Test run on teacher gifts (9 Bean Soup with Sausage and Kale)

My older son’s school encourages the little ones to make (not buy) holiday gifts for their teachers. In past years, we have made tins of the most decadent candied pecans ever…delicious to eat, but laborious. (And not the kind of labor my little ones can help with since it involves stirring hot, sugary nuts over and over, every ten minutes.) So this year, I was trying to think of a gift the kids could really help make, and that wouldn’t be “screwed up” if my almost three year old wanted to get in on the action. A local friend sent me the most gorgeous photos from her child’s Montessori service day, where the children gathered to assemble bean soup mixes for families in need. The jars were pretty to look at, I know they are good to eat, and if a teacher is inundated with baked goods and hand-painted mugs at holiday time, this could be a nice alternative—particularly if we make it based upon the delicious bean soup I regularly whip up for my family when the weather gets chilly.

Lots of websites have recipe ideas for 1 quart jars. Fine if you can find 1 quart jars, which I couldn’t. Closest thing to it was a 1.6 quart jar at Container Store. Just keep in mind, that if you find yourself in the same predicament, simply adjust recipes by 1.5.

Last weekend we assembled the jars. The kids scooped away. The beans were flying, and they had a ball. It is impossible to “mess up” this recipe, as all that is required is filling the jar with some assortment of beans. We used kidney, black eyed peas, barley, split peas, lentils, small red beans, black beans, chickpeas, and pinto beans. My older son made sure to get all nine types of beans into each jar, my younger son was more willy nilly, and he was just happy when the beans went in the jar. Needless to say, I bought extra beans since I knew I'd be vacuuming up a lot of beans…

Then I sent my younger one to Starbucks with dad so I could tackle the (more precise) seasoning packets with my older son. Our seasoning packet was made with a teaspoon each (or so) of: oregano, basil, tarragon, thyme, dried onion, chili powder, coarse pepper, dried lemon peel, parsley, garlic powder, and smoked paprika….I learned afterwards that Costco carries an Organic No-Salt Added Seasoning mix, which I would probably opt for next time!

I gave a jar a test run today, as it was my cook day for our Wednesday Supper Swap, and the soup is delicious.

9 Bean Soup (with Sausage & Kale)

1.6 quarts (about 6 cups) of dried beans (any type)

Two 28 ounce can of diced tomatoes (I used ones with garlic and basil)

Two 34 ounce boxes of broth (I used organic chicken broth)

Seasonings/spices of choice (add in stages; you can always add more but not take it out!)

Optional – Sausages (I used Turkey Kielbasa)

Optional – Greens (I used a big bunch of kale)

Soak the beans overnight. The next day, drain and rinse the beans.

In a large stock pot, sauté the sausage in a bit of olive oil. (If this is strictly a bean soup, skip this step.)

Add the pre-soaked beans, enough broth so the beans are covered by about 2 inches of liquid, and 2 cans of diced tomatoes (as is, don't drain them).

Bring to a boil, then cover and reduce heat to low, letting the soup simmer for 2 ½ hours, or until beans are tender. You'll want to stir the soup every 1/2 hour or so, to prevent any beans from sticking to the bottom of the pot.

If you are adding kale (or any other leafy green) you’ll want to do so about the last 15 minutes of cooking.

This soup freezes beautifully, so go ahead and make a huge pot. It’s also a crowd pleaser after an afternoon of sledding.

Just to recap...

Tyler and Ben made my job extra easy this week by already telling you all the cool stuff going on.  So just to recap - 

Friday we'll be tapping our new yet-to-be-named Humulus extra pale ale.  Together we'll celebrate the delicious hoppy session beer that is this Humulus (blank)!

Saturday we'll be starting Holiday Beer Geek Show & Tell around 5 pm.  Just a note - since these get-togethers have grown a bit in popularity, we're asking that you please limit your contribution to 2 beers.  This will help us make sure we get to each and every one of the delicious beers that you bring with you.  

As Ben mentioned, you'll also get to try some of the fry-licious concoctions from Frysmith, so come hungry!

We'll be serving Hottenroth Mimosas on Sunday, and you'll still be able to purchase gift baskets and Reserve Society memberships (while they last!).  See you there!

My Cupcake Craze

After returning from Australia and my Cruise trip, there was a period I went into a baking craze.

