dynagirl

What to do with all the leftover cheese? French onion soup!

We’ve been making a lot of soufflé lately, as we gear up to lead a workshop. My usual practice as cheese-monger-ee has been pretty sloppy: scrawl “Swiss cheese” on the grocery list, then find myself shuffling from foot to foot in the dairy section, trying to remember if we’d ever come up with a preference….eventually grabbing the cheapest of whatever looked decent. Really, everything there looks decent—I’m too lazy to drive to the Giant Chain Grocers (and besides, they give me ADD-hives) so I shop at the locals, which have really nice cheese.

To put an end to this nonsense, here are the three non-baby, non-mega-dairy Swiss cheeses available at the Willy St. Coöp last week: Emmenthaler (source unknown), Edelweiss Grass-fed Emmenthaler, and Cave-aged Guryère (source unknown).

We tasted the cheeses uncooked, first, then in four soufflés—the fourth was a mix of half Guryère and half Grassy Emmenthaler. Guryère, solo, wins by a mile. Here’s our notes:

Emmenthaler

regular old Swiss cheese

creamy; would be good for melty uses

boring and Panera-like

Grass-fed Emmenthaler

like the other one but with a nice top bite

tasty—with terroir, and funky

has a sharp note that the regular Emmenthaler was missing

Cave-aged Guryère

salty, brown, nutty, toothy, & dry

back wall of funkiness

best—rotten

TOTAL WINNER

Whut.

Would you guys start a website for all of your personal care items? It is important for sanitation for people to have a culturally competent wholeness soap that doesn’t use any type of inflammation. So what are the emotions behind the ingredients? Thanks.

Well this tip is handy if you’re doing multiple .indd files/renditions for DPS where you need different folios for each resolution you’re servicing. CS6 supposedly will let you keep all of those layouts in one file.

That’s pretty cool. I don’t use Instagram but the effects are nice.

Personal Brewery Is All-In-One Beer Factory—because brewing was SO HARD before this!

The only step this saves is siphoning the beer from the fermenter into your bottles (or keg, if you’re fancy). Bottling five gallons takes me, oh, about an hour. For only $4500, I’ll get that hour back! Huzzah.

The jazz is on the stereo, the steak is seasoned, the olives are stuffed with blue cheese, and the gin’s in the freezer.

Why, hello, Friday Night! It’s lovely to see you again.

Celebrating St Patrick’s Day with French food and Piña Coladas. Prosit!

hello, Wichita! Where is your lineman, and where can I find the souvenir? (Difficulty level: earworms don’t count.)

Did you know? Effingham, Illinois real name is “Fuckingham,” but Rand-McNally decide to make their maps “family friendly” in 1953. It’s been reprinted that way ever since! True fact.

So, I just started watching The Boondock Saints after years of prodding from a friend. Not one minute in:

Racked Sven’s Oatmeal stout, and brewing Hammerhead Porter. Long mash!

Racked the Warbler Pale Ale, and brewed the Sven’s Oatmeal Stout.

Tell me there aren’t any other ways to incorporate hop puns into my beer names!

Bottled the Rachel-in-Dairyland cream ale, racked the Red Foxx, and brewed another batch of Warbler Pale Ale.

Making blintzes. Not stingy.

Brewing Badger Red Foxx Ale as he spins up the funk and acid/jazz on the downloader. Yay, Saturdays.

@HomeDepot’s @MarthaStewart Xmas lights don’t daisychain end-2-end. Porch 1/2 done & no idea where receipt is >.< http://twitpic.com/369akp

Dancing in the kitchen to Sly, the Staples Singers, HAIR, and the Sex Pistols.

Bottled the Russian Imperial Stout and the Oktoberfest; racked the cream ale; made beef stock and turned it into French onion soup; made the sauce for tomorrow’s lasagna; stuffed the sopressata; he made chicken pot pie and lemon curd torte… the kitchen is going to be glad tomorrow’s Monday!

This captures so well the grim determination that’s needed for first-time sausage making. Armed with Charcuterie, The Art of Fermented Sausages, and, err… Charcuterie, our long-term goal may be to get good at making tasty, tasty meat products, but our short-term goal is to not die.

Our shortest-term goal starting out was harder than it seemed. While we did ok on the provisioning (thanks, internet!), and I already had a meat grinder, the stuffing doesn’t really go so well without the right tools. A big pastry bag is great, but you really need the long nozzle of a trumpet to jam the casings up. (Like putting on stockings: you start by pre-loading them at the foot, rather than just trying to shove your leg in them.) The meat went back into the freezer for two days, while Amazon swooped in with the Kitchen-Aid grinder attachment + sausage stuffer tubes. Do NOT buy! It worked …ok, but the amount of product you can get through the masher at a time is paltry. Sure, they’ll sell you a big piece of plastic you can attach to pile more on, but you’re still stuck feeding the mill–and for all the power of the KA motor, you’re really still doing a lot of work: you have to push that plunger very hard to keep the sausage going through at any speed. Plunge, reload, plunge–it’s a drag, and results in a ton of air pockets to prick. Also, the tubes are plastic; for the same price, you can get metal over at Butcher-Packer. I’m sending the grinder attachment back: next time, we’ll shove the trumpet tube inside a pastry bag.

Mmmm, casings.

You know what’s weird? Taking another animal’s flesh, grinding it up, and shoving it inside said animal’s intestines. Oh, and then? Eating the flesh-stuffed flesh.

…but you know what’s weirder? Eating another animal WITH YOUR FACE, probably while it’s still half-alive.

Racking the Russian Imperial Stout; might need to pick up another carboy so I can do the same with the Oktoberfest. Also, the boeuf bourguignon in the oven for tomorrow night smells awesome.

Calling all web builders! I took it and so should you—The Survey For People Who Make Websites, 2010: http://j.mp/alasurvey2010

This is not the droid you’re looking for (is actually com.apple.mobile.restored). Move along, move along.

At the Essen Haus.

Bottled the California Golden Ale last night.

Smokey the (alt) Beer now occupying Fermenter #2.