A Hoppy Pipper
a beer and food forum for allSweet Potatoes Anna
Hands down, my favorite holiday of the year, besides the glorious day of my birth, is Thanksgiving. However, I absolutely LOATHE the sight, smell or mention of sweet potatoes smothered in marshmallows and brown sugar — that is the most disgusting thing I’ve heard you can do to sweet potatoes. They are, by nature, sweet! Why anyone would mess with such a creation is beyond me. My mother has been making a recipe she found in the New York Times many years ago, that utilizes the potatoes, butter, thyme and black pepper. So here goes:
What you need:
6 medium sweet potatoes peeled
10 tablespoons unsalted melted butter
1 tablespoons fresh thyme leaves
Coarse sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
What now:
Slice the potatoes in circles, once done toss them with the butter and thyme until they’re covered. Then layer them in an oven-safe casserole dish, sprinkle salt and pepper over top, cover with tin foil and pop in the oven for 30 mins. Uncover after 30 mins and bake an extra 20-30 so the top caramelizes a bit. Serve however you wish, it doesn’t matter because it’s delicious.
Troyer’s
If happiness isn’t an entire Troyer’s pumpkin pie in front of me, then I don’t want to know what happiness is. I spent my first 9 years in Wooster, OH just a few minutes away from what I consider to be the best pumpkin pie ever. I’ve never tried my hand at making my own pumpkin pie because there didn’t seem to be much of a point when the Amish down the road had already made the best. Sadly it’s a recipe probably as closely guarded as the Coca-Cola recipe so, there’s that. I picked up 3 of them for my mom before coming home for the holidays — it took every ounce of my self-control to keep from sneaking a piece for a day and a half. Since first posting this, as of last night my mother and I put away the 3 pies in 3 days. Not too shabby.
Nona
Nona — Italian for ninth — is a modest enoteca/osteria/ristorante in Granville (home to our rival school, Denison University). Located right on the “main drag” of the town, Nona offers a small portal back to Toscana with an Italian/English menu, the feel of an authentic Italian enoteca and a wine list that includes the famous Brunello di Montalcino and other DOCG wines.
The service was excellent and friendly, the atmosphere muted but warm and bustling and the food was life-saving. To start my roommate ordered the vegetable soup which made her eyes roll back in her head and for me the braised fennel with blood orange vinegar infused onions. Ummm ok so that all rocked pretty hard but then came our primi: for my roommate, the Sundried Tomato and Asiago Ravioli with Arugula pesto and Toasted Almond Butter and for me, the spinach and ricotta tortellini with ragu — TO DIE FOR. All the pasta is done in-house so the freshness can’t really be beat.
For the dolci, we split a gorgeous flaky pastry nest of roasted apples and balsamic gelato. Whatever, we basically had a roommate date but we had so much fun and you could not have slapped the grins off our face. I think our waitress thought we were slightly insane because we gushed at every special she told us about but whatever.
All I Want is Your LIFE!!!
After my roommate and I gorged ourselves on cheap, greasy delivery Chinese food we decided to kick back, digest and have a few laughs. Thanks to Mel Brooks’ genius we fell into Dracula: Dead and Loving It, the rest is history. In true Mel Brooks fashion, the movie had us flirting with the possibility of peeing our pants laughing throughout the entire feature. Peter MacNicol delivered his best performance as Renfield, the enslaved Brit of Dracula (Leslie Nielsen) with a zest for insects and an insatiable palate.
I particularly love that Renfield’s luncheon companion, the director of the sanitorium, thinks he’s crazy not just for eating bugs but for the way in which he eats them.
Om nomnomnom
In my perpetual state of crackedoutdom, preparing for my senior Art History exam, I sometimes stumble upon gems like this…
Hans Baldung Grien, Death and the Maiden, 1518-20
Death looks more than a little peckish here as he takes a chomp out of this already dead looking lady’s cheek. I’ve seen plenty of memento mori in my 4 years of studying art history but this is the first uncluttered image of Death literally owning some poor girl. Usually, the subject is portrayed through a single skull, still lifes, dances of the dead or the wildly chaotic scenes from the Last Judgement. The composition here is focused, central and sparse. Of particular interest is Grien’s use of a black background which is traditional for portraiture or still life painting. Reminds me of the lines from Snoop’s latest musical contribution to the world, Gangsta Luv, “it’s like True Blood/I sink my teeth in”.