Determined to slave away in the kitchen as a doted home maker would, a transition easily adopted after living out of a suitcase for far too long. It's like discovering a whole new me in place.




During which I was particularly quite involved in cupcakes. Baking all sorts of pretty little cupcakes, icing them with homemade chocolate or colored icings, most times with flavours. Gosh I was becoming a housewife.




I wasn't alone in baking though. My super chef baby was working it hard in the kitchen whipping his awesome fine dine style meal after meal, determine to fuel me until my next departure. -.-

From pasta to Sticky Lemon Chicken.




And Homemade Mash.




And my all time favourite: Oven Baked Salmon with Rosemary and Olive Oil.







For some reason, he could always perfect this dish no restaurant I've dined in was able to. Sheer bliss. I bake, he cook.


Anyway, here were some of my baking results during the entire month of June, I call it the period of settlement.


The Swirly Chocolate Cupcakes
















Then there were just Birthday Cupcakes I baked for two persons in that month.

First there was the colorful cupcakes for Shirley.
















And the mini-cupcakes for Timothy.







I kinda rushed the cakes the whole day right up till before we left the house.
Which explained why I was in my dress in the photo below when I was finishing up the icings.


careful careful~


I can't remember but I think the green one could be banana flavour.




Not sure if he and princess ate it or threw them away. Hmm...


Of course it wasn't just cupcakes, there were apple and banana chocolate chip crumbles too.








can't remember which was apple and which was banana


On second attempt, I poured twice as much chocolate chips because chocolate is always good. Yum~




And twice as much apples too.


It wasn't just all boring square cakes and cupcakes too, I took the initiative to bake muffins too! Ha!

My personal favourite.

Banana Crumble Chocolate Chip Muffin
















What? Do I look like the type of girl who don't know how to bake?


*snort*

Psychologists find a drug-free way for fears to be unlearned

In an exciting breakthrough for psychological science, researchers in the United States have demonstrated a drug-free way to prevent the return of a learned fear. Similar memory modification effects have been observed before, but these experiments have involved drugs such as the beta-blocker propranolol. It's hoped the new drug-free procedure will lead to improved therapeutic techniques for people with phobias or intrusive traumatic memories.

Elizabeth Phelps and her colleagues exploited the fact that memories are particularly vulnerable to modification just after they've been recalled. The procedure began with 65 participants learning to fear a coloured square that appeared on a computer screen. Each time the square appeared they received a mild but unpleasant electric shock to their wrist. In a real-life scenario the equivalent might be a repeatedly bad experience on each attempt at giving a class presentation.

The next day, the participants were repeatedly presented with the square but without the shock. This is a well-established procedure in psychological therapy known as extinction, the idea being that the person unlearns the fear associated with the stimulus or situation. A real-life equivalent might be to repeatedly practice giving a presentation in a safe environment, perhaps to sympathetic friends and family, or to a "virtual audience".

Crucially, a minority of participants undertook the extinction trials just ten minutes after they were given a reminder of the coloured square. This reminder will have rendered the memory of the square temporarily "labile" or vulnerable to modification. Other participants completed the extinction trials six hours after a reminder - too late to capitalise on the memory's vulnerable period - whilst a third group of participants had no reminder at all.

A short-coming with extinction therapy is that even after people appear to have unlearned the fear associated with a stimulus or situation, that fear can creep back. In the lab, on day three, the participants were again presented with the coloured square. Even though they'd all responded without fear at the end of the previous day's extinction training, the majority of the participants - those who'd had the 6-hour reminder before extinction, and those who'd had no reminder - showed a renewed fear response (as betrayed by their sweatiness), just as eventually tends to happen after extinction therapy in real life.

But excitingly, this was not so for the participants who'd had the ten-minute reminder before the previous day's extinction trials! They were ice calm, unmoved by the coloured square. For this group, it's as if their memory of the square had been permanently modified. When, on the previous day, they'd been reminded of the unpleasant shock-square experience, this memory was briefly vulnerable to modification, and it was just at this critical time that they'd had the run of ten innocuous, shock-free presentations. For the fictional student with a fear of class presentations, the trick would be to recall their nightmare experience in class, and then begin the safe, innocuous practice of presentations with friends.

