cooking with booze -

by snebbu

100 Ways to Use Beer in Food and Drinks

Editor’s Note: New contributor snebbu joins ES to bring us a very epic, very ES series.

I caught the brew bug. Yes, I’m addicted to brewing beer. With this comes a snooty attitude towards “big beer” and using my “well-earned money” to purchase craft beer. So after a few brews, my fridge is rapidly filling up with bottles of my homebrew, along with craft beer and of course, there’s always a case of Pennsylvania’s pride — Yuengling. The problem is, the other day I opened the fridge door and realized my collection of beer was overfilling its allotted space, and without some good use, would spoil in time. Of course, the first thing that came to mind was drinking it all in one grand night of sitting on my couch and watching sports until reaching a drunken stupor. Then I figured I could use this in food, while drinking beer!

My mind began to wander — what foods could I put beer in? Is it limited to food, or can I mix it with some tasty drinks? In my opinion, beer can make any situation better, provided you choose the right make and variety. I couldn’t get this wonderful idea of complementing dishes and drinks with beer out of my mind. Fortunately, I’m taking a graduate level class on diversity and had the resources (three hours worth of hearing “you’re blind to your blindness”) to put together a list. This list begins my journey to attempt to make each and every one of the following 100 food and drink items better…with beer.

Check out the list, and let us know what other items you’d like to see cooked with beer. Then bookmark this page and return to see the results of our attempts to cook all 100 items on this list…with beer! Of course, feel free to play along yourself, and report back with your results.

The Ground Rules:

*I noted my disgust for big beer — the only rule I am enforcing is to use either homebrew or a favorite craft brew. Drink Craft Beer.

**It is assumed that while cooking/concocting these creations, you will be drinking beer.

The List – 100 Ways to Use Beer in Food and Drinks:

by bakersroyale

Endless Poptails: Strawberry Greyhound

They’re baaaaaaack. We were going to wait for summer to re-launch our Endless Poptails series, but guess what? Poptail season starts when we say it does. Because while we don’t need to an excuse to squeeze a little booze into anything we can, we thought we’d give you an excuse to do so, too. Besides, there’s always fruit in a Poptail — so thank us later for giving you another way to get you daily fruit serving.

For those who are new to the series — we try to keep it simple here, so you don’t have to go spend some crazy money for jut a few ounces. At the same time. if we do use something crazy we’ll give you a variation, so you can decide to scale up or down.

Kickstarting the series is a classic Greyhound (vodka-grapefruit cocktail) mixed here with strawberries, for a sweet-and-tart kick on a stick. Also — now that we’ve got you started we’re taking orders. Let us know in the comments what kind of cocktail you want to see mixed into a Poptail.

Grapefruit and Strawberry Greyhound Poptail

in Desserts / Endless Poptails / Featured / Recipe 19 comments

by BS

Corn Dogs Gone Gourmet

State fair season may still be several months away, but at ES we think about corn dogs 24/7/365. Now, here’s a corn dog even ya’ll uppity foodies won’t be ashamed to embrace.

Chef Kyle Rourke of Red Star Tavern in Portland has been giving corn dogs all kinds of gourmet upgrades, serving rabbit corn dogs with carrot-habanero dip, lobster corn dogs with mango relish, and venison corn dog with fig preserve. We asked him to share a recipe for one from his menu that’s just slightly more acceptable for home cooks.

Chicken Kielbasa Corn Dogs

in Featured / Fowl / Recipe / Restaurants / Trends 2 comments

by bakersroyale

Coconut Limoncello Cupcakes

I know there are a lot of you cupcake haters here on ES, and yes, I am still trying to convert you. Can I offer you a cupcake with a boozy limoncello curd center that will drip, pour and ooze its way into likeability?

Come on, check out that money shot, begging you to take a bite and taste its tartness. Actually, it was really tart when I first made it so instead of adding more sugar to the mix to even it out, I decided to step it up with some limoncello. Booze is, after all, the grand equalizer in food — alright, that’s just my personal philosophy. It works more often than not to even out a too-strong flavor, and as expected here, it didn’t fail.

So, my dear cupcake haters, brace your tastebuds and take in a rich lemon cupcake body filled with a limoncello curd that’s then been stacked with piles of coconut sweet buttercream frosting, then covered in sweetened coconut.

And trust me when I say the lemon and coconut pairing is quite damntastic!

Coconut Limoncello Cupcakes

in Desserts / Endless Cupcakes / Featured / Recipe 4 comments

by Russell Warnick

Welsh Rarebit Lamb Nachos

Recently, I was invited to participate in a recipe competition hosted by the American Lamb Board. I think in all the years in writing for ES I’ve only ever cooked up one lamb dish. In a moment of weakness I agreed to participate. The premise of the contest is to create an original dish (do they even exist these days?) using a cut of meat provided to us by the good folk at Border Spring Farms in Virginia — in this case a dry aged boneless leg of lamb.

The more I thought about creating a dish with a slab of meat I’m not incredibly comfortable with, the more I became intimidated. I’m in this contest with a flock (ha! I apologize) of other DC-area food bloggers and these guys are pretty awesome. In the spirit of all things Endless Simmer I decided to do what I do best — nachos. We’re big fans of nachos, actually pretty wild about them here, so it seemed fitting I’d go this route. I just hope I didn’t disrespect the meat.

But I still brought a little class. Growing up in England, I always associated lamb with Wales. I would holiday there a lot as a kid and it wasn’t uncommon to see sheep and lambs in the rolling fields of the countryside as I was camped out in a tent in an adjacent field — welcome to my childhood. In that vein I thought I would bring a little of Great Britain to these nachos and instead of using plain old cheese, I’d go with Welsh Rarebit, in the hopes of allowing the flavors of the lamb to shine through.

Slow Roasted Lamb Nachos with Welsh Rarebit and Scallions

in Cheese / Featured / Personal / Recipe / Red Meat 7 comments

by BS

Spreadable Booze: Prosecco Preserves

Here at Endless Simmer headquarters, we’re considering whether or not to rename our blog 100,000 ways to turn booze into food. From popsicles and cakes to jell-o shots and chicken, there’s nothing better than edible alcohol, right?

Now we’ve even got the pros in on it. Chef John Eisenhart of Pazzo Ristorante in Portland, Oregon likes to take leftover wine and turn it into delicious, boozy jam, and he was kind enough to share his recipe for prosecco preserves with ES. Warning: this ain’t your average jelly recipe; it’s more for aspiring Top Chef-testants, so have your CO2 canister at the ready.

Prosecco Preserves

in Recipe / Trends 2 comments

by bakersroyale

Edible Holiday Gifts: Boozy Peppermint Bark

Peppermint bark is a standard for the holiday season, but since we like playing with our food here at ES we decided to give ours a bit of a boozy twist by adding in a peppermint Kahlua truffle center.

We’re so glad we did and we are betting you will too. What can you expect in this bark? How about a bottom chocolate layer crunched-up with some crushed chocolate wafers. For the center we boozed up our bark with Kahlua’s seasonal Peppermint Mocha mix, and to finish it all off is a layer of white chocolate with crushed Peppermint Andes candy.

Now that we’ve finished tweaking a classic bark, we’re off to create a new bark with a bit of wine. Stay tuned!

Peppermint Truffle Bark

in Desserts / Holiday / Recipe 4 comments