Making and cooking

This has been a full weekend of hobby! Friday night I went to yellow house canyon brew works for there monthly last Friday event! I had some great beer and got 3 people to join the Homebrew club!

Saturday was a FULL day of brewing! The club did a social brew at my home and we brew three historical beers. We brewed Thomas Jefferson's beer, Benjamin Frankln's beer, and a 1744 porter. It was crazy busy and exhausting!

Sunday was a busy day as well. I wrote a 6 page paper on the sate of of sex education in Texas. FUN STUFF!

After writing my paper I set to work on making 2.5 gallons of red rice wine! It is a tart wine made from two forms of Asian yeast and Jasmin rice. Here is the recipie I followed today.

9 cups rice (steamed or boiled 2-1 ratio water to rice)

8 yeast balls crushed to powder

3/4 cup red yeast rice ground to powder

Let rice cool and roll into balls. Coat balls with mixture and stack in jar. Top jar with cheese cloth then screw on lid. Let stand 3 to 14 weeks. Seperate and drink. I am going to pasturize when the flavor is right. I should get around 2 gallons of the wine.

During the process of making rice wine I also made some stew for the week! I substituted the barly for lentils. This soup was really easy and only took about 40 min total to cook.

http://cupcakesandkale.blogspot.ca/2013/11/vegetable-barley-quinoa-soup.html

The soup came out wonderfully! Now I am off to watch wolf of Wall Street and sleep! Thank you for reading. Have a great week!

 

 

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Made another batch of soap today.  I split the batch in half and did one half sweet orange and the other half Eucalyptus.  I now have about 60 bars of soap made.  I am hoping to sell it at school, and a few places here in town.

 
I am wanting to keep the soap as natural as possible so I died the orange soap with carrot juice and dyed the eucalyptus green with spinach juice.

 The soap came out way softer than my last few batches.  I added a little less Lye to this batch to see if I could get a better moisturizing soap.  I am wondering if the soap will firm up in time.  I am really happy with the color I got using juice.  We will see in a month if the color and aromas hold up.

Just soap today.  Have a great day

Breakfast, Beer, and Dinner

What a wonderful day on Saturday!  I started the day by cooking some gluten free banana pancakes with homemade blueberry jam and hot lemon water.  The gluten free flour I am using is ok for pancakes but not bread. Next time I will use garbonzo flour instead, I believe that it makes a more fluffy pancake.   Here is a link that I am finding helpful to learn about gluten free flour.
http://www.beardandbonnet.com/the-beginners-guide-to-gluten-free-flours/


1 cup flour (whichever kind you prefer)
1 tablespoon sugar (I used organic cane sugar)
2 tablespoons baking powder
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 cup soymilk
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 Banana chopped 


After breakfast I started up the water to brew 10 gallons of Black IPA.  A black IPA is a really hoppy beer but has some residual sweetness and roast flavors.

-24-lbs.-Rahr-2-row-pale
-1-lbs.-Briess-Caramel-80L
-75-lbs.-Weyermann-Carafa-III
-.75-lbs.-English-Chocolate-Malt

2 oz. Summit (60 min)
2 oz. Chinook (15 min)
2 oz. Centennial (10 min)
2 oz. Cascade (5 min)
2 oz. Centennial (0 min)
2 lb Corn sugar (0 min) 

Wyeast 1272 American Ale Yeast II

- Boiled the first gallon down to a syrup and added back into the boil.

 Gandalf keeping an eye on the beer

After a wonderful day of brewing and drinking with friends we transitioned to the Saint Patrick's day festivities.  I made some Irish Colcannon for the party.  It came out wonderfully and didn't last long.  I used the recipe bellow without the Kale.... I forgot to add it.

http://www.food.com/recipe/irish-vegetarian-colcannon-20754

Gotta love good beer, Good friends and good food!

Wine soap......Yes I said wine soap! Oh and some soup as well

I read about making wine soap in the soap making book I bought last week.  I really wanted to try it so I thought I would do it today.  In ADHD fashion I made soap, made a batch of soup and wrote 3 papers today!

The soap was my normal recipe but I changed the coco butter for bees wax.  I then took a bottle of wine and boiled it down to try and eliminate the alcohol.  I then used the wine reduction and some extra water to make the Lye solution.