This study gets even more impressive because the result carried over when a subsample of the participants were retested a year later - those who'd had the ten-minute reminder before extinction were still largely unmoved by the square whereas the other participants again showed signs of fear.

What's more, the intervention is highly specific. The researchers repeated the procedure but with three differently coloured squares - two associated with a shock, and one safe square. They then used the pre-extinction reminder procedure for one of the feared squares but not the other, and it was only this targeted square that remained fear free.

Phelps said: "Previous attempts to disrupt fear memories have relied on pharmacological interventions. Our results suggest such invasive techniques may not be necessary. Using a more natural intervention that captures the adaptive purpose of reconsolidation allows a safe way to prevent the return of fear.”

Phelps also told the Digest that any concerns that their procedure could be abused - for example to erase eye-witness memories or implant false memories - are misplaced. The types of emotional memory that were modified in the current study are represented in the amygdala, whereas the "declarative" memories involved in eye-witness testimony have a different neural representation, she explained. Indeed, all the participants in the current study were able to remember that the coloured square had previously been paired with a shock, it's just that those who undertook extinction ten minutes after a reminder no longer showed an automatic fear response to the square. "In short," Phelps told us, "eyewitness testimony depends on identifying (recollecting) what occurred before. We are not affecting that kind of memory."
_________________________________

D Schiller, M-H Monfils, C Raio, D Johnson, J LeDoux & E Phelps. (2009). Preventing the return of fear in humans using reconsolidation update mechanisms. Nature

Update: Nature has a free video about this research and a PDF of supplementary methodological info.

Two Years Now

Has it really been that long?...
It was two years ago when I first started here at the Bruery and after reading my very first blog post I kind of miss those days… See, back then a regular day was coming in around 8 am, maybe getting on the phone and placing a few orders, and then starting to build and place the equipment you see in the Bruery today. When I look back on it, I thought it was hard at the time but now realize how fun and easy it really was! I love creating and building things, from an early age you would see me following my father around with my toy hammer trying to help him out. As I grew up, so did my love for creating things; this probably explains why I wanted to become a brewer. After Patrick and I had everything settled in its final resting place, it was time to start brewing. Over the next few months we worked out most of the kinks in the system (some we still have today) and finally got the brewery running somewhat smoothly. Ben Weiss (now our Marketing and PR guy) was hired on and helped create some new kinks (cough...Black Tuesday...cough); Yes Ben, I am still blaming you for leaving the mash paddle in the tun and making the mess that it did (I know Patrick was there too, but he signs my checks!) but hey, I guess it worked out!

Fast forward to today and we still have kinks every now and then. When I left the brewery today Travis, our lead brewer, was dealing with a stuck mash that will probably land him at the brewery until late tonight. My regular day still begins at 8am, though you’ll find me here a lot earlier now. My day still consists of making phone calls, checking my e-mail (which seems to increase on a daily basis), and talking to the press every now and again, which is new to me (I feel like such a dork being in front of a camera, I don’t know how Patrick does it.) At some point in the day I try and make it out on the brewery floor but seem to be kicked out by Jay and Travis because I’m just getting in their way. I usually head back to my desk and start thinking about scheduling issues, raw materials, warehouse design (don’t get me started on this), brew house layout, cleaning kegs, water supply and all the work that has to be done before the holiday but we can’t fit it in (mostly because of our water supply!) Oh, did I mention how many kegs we are going to have to clean in the new year? Ahhh!

I may not be designing (I have a BA in advertising), building or even brewing as much as I used to but after looking back at the past two years I wouldn’t have it any other way. This sure beats the old days of being all alone while Patrick was off spreading the word of our newly opened brewery. Hell, now I even have four people in the brew house to bug all day. The most exciting change over the past two years for me happens when I call my vendors . They know who we are; this beats the long conversation of “what brewery are you with?” – vendor, “I’m with The Bruery” – me, “I know you’re with a brewery, which brewery?”- vendor. This happened on every phone call for at least three months!


A little info on our new, as of now “nameless” beer we will be tapping this weekend.

