Wednesday, April 25, 2018
Being married to a craft-beer lover, I’ve known that this year the Craft Brewers Conference was coming to Nashville for quite some time. Apparently this is a really big deal in the beer world. Even though the conference is a ticketed event, there are also going to be events going on around town that the public can attend. Here are a few:
CANdemonium – Canned beers, food trucks, and music from Nashville heavy hitters like Emily West, Shelly Fairchild, Lila McCann, and a special guest headliner. Tickets are $45 and include samples/full cans from 20+ breweries (click the link the see the full list). Marathon Music Works, Tuesday May 1st, 6-10pm.
Music City CANarchy + Oskar Blues Encore – This event at Music City Walk of Fame Park is FREE (my favorite word) open to the public, and damn near all day long! This party is to officially launch the new craft beer collective created from the partnership of Oskar Blues Brewery, Cigar City Brewing, Perrin Brewing Company, and Utah Brewers Collective. At 4pm there is a tapping of Oskar Blues’ limited release Check Yo’Self Golden Double IPA and Interstate SMaSH Express Simcoe IPA. And at 5pm the music kicks in with 5pm with Eagle Eye Williamson from Austin, TX, Interstate Stash Express from Lyons, CO, and headliner Lukas Nelson & Promise of the Real, featuring the 28 year-old son of Willie Nelson. Sounds like a fun event not to be missed! Full press release here.
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Blackberry Farm & New Belgium Bière de Mai Release Party – These two breweries are throwing a shindig to celebrate their collaboration on a late Spring wild ale blended with foeder-aged sour beer. The party is open to the public, but requires ticket purchase. The $20 ticket include unlimited pours of Biere de Mai and a wide assortment of New Belgium and Blackberry Farm Brewery brews. There will be food trucks on site to purchase food. The party is May 2nd at Nelson’s Green Brier Distillery. Head here for tickets & more info!
Monday, February 5, 2018
I’ve been on QUITE the champagne kick for a while now. Mainly thanks to the accessibility of canned champagne. My favorite brand is Underwood. Usually when I drink champagne I’m drinking it solo. Therefore, I do not want (or need) to drink an entire bottle alone. Yes, they do make small bottles of champagne, but first of all, one bottle isn’t quite enough to satiate my taste, and second that amount of glass for that small amount of liquid seems really wasteful. Discovering a canned champagne has allowed me to enjoy it on the regular. One can is the perfect serving for me.
When the Nashville Food Bloggers group organized a potluck meet up, I instantly knew I wanted to bring booze, and I wanted to bring a champagne cocktail. I scoured my liquor cabinet for inspiration and landed on a bottle of homemade limoncello gifted to me by a friend. A quick google search lead me to this Cooking Light recipe. To be honest I was a little fearful of serving and untested recipe to a group of discerning food bloggers, but I very please with the flavor of this drink. While the recipe came with ingredient measurements, I told everyone to just add portions to their liking. If you like a little bit of booze, add less champagne. If you like it less sweet, use less limoncello. This is a very simple, yet sophisticated and impressive drink to serve to a crowd. I also loved that it’s a nice departure from your standard mimosa. A perfect toast for any occasion!
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Champagne Limoncello Cocktails
Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients:
8 (3 x 1/2-inch) lemon rind strips
8 tablespoons Limoncello (lemon-flavored liqueur)
4 teaspoons fresh lemon juice
1 (750-milliliter) bottle brut Champagne, chilled
Directions:
Roll up each strip of lemon rind; place 1 into each of 8 Champagne flutes. Add 1 tablespoon liqueur and 1/2 teaspoon juice to each glass. Divide Champagne evenly among glasses. Serve immediately.
Monday, October 30, 2017
I had no intention of making these. No intention at all of making a time consuming cookie. But, an old neighbor/friend who now lives far away was back in town visiting and brought these as a gift for me. And my kids saw him give me the gift. So… I was pretty much on the hook to make cookies with them. We’ve had an incredibly busy October, but the Sunday before Halloween we were home with no plans, and I figured might as well get baking. I turned to one of my favorite sources for cookie recipes, Martha Stewart Cookies* cookbook. I suppose I could have done sugar cookies, but I love all things chocolate. So with the “help” of my lovely, wonderful children, we whipped up a batch. I’ll note, the recipe says it yields 3-4 dozen 3 inch cookies. We got exactly 16. I believe I made mine thicker than the recipe calls for, and my cookie cutters were bigger than 3 inches.
I also suppose I could have easily not decorated them at all. We could have enjoyed them plain. But I just knew they’d look SO cute decorated with royal icing. Apparently I’ve done royal icing in the past, and it was such a tiring process with ugly results I swore I’d never do it again and blocked it from my memory. (Seriously, only after looking in my archives before writing this did I realize I’ve made cookies with royal icing before.)
