose. This beer drinks big, a blast of grain starts you out before quickly relenting to the hops and there are a lot of them. Grapefruit and tangerine dominate before slowly bringing just a small amount of bitter orange peel and resin to the party on the finish. Those notes linger for a long time before slowly fading off after a minute. This is definitely a beer to be savored and drunk slowly to truly appreciate the complexity. Pliny is balanced and fruity with no indication of its 8% alcohol and is easy to drink for such a big beer. Pliny is a truly great beer and worth finding someone to trade bottles with if you have never had it before.
Russian River Pliny the Elder lectures the crowd with 5 history lessons out of 5.