It was about three weeks ago when we decided to start yeast propagation for Saison De Lente. Seeing that we usually always have a steady supply of our proprietary yeast strain, we needed to prop up some Brettanomyces. Usually doing a yeast prop, I would harvest the yeast and dump the “beer” that we used to prop it; this time, since it would be tying up a fermenter, I thought it would be fun to brew a 100% Brett - Extra Pale Ale. I kept the recipe fairly simple with Vienna as my base malt and a little C-15 and Kiln Amber for taste and color. I really enjoyed the hop profile of Humulus Lager ,so I thought I would keep it along the same lines, I lowered the IBU level to around 40 and used half the flavor and aroma hops that Humulus Lager used. Jay and I first brewed seven barrels and were very happy with the end result; we pitched the starter yeast and went home. The next morning I came in at 7am and checked the fermenter; it wasn’t bubbling away. I climbed up the ladder and opened the man-way, I poked my head in and saw fermentation! At this time most brewers probably would have taken a gravity, pH and dissolved oxygen reading just to make sure it really was fermenting (it wasn’t by the way.) After climbing back down the ladder I headed straight to the mill and started milling for the second part of the batch. The first brew tasted great but was a little too dark for me, so Jay and I left all the specialty malt out of this brew. About half way through the brew Patrick came up to me and mentioned something about not dry hopping this beer. You see when we dry hop our Humulus Series beers we lose a lot of the product due to the hops. I loved this idea because this beer didn’t need any dry hops and it meant that we would have that much more of it to drink. I ran straight to the brew house where Jay was working away and eagerly told him to double the whirlpool addition hops (to make up for the lack of dry hops). Jay’s face lit up with excitement! We knocked out the second brew into the fermenter and were delighted with the color and flavor of the day’s brew. Everything went so well over the two day brew; the color ended up being a little darker than I would have liked but I should have expected that when we went with Vienna as the base malt instead of two row.

Over the next four days I walked into the brewery each day hoping to see the fermenter bubbling away, but nothing. How can this yeast starter batch that we brewed not ferment? I’m dead I thought, I’m really in deep sh**! After a few phone calls to Patrick to tell him the bad news we decided to pitch our house strain and forget about the yeast prop and 100% Brett E.P.A that would’ve come from it. At the time we only had pitchable yeast from our 3-4 week old Saison Rue that was getting ready to be bottled the following Monday. We already harvested yeast from this batch twice before and the only yeast that was left was either stressed or dead, not ideal either way. We pitched the yeast hoping for the best and came in the next morning disappointed again. Luckily, we were brewing this day which meant we would have fresh viable yeast; after pitching yeast for the day’s brew we attached the yeast hose to the E.P.A tank and added fresh viable yeast. When we came in the next morning it was happily bubbling away, what a relief! After its week or so ferment, I pulled a sample from the tank and Travis and I tried it: low to medium body, nice mouth feel, extra dry and great hop aroma. It was still a little darker than what I was hoping for though. Travis and I both agreed that it didn’t need much more, maybe a little bit of cold conditioning but hop wise we liked it where it was (what were we thinking, you can never have too many hops!) I told Travis to come up with a dry hopping schedule and he did: one pound of Columbus hops in a fifteen barrel batch. When he told me how much he added I started to laugh; I have never heard of someone using so little hops for a dry hop addition. After a week and a half of dry hopping and cold conditioning, we pulled another sample. It was delicious! That one pound of dry hops changed the flavor ever so slightly and in a good way. The beer ended up being a little darker than it should have been (reminds me of Sierra Nevada), 4.3% ABV, crazy dry (from the low mash temp we did when we thought it would be a 100% Brett beer) and with a great citrus hop presence that you can have pint after pint of. The Brett character mildly comes through for most people but I think it will grow with time, which hopefully we won’t find out because this beer needs to be consumed right now! Look for a cask of this sometime this month; we dry hopped it in the cask with the hops Kevin had growing outside of the home brew shop! As for the name, I think Tyler’s Birthday E.P.A (my birthday is on the 28th) sounds good but we’ll probably end up calling it Humulus something…

P.S. I think this long post makes up for the lack of posts by me!!

I've been wondering...

I think I've found the one.

Toy Ideas for Little Ones (Re-Post)

The post about gift ideas for little ones got hidden way way down, many posts ago. A couple of my friends mentioned that they were having trouble finding it, so I am re-posting the link for those of you looking for toy ideas based on ones that have been a hit around here. Enjoy! (And please do leave a comment if you've got neat ideas to share.)