I’ll give you a quick and easy way to tell if your favorite pumpkin beer was made with fresh pumpkins or the canned version. Release date. It takes weeks to brew a beer, and pumpkins reach full maturity, ready to harvest and roast for brewing, sometimes around late August. Making those beers released in July… Read More
I made you something. It took me a year. Right after I made the big move from Los Angeles to Seattle, I spent the better part of last year holed up in my tiny wooden house writing my second cookbook,The Craft Beer Bites Cookbook. It’s the follow-up to my first book, The Craft Beer… Read More
Cream Cheese Beer Pancakes with Strawberry Saison Syrup I’m standing in the middle of a craft store talking quietly on my phone to an 87-year-old woman who wants to ship me weed. I’m acutely aware of the fact that I’m actually embarrassed to tell her that I’ve never really been into weed. Not ever. Not… Read More
Maple Bacon Beer Waffles. Win at breakfast. Everyday you have a flight. A flight of meals that starts with breakfast. Maybe it’s a hastily consumed piece of toast as your rush out the door, or a Grande cup of caffeine, or maybe you miss out in favor of a few extra minutes of sleep. Then… Read More
Drunk French Toast Sticks with Beer Blood Orange Syrup. Win at breakfast. Breakfast being the most important meal has nothing to do with nurtition. It’s not about blood sugar, or enriched whole grains or jumpstarting your metabolism. It’s emotional. Breakfast is important because of who we eat it with. The people who live in… Read More
Blackberry Beer Breakfast Muffins A few years ago I spent a week in Ireland, at a hostel at the base of the Guinness brewery. Somewhere near 9am I wandered into a nearby restaurant that was much more pub than grub. At the bar was a bit of a surly local, just him and me. I… Read More
Let’s just say that you want to dive into the world of craft beer. Or even that you’re curious enough that you just want to know a bit more. Or maybe you’re just as much of a geek as I am and you just like to know stuff. Let’s also assume that you’re starting… Read More
No matter how great beer is in meat recipes, bread will always be it’s culinary kindred spirit. Because the heart and soul of bread and beer is the same: yeast. The beast that gives us bread, also gives us beer. A few months ago I was interviewing a brewer at an LA brewery who told… Read More
I have this idea that breakfast is a mark for true culinary hospitality. It’s much more intimate than dinner, it’s more vulnerable in a way. You’ve had dinner with hundreds of people, but how many people have you had breakfast with? How many times have you made breakfast for someone? How often do you… Read More
A few years ago I’d had this unfortunate idea that a red eye from LAX to JFK was a great plan. I boarded a plane around 10pm in Los Angeles, alongside a 747 full of business travelers headed for jittery East Coast morning meetings. It wasn’t so much that I irrationally figured that I could… Read More
These aren’t just muffins. They are two forms of quiet rebellion. First, it’s beer for breakfast. And unless you’re having a brunch mimosa or in the general vicinity of Las Vegas, breakfast booze is generally frowned upon. Second, lets be honest, muffins are basically just cupcakes. But you and me, we’re different. We aren’t… Read More
Pancakes are my first food memory. I’m one of 8 kids (all girls, wrap your head around that) and one of about 27 cousins (I don’t even know the actual number) which made alone time with my grandparents really special. The spring after I turned 4, I spent a Saturday night in a My… Read More
Let’s pretend for a second that you’ve never had biscuits and gravy. Like you’ve never sat in good company at a crappy diner in a small town eating sub par biscuits and gravy washing it down with shitty coffee like it’s the best breakfast you’ve ever had. Like you’ve never had someones grandma make them… Read More
Don’t judge me for this. It’s obligatory. After all, I am a blogger, and it is pumpkin season. And as the beer-food blogging hybrid beast that I am, pumpkin season means two things. First, there is the food blog trend of Pumpkin All The Things that I must participate in. Second, there are the most… Read More
We need to chat, you and I. About the Cooking With Beer odyssey I’ve firmly placed myself on and the reasons, both practical and provocative, that I’ve remained such a Craft Beer Cooking Devotee. While I know that the reason you’re drawn to these brew-infused foods may just be the ability to lay down a… Read More
If you follow me on twitter, you may have seen my announcement that I shot a TV show for Lifetime back in January. The premise of the show was to take people with interesting ideas for food products and develop those ideas into product lines that end up on grocery store shelves. There is a… Read More
There is something about lingering over a long breakfast with those I love that just makes me feel like I did something right. Everyone eats dinner, most of us have a few minutes for lunch, but it’s when we take time to sit and spend “valuable, productive” hours of the day actually tasting our food,… Read More
I didn’t grow up eating Sweet potatoes. I never saw them on my Thanksgiving table or at Sunday dinner. They just didn’t exist in my world. Until one chilly afternoon in College when I stopped by the dorm room of a Souther friend of mine who had just pulled a Sweet potato, covered… Read More