Ingredients 

Reducing the Wine

Cooling the Lye solution

Ready to age

The soup I made was a taco soup

Dice and sauté 

- 4 Carrots

- 1 Bunch of Celery

- 2 White Onions

Add veggies to
- 1 large can of Ro-tel
- 1 large can of white hominy
- 1 can of pinto beans
- 1 can kidney beans
- 1 can black beans
- 1/2 bag frozen corn
- 1 bag of taco seasoning

Simmer ALL DAY!

Sautéing Veggies

 Add diced Avocado and some hot sauce if you like to spice it up!

After a full day of soap making and cooking and cleaning it was time to write some papers and do some research.  Drinking my Saint Paul Porter!

 Thanks for reading.  Enjoy the extra hour of light!

A day in the life

So I thought I would show you guys what I normally eat for breakfast and lunch. I am trying to do mostly raw and simple veggies and fruit.

For breakfast I juice half of the produce and blend the rest. I juice the apple, celery, cucumber, and carrots because they produce a lot of juice. I add the banana, frozen blueberries (not in pic) and spinach to the blender with the juice because they do not juice well. I add a scoop of pea protein and some chia seeds to the blend as well. The pea protein provides 27grams of protein and is a very simple and sustainable product. The chia seeds I add for vitamins, protein and cleansing properties.











I am also drinking lemon, cinnamon, ginger water. Lemon in the morning helps with hunger, breath, balancing of PH and many more things. Check out the link to read more.

http://foodmatters.tv/articles-1/cheers-to-drinking-warm-lemon-water






I am also taking a b12 vitamin because B is the one vitamin that is hard for vegans to get in high quantity.







LUNCH!
I eat the same thing for lunch almost every day. Spinach, tomato, carrots, cucumber, and avocado salad. SO GOOD!







Well that's about it for my daily meals. Thanks for reading!

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What to do on a cold day!

Today was full of shopping, cleaning, organizing and baking.

I have to say, I LOVE COSTCO! If you have not been, you need to go. They have some amazing deals on really good products.

I started the day by going to Costco, best buy, the mall, and grocery store with my lovely fiancé! I also stopped by Barnes and noble to trap a soap making book! It has some really great ideas. I want to try wine soap, coffee soap, and beer soap!

This evening, started with a purging of the kitchen! I bought a bunch of bulk dry goods so had to clean out the kitchen to make some room. I love the view of an organized kitchen. I am not sure what has changed in my adult life but the kitchen has become my sanctuary and cooking is my meditation.

Also made some gluten free challah bread! Came out more like a pretzel than bread so I am going to make this recipe again but in the form of pretzels.

The flour I used

Before the oven

After.  Very large pretzel 

Here is the website I used for the recipe, notice the picture looks way better than mine! 

http://www.care2.com/greenliving/seven-delicious-vegan-bread-recipes.html

Between stages of baking, I whipped together my own recipe for lentil soup. It is very simple. I added about 3 cups lentils with 10 cups of vegitable stock and let cook. While it cooked I sautéed carrots, celery, onions, and garlic. After the veggies were soft I added them to the soup and added a box of diced tomato sauce and 5 chopped tomatoes. I let it cook for a couple of house and then dove in with a wonderful IPA called Union Jack IPA.

This beer was wonderful!

Boom!  Leftovers 

After cooking, I of course had to drink and watch the oscars!  I also had to add this picture the Ellen took during the oscars.  I love how technology and social media has changes the way we experience things.  

Thats all the shenanigans I can stand for the day!  Thanks for reading.

Pretty sure I will end up on the no fly list

So this came in the mail yesterday! I am pretty sure ordering 10 pounds of sodium hydroxide, aka lye, put me on some sort of list. Don't worry, this is not for food, it is for soap making. It was cheaper to order in bulk on Amazon. I will be teaching a friend to make soap in a few week and needed to stock up.

Question: any requests for the type of soap I make next?






On a completely unrelated note, here is my breakfast from this morning. It is a mixture of things to juice and blend. I juice the hard stuff and blend then things like bananas and spinach. I have started adding pea protein. It adds 24g of protein to my morning. I am eating a lot of raw veggies lately and less beans and cooked things so I thought I might add some protein to my morning shake.






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