Bumzor
I’ve visited the Great Lakes Brewing Co. two or three times and taken the tour each time in hopes that the next will be better than the last. Alas, alak they insisted on being a full 15 minutes long. Highlights included talking about the history of the place, looking at sealed bags of barley and malts and empty mashtuns, then popping out a quarter for a quarter sized sample of their most lack-luster beers.
I’m confused and disappointed by this, the largest regional brewer in Ohio presenting such a downer. Even Sam Adams in Jamaica Plain, Boston can put on a tour that shows you the difference between various hops and barley – taste, smell and feel them – then wind up the tour with communal and bountiful samples of multiple beers. Why must the largest Ohio brewer be such a bummer?
The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum
Last weekend, while visiting my brother in Williamsburg we took a detour into the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum. It was a pretty cool place with some quirky stuff, sweet Revolutionary/Civil War muskets, mansion-sized dollhouses and some pretty sweet beer paraphernalia.
The old man river motif is of German origin as is the shape of the ware. According to the handy museum placard the “Bartmann Bottles were produced in different sizes from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The small specimens shown here that feature a round or globular body date from throughout the 1600s. They were used as storage containers for beer, wine or cider and may even have been pressed into service as drinking vessels. [...] The salt glaze on stoneware was impervious to the corrosive effects of these preservatives, making it an ideal choice for maintaining a well-stocked household”.
Of course, these are things I have to have as is this next hilarious little vessel, a miniature keg.
Makes modern day kegerators look pretty crass and unrefined, huh?
Tacos and Cerveza
It’s a common mix and for good reason. The refreshing, not too filling beer refreshes a spicy palate after a faceful of tacos and hot sauce, while the light carbonation brings about those satisfying belches.
I had the pleasure of visiting my big brother this weekend in Williamsburg, and the little love bug brought me back a 21st birthday presie from Spain in the form of a bottle of Ambar CaesarAugusta (CaesarAvgvsta). The bottle is awesome — reminds me of the squat Chimay Blanche bottle. Pours a light yellow with a 2 finger bright-white head. Faintly citric notes in the aroma. Flavor is about the same as the aroma with more lemony taste and a bright mouthfeel. The other Spanish beer I’ve had is the macro, Estrella Damm Inedit and I hated it, so this was a lovely change. Spain still could use a bit of work on their micro industry and take a chapter from the Italian craft-beer movement, France too!
Meat Stall
As I peruse and devour every image in Janson’s History of Art for my senior Art History exam, I forgot how much I love the Dutch painters of the Renaissance and Reformation periods in 16th cent. Northern Europe. In particular, I love the realism and naturalism of the everyday genre paintings such as Pieter Aertsen’s The Meat Stall (1551, oil on panel).
This Dutch style and genre of painting continues into the Baroque and only gets more awesome. What’s especially interesting is during the Baroque in the Netherlands, we see a focus on women and their place in the market economy, management of their household and educating their daughters in the field. It illustrates their importance in Dutch society, the wealth of the state and prowess of the artist in depicting the plethora of the markets. Perhaps it is partly my art history training that makes me so enamored of market places and especially the meat counters — formal analysis of paintings such as this seems to carry over into reality.
Paperworks
I’m in the early stages of writing a research paper for my art history senior seminar about the portrayal of women with beer or in bars during both the Impressionist and Art Nouveau era. The works I’m looking at now are Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), Picasso’s Le Moulin de Gallete (1900) and the popular Art Nouveau commercial posters. It kind of sucks that now the popular art surrounding women and beer is restricted to buxom, semi-nude tanned girls. I somehow found this image, and can’t remember where, that while still erotic was much more interesting artistically than the Budweiser girls.
The colors and medium are interesting as is the fact that these women aren’t placed in any given context as the other works. In Picasso’s painting, the women are clustered in a crowded bar, mostly blurs of moving color but with staunch white almost vampire-like teeth smiling out of lurid red lips. For whom are these women posing with their full mugs of beer, almost fully exposed?
