Home-Brewed Beer Bread

Besides cooking and baking one of my passions as many of you know is brewing beer. I am constantly trying new styles and recipes for beers, and of late have spent more time brewing than I have in the kitchen. But this week I decided it might be a good time to combine the two passions by taking one of my recent home-brews and making it one of the star ingredients in a bread.
Beer bread is not your normal light and fluffy bread that you would use for sandwiches and the like, but rather a more dense bread that is great as a starter or snack, and pairs most excellently with various cheeses, olive tapenade, and the like.
Your beer bread will vary in flavor depending on what type of beer you use (I used a Rye Ale I made a couple months ago), although I cannot stress enough the importance of using a good quality craft or home-brewed beer. Don't screw up your final product by dumping some watered down commercial beer in there. At any rate this bread is very easy and fairly quick to make, so get in the kitchen and give it a go!

Ingredients
3 cups of sifted flour (make sure to sift your flour!)
2 large eggs
3 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1/4 cup sugar
12 oz. of a good quality beer
1/4 to 1/2 cup of melted butter

Preparation
Preheat oven to 375. Mix the dry ingredients together with the eggs and beer in a large mixing bowl. You may need to add a little more flour to make it a little less sticky (I added a couple more sifted spoonfuls to get it to the desired consistency). Add your mixture to a greased bread pan and then pour the melted butter over your mixture. I actually melted a full 1/2 cup of butter here, but didn't use all of it, because a little over a 1/4 cup was plenty, but add as much as you prefer. Place in the oven and bake for 1 hour. Remove from oven and take the loaf out of the pan and let cool for about 15 minutes on a baking rack. Slice and serve.
That's it! You can also add additional dried herbs to this mixture depending on what flavors you are going for and that would best match the type of beer you ended up using. Feel free to experiment! Enjoy!

The Quest for Biscuits Continues: Red Lobster Style

So for any of you that have read my little food blog from the beginning, know that I orginally started this whole adventure in the quest to return to my baking roots. My first attempt at making biscuits ended up being a complete failure, as far as biscuits are concerned since I ended up with some sad looking crackers instead of fluffy and delightful biscuits.

So I left the baking world for a while, and busied myself with soups, salads, and entree style dishes instead, with a dessert thrown in here and there for good measure. Recently however, my fiance's mother sent over a recipe for biscuits that was styled after the ones that are served at Red Lobster. For any of you who have had the pleasure of eating a biscuit from Red Lobster, know that these cheesy fluffy little dinner rolls are quite delightful.

So this morning I made a second attempt at making biscuits with this easy recipe, and they came out...well...freaking awesome. Give these a try. They will go good with any meal in my humble opinion.

Ingredients

2 cups Bisquick
2/3 cup of milk
1/2 cup cheddar cheese
1/4 cup butter or margarine
1/2 tsp. garlic powder

Preparation

Preheat oven to 450 F. Mix the Bisquick, milk, and cheddar cheese together in a bowl until all combined. Consistency will be a bit sticky. Don't over mix though, as too much mixing can cause the bisquick to not bake properly and make the biscuits heavy instead of fluffy and light.

Using a tablespoon, place drops of the biscuit mixture on an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake for about 10 minutes (sometimes less depending on how big you've made your drops of dough, just keep an eye on them.)

Melt the butter in the microwave and then stir the garlic powder into the melted butter. Once you remove the biscuits from the oven, brush the butter/garlic mixture lightly over the top of the biscuits. Serve warm. Makes 10-12 biscuits.

The Portobello Push

Portobello Mushrooms, the vegetarians steak. Mushrooms, Portobello's in this particular recipe, are quite versatile and can be used in all manner of cooking, baking and grilling. Many of you remember the scene in Forrest Gump, when Bubba was reciting all the different ways to make shrimp. Well the Portobello could just as easily be inserted there. Portobello sandwiches, Portobello salad, grilled Portobello, stuffed Portobello, so on and so forth. And with vegetarianism being much more chic these days, Portobello's and the rest of the fungus family have become quite the rage.

There are a few variations of the history of the Portobello and how it got its name, but the one that I like the best (and the one that seems most feasible to me) is that the portobello in Northern Italy is called "cappellone" which means "big hat". Whatever its name origination, the only thing we need to know is that it is some good eatin'.

I have dabbled in the past with stuffing Portobello Mushrooms and grilling them on a charcoal grill, which came out quite good, but this is a newer revised recipe that I threw together a couple weeks ago. Hope you enjoy it!

Ingredients

8 medium to large Portobello Mushrooms, stems included.
2 or 3 green onions
1/2 Cup Feta Cheese
1/2 Cup Extra Sharp Cheddar Cheese
3 to 4 pieces of white bread
1 egg
Dried Sage (2 or 3 pinches)
Salt & Pepper to taste
Olive Oil

Preparation

Remove the stems from the mushrooms and set aside. Then using a small spoon or butter knife, scoop out the dark inside of the caps and discard. Dice up the stems that you had set aside along with with the green onions. Add the stems and green onion to a frying pan with enough olive oil to grease the pan and sautee over medium high heat until the onions are soft and most of the liquid has been cooked out of the stems. Set aside and let cool a bit.
In a bowl add the Feta and Cheddar Cheese, two or three pinches of sage, and salt and pepper to taste. Toast the slices of bread until they are very dark (but not burnt) and then crumble them into small bits into the bowl with the cheese. The bread bits should be pretty small, to basically make your own bread crumbs. You can substitute store bought bread crumbs here as well, but I didn't have any on hand and this worked out great. Beat the egg, and then add it to the mixture. Add the sauteed mushroom stems and onion and stir the entire mixture until it has all blended well.

Rub the backs of the mushroom caps with olive oil and place oil side down in a large baking dish. Then using a spoon, scoop the mixture into the mushroom caps. It is completely fine to overstuff them! Once all caps have been filled with the mixture, place in a 425 degree oven for 20 minutes. Serve hot. We had this with corn on the cob and grilled chicken and it was an excellent dinner!