(Please excuse the wild hair…)
Anyways, I turned to the step by step tutorial on Everyday Annie (formerly Annie’s Eats). This recipe yielded the perfect amount for my small batch of cookies (with frosting left over). I also followed recommendations by Serious Eats to use organic powdered sugar to yield a tastier royal icing. I swear I was so nervous to do these I wanted someone to come and hold my hand through the process. But somehow I powered through and these turned out SO CUTE! The only one I didn’t like much was the pumpkin, and I think that is the fault of the cookie cutter. It had the eyes and mouth already cut out, which didn’t leave much space for creativity. Next time I’ll do a plain, solid pumpkin. And when it came to the cat, I had the idea to cover it in sprinkles, but I also liked the look of it without sprinkles so I did both versions.
Have I not yet mentioned that these are DELICIOUS?! They taste very reminiscent of an Oreo, thanks to all the cocoa powder. Especially when combined with the royal icing. My cookies were thicker than the recipe recommends, but I kept roughly the same baking time (8 min – 9 minutes), this yielded exactly what I was looking for, a thick, somewhat chewy cookie. These would not be described as “sandy” or crumbly, which is how I feel decorated sugar cookies can sometimes taste, and what I was trying to avoid.
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Chocolate Cookie Cutouts
Yield: I got 16 cookies, Martha says 3-4 dozen
I rolled mine out thicker (1/3-1/2 inch) than recipe recommends (1/4 inch), and my cookie cutters were larger than 3 inches. But I kept baking time the same. This yielded a SOFT cookie, not a crisp cookie. I have reflected my changes in the recipe below.
Ingredients:
COOKIES:
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for work surface
1/2 cup plus 2 tablespoons unsweetened Dutch-process cocoa powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, room temperature
1 1/2 cups sifted confectioners sugar
1 large egg, lightly beaten
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
For Royal Icing visit Everyday Annie
Directions:
COOKIES:
Sift together flour, cocoa, salt, and cinnamon. With an electric mixer on medium-high speed, cream butter and confectioners' sugar until pale and fluffy. Add egg and vanilla, and beat to combine. Reduce speed to low. Gradually add flour mixture, beating until just combined.
Divide dough in half; flatten each half into a disk, and wrap in plastic. Refrigerate until firm, at least 1 hour (or overnight). Dough can be frozen, wrapped tightly in plastic and placed in a resealable plastic bag, up to 3 months; thaw overnight in the refrigerator before using.
On a lightly floured work surface (or a piece of parchment paper), roll out one disk of dough to just under 1/3-1/2 inch thick. Transfer to a baking sheet; freeze until firm, about 15 minutes.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees, with racks in upper and lower thirds. Using a 3-inch cookie cutter, quickly cut out shapes from dough (if dough begins to soften, chill in freezer 5 minutes), and transfer shapes to parchment-lined baking sheets, spacing them 2 inches apart, as you work. Reroll scraps and cut out more shapes. Brush off excess flour. Freeze until firm, about 15 minutes. Repeat with remaining disk of dough.
Bake cookies until crisp, about 8 minutes, firmly tapping down sheets once and rotating them halfway through. Let cool completely on sheets on wire racks before decorating as desired.
For Royal Icing visit Everyday Annie
*My Amazon Affiliate link* I love that Martha Stewart Cookies cookbook SO MUCH. It’s such a staple to me, I even have a tag for it on here. If you ever see a copy for sale buy it, if you like cookies you won’t regret it!
Sunday, October 8, 2017
My husband is a fan of Rhinegeist Brewery based in Cincinnati. They distribute to parts of Kentucky that we pass through when visiting family. He knows I’m all #roséallday and really into ciders so when he saw their Rosé Ale, a cider variant actually, he instantly knew he had to get it for me. I’m not super into beer, but I like ciders. Technically this is not quite a cider, as they changed their recipe slightly to make it an ale, which made it more affordable due to lesser tax on ales than ciders. Anyways, it makes for a delicious drink.
Recently we had a cousin visiting and when we were making beverage offerings and mentioned the Rhinegeist he suggested making a cocktail with it. Now, technically he is a step cousin, but at that moment I’d swear we were blood relation. And so, a quick perusing of our liquor cabinet revealed a bottle of Cocchi Americano, an Italian aperitif, with hints citrus. It was introduced to us by a friend who is a bartender. Anyways, I decided to try out a little cocktail attempt with the Rhinegeist Rosé Ale + Cocchi Americano. I suppose you can hardly call this a cocktail, because it only had 2 ingredients. But still, the combination of the two flavors paired for a delicious drink. And a fun reason to use such a pretty glass!
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Rosé Ale Sipper
Yield: 1 drink
Ingredients:
4 oz Rhinegeist Rosé Ale
1 oz Cocchi Americano
Directions:
Pour the Rhinegeist Rosé Ale into glass, add Cocchi Americano. Stir gently with spoon. Enjoy!
{Below} I laughed so hard both when this happened, and again every time I see the photo. Two things here, 1) depth perception is a little off when looking through viewfinder. 2) My arm is not as long as I’d like…
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