May

26

Beer Review: Ommegang Abbey Ale

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Ommegang Abbey Ale beerPoured into glass, this beer is opaque and has a dark orange color - if you remember your Crayola Crayon set, you’d know it as “burnt sienna”. It’s topped by a thick, foamy head that takes about 15 minutes to settle.

The label describes it as “a Belgian-style Abbey Ale — top fermented and bottle conditioned, yielding a rich, fruity, aromatic, burgundian brew.”

Nice wordage there, unfortunately I’ve never had a “burgundian brew” so therefore not sure if the tasting notes are appropriate. I have had Burgundian wines — white and red — and I can assure you that this wine tastes neither like Pinot Noir nor Chardonnay. Also interesting that a Belgian beer would taste “burgundian”. Anyway …

It does have a nice aroma - somewhat fruity and fragrant, with hints of wheat. The taste is much more interesting: rich mocha, malt, and a bit of earthy peat. It finishes somewhat sweet, with a molasses flavor accented by a tiny touch of dark honey and something fruity — though I can’t put my finger on what fruit. Texture is creamy.

Overall an enjoyable brew, with surprising sweetness considering its thick color and ample weight.

Brewed in Cooperstown, NY by Brewery Ommegang.

Apr

23

Easy Roast Chicken

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Roast ChickenOne of my favorite dishes to prepare is simple roasted chicken — mostly because it’s so darn easy. At least, the way I do it is pretty easy (and foolproof). In a nutshell, you chop, rub, and roast.

Here’s what I do:

  1. preheat the oven to 475 degrees F
  2. make sure you take that little bag of goodies out of the cavity
  3. make a dry rub from 3-4 cloves of chopped garlic, kosher salt, pepper, and fresh “poultry herbs” (rosemary, parsley, thyme)
  4. coarse chop carrots, potatoes, and onions, and create a bed with them in a roasting pan
  5. place the chicken on top of the “bed”, and rub with the dry rub and olive oil
  6. place the chicken in the oven, leaving at 475 degrees for 15-20 minutes (the high heat gives it a nice crusty skin
  7. after the 15-20 minutes, lower the temperature to 350
  8. baste once every 20-30 minutes with dry white wine and/or chicken stock
  9. follow the standard roasting time (20 minutes per pound) depending on how much chicken you have. Make sure to include those first 25 minutes.

That’s it!

Pair with an unoaked Chardonnay, Cru Beaujolais, or New World Sauvignon Blanc wine.

Mar

31

Beer Review: Widmer Brothers Hefeweizen

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widmer hefeweizen4.9% Alcohol
30 IBU

This is a handcrafted wheat beer, so it has a cloudy look to it, though there wasn’t any settlement of sediment at the bottom of the bottle nor the glass.

It has a nice, fruity aroma with a hint of sweet peat. Not much head, but it does have a thick, frothy texture once in the mouth. Flavor is mild, almost lager-like, with a touch of bitter hoppiness in the finish. A pleasant, easygoing beer that is enjoyable alone, and also would be nice with a plate of wursts. The Widmer website says it has a bitterness of 30 IBU, but I’m still trying to figure out what that means to my palate.

You might be inclined to brighten the flavor a bit by topping it with a thin lemon slice.

Widmer Brothers Website

Mar

25

Buffalo Wings from Benny Tudino’s

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Mission Impossible: good take-out buffalo wings from a Hoboken establishment.

Living next to Hoboken, you’d think I’d be there all the time, sampling victuals from the myriad quality restaurants in that one square mile of eclectic cuisines. I thought that too, when I first moved in to Weehawken. After several frustrating visits to Washington Street in search of a parking spot, take-out became the main way I eat meals cooked in Hoboken.

Nearly every restaurant in Hoboken offers a take-out menu, which works out nicely. However, some dishes are either difficult or a bad idea to take in. French fries, for example (always soggy). Sushi (it seems they always give you the two-day-old pieces). And buffalo wings.

Wings in Hoboken are easy to find and usually acceptable — assuming you are in a pub. Getting wings delivered — good ones, anyway — is a difficult task.

Few pubs offer takeout wings … or if they do, it isn’t advertised. That leaves you stuck with wings from either a pizzeria or a wing place.

The other night we tried Benny Tudino’s, figuring that their pizza is good, maybe their wings are as well. Luckily, we figured right.

The wings were obviously fresh and had plenty of meat. They were breaded — from what seemed to be homemade breadcrumbs — and not coated with any sauce. This seemed strange at first, until the sauce containers were opened. You apply your own buffalo sauce, which after getting used to, found to be preferable, as I could apply as much or little as I wanted. It was also a lot less messy. The sauce choices were mild or nuclear, and I’m glad I chose mild, as it had plenty of heat.

Not much else to say. The chicken was tasty and fresh, the sauce was typical buffalo with a zesty zing. Not as sloppy as traditionally prepared wings, but that was OK with me. I’ll try wings from other places in the future, but that said, I’d order wings from Benny’s again.

Mar

5

Quick and Juicy Pork Chops

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We keep hearing about “other white meat”, how it is so lean and healthy and delicious. At least, that is what the National Pork Board keeps telling us. Mmmm … how do you get a job there? Can you imagine being at a party, introducing yourself, “Hi, I’m Jane, and I work for the Daily Pork!”

Don’t laugh, there IS such a publication. However, don’t trust The Daily Pork when it comes to sauteeing pork chops.

The recommendation is that you pre-heat a skillet with oil and then cook the chops — pretty much standard procedure. However, if you follow that traditional way of cooking meat, you often end up with dry, chewy, chalky-tasting slabs of what resembles meat. The key to juicy pork chops — meaning something you don’t have to drown in apple sauce — is to apply the exact opposite method of cooking them.

Why can’t you cook pork in the same way you cook, say, beef (for example)? Science — and biology in particular. Pork is different from beef, especially when it comes to protein structure and amino acid chains. Without getting too technical, the gist of it is this: high heat kills pork chops. Pork proteins break down at least twice before reaching the 160-degree mark (that’s the “safe” temperature for cooking pork). They’ll break down again if you continue cooking beyond 165. Every time the proteins break down, they release water — and thus you lose the juicy-ness. So if you start cooking pork on high heat, you immediately start breaking down the protein and drying out the meat.

The trick, therefore, is to bring pork chops to the ultimate 160-degree temperature slowly. In fact, start with a cold pan. Sounds crazy, I know, but trust me on this one. Brush some oil on the chops, put them in the pan, put the pan on the stove, turn the burner on to medium. Keep a meat thermometer next to the stove and check the temperature for doneness every few minutes. The best way to check is to use tongs to pick a chop out of the pan, and insert the thermometer into the side of the chop (precious juice will run out if you stab the chop with a fork to pick it up).