Appetite for Destruction

I got the book An Appetite for Ale by Fiona Beckett and Will Beckett a while ago. It's a book about beer and food, it's also got great recipes that use beer, recommendations on what food goes with what beer and a section on beer and cheese.

I've made a few recipes from this book and last week I made the best one yet, Carbonnade of beef with Orval. Some friends came over to watch Ireland playing and winning against France in the rugby and we ate this after wards. It was very tasty, rich and warming. We had some Samuel Adams Boston Lager with it. I know we should have had Orval but I used my last bottle making the stew.

A word of warning though, blogging can be dangerous. I decided I should get a photo of the stew for the blog and so set up the photo above with the book behind the pot. Unfortunately the book slipped into the gas ring which was on and the book went on fire. I was lucky and it went out easily without having to wet the book. Only the edges of a few pages were scorched. I felt a bit silly then and learned my lesson.

Oh and my blog has made the long list for the Irish Blog Awards. I'm very pleased about it.

The Session 24: A Tripel For Two

This month over at Musings Over A Pint the session is being held on the subject of A Tripel For Two. They must be getting into the valentines spirit already. I hate valentine's day, it's all too contrived for me, but sharing a beer you love with someone you love now that sounds ok to me. I'd have to pick my favourite tripel Maredsous 10 to share. It's one of my favourite beers, it has all the things that Belgian beers do well. Sweet, strong and spicy with good yeast character.
Of course I'd share it with my lovely husband over a nice home cooked dinner.

This reminds me, I've been planning my next brew for a while now. It's going to be a Belgian dubbel so it fits in with this post. I'm hoping to get it done next week. I have some nice caramunch malt that will combine with crystal and a dose of sugar to give a strong sweet malty beer. I even have the right yeast this time, some Safbrew s33. I'll ferment this in the sitting room by the radiator for some warmth. My fermenting room is pretty cold, I think it's too cold and my beers have been lacking yeast character. This is fine if you don't want yeast character but in a Belgian dubbel I want that fruity estery taste. It'll be an all grain brew so it will take all day but it's worth it.

Winter Warming Needed

Back at the start of December it was pretty cold so I brewed Westley's Winter Warmer in honour of the arrival of our new dog Westley.

Well such a warming spicy beer is needed at the moment. It's been snowing for the past week which is really unusual for Ireland and especially for Dublin.



Westley loved the snow. We went out for a walk and everyone was out building snowmen and having snowfights, kids and adults alike. Dave decided to roll a big snowball. Westley decided Dave was making this for him to dig into. I stood there laughing. When we got back in we opened a bottle of the winter warmer. It was spicy, strong and sweet. Perfect for this weather.

Three Bags Full

It was a bit like the nursery rhyme when a white sack arrived from Wingham Wool Work full of wool. After unpacking I had bags of lovely colourful fiber. Wingham were great to deal with, they have a fantastic selection, the prices were good and the shipping to Ireland not to steep.



Right to left we have blue faced leicester in white, pink merino silk blend, emerald Merino, silver grey merino, alpaca in tangerine.

All put together like that the colours clash but I'm not planning on using them together or anything. There's 100g of each apart from the blue faced leicester of which there's 300g. I also got some dye and a simple wooden drop spindle for plying. The blue faced leicester feels like you'd imagine a cloud to feel.

I decided to spin up the silver grey merino first as I loved the colour. I'd heard it said that merino is a bit harder for the beginner but it's working out ok for me. Here's a photo of that beautiful Golding spindle.



Here's my kinda summary of spinning. Sorry to anyone who actually knows about this, actually you should probably head to Wikipedia or google it if you really want to know.

When a sheep is shorn the locks of wool have a certain length called a staple. This depends on the breed of sheep. Things that aren't sheep have a staple length too, linen has a long staple and cotton has a short staple length. The wool is cleaned and washed. It's then combed or carded which aligns all the fibers and cleans it further. The fiber is then drawn out into a long piece. The fiber is now called a top in the UK or roving in the US though there's some confusion about the two terms.

Spinning basically puts twist into the fiber so that it can't fall apart. When you pull the roving you'll find that at about a distance slightly longer than the staple length the fiber begins to pull apart. If you pull gently it will come apart, if you pull it when the distance is shorter than the staple length it won't come apart.
So when spinning the idea is to put twist in while pulling the roving apart to make it thinner. There needs to be enough twist to hold the fiber together. The pulling is called drafting and this determines the thickness of the yarn. You can leave lots of fiber into the twist to get a thick yarn or just some fiber and get a thinner yarn. It gets more complicated than that but that's the basic idea of spinning, it's kinda interesting physics but that's a whole other boring post for another day.

I have decided that spinning is quite an old fashioned thing to do so I've been listening to a lot of rap and new music while spinning. Damn it feels good to be a gangsta spinner...
I have also decided I must have The Knit Kit which looks like a swiss army knife for knitters, the sort of thing MacGyver might have had if he was a knitter. I'm sure he could knit, as a kid I was convinced he could do anything.

Cake and Blind Ale

Over at Tangelled Angel Sweensie posted the best brown bread recipe ever. So I had to try it out, I can report that's it's really tasty and easy to make. Give it a go.

While I was in the baking mood I also made this lovely Lemon Cake from the joy of baking website. It's really nice, I have to stop myself eating the whole lot of it. The icing is lovely and it's just icing sugar mixed with lemon juice. One of my new years resolutions is to make more good food and baking is definitely part of that.

Oz and James Drink to Britain was on last night and the Irish Craft Brewer section they filmed at the Bull and Castle last year made it onto the show. It showed home brewed beer in a good light I thought. It was nice to be described as the future of brewing in Ireland. Though I hope it's because we all go set up micro breweries and not because the only way to get good beer in Ireland will be to brew it yourself. The Bull and Castle got a great plug which it should as it's a great pub. Thom's beer as presented by The Beer Nut was the deserved winner. My friend Ed's beer was second due his to his tasty beer and great blarney.

The home brewers who appeared on the show gathered at The Bull and Castle to watch the programme last night. For extra amusement we did a blind taste test on five english ales. We had to taste the five ales blind and identify them. The five were black sheep ale, fullers london pride, fuller's esb, abbotts ale and bishops finger. I surprised myself by getting three right. The abbotts ale and bishops finger both tasted light struck. The abbotts really wasn't pleasant at all. I could spot black sheep as well. I mixed up the two Fullers beers. In the unmarked beers the one I thought was london pride was my favourite. It was actually ESB which is the beer I prefer most so I don't know why I didn't spot it. It's an interesting thing to do. It makes you think about what it is you like about a beer.

Finishing things and my first design

My blog was featured in the Irish Independent! Thanks to Marie Boran for featuring it.

January seems to have been a month of finishing off various projects so that when the end of month comes I'll have no works in progress and can decide to make any new project I want. I finished the alpine frost scarf which worked out nicely. Radcliffe the bear volunteered to model it. It's very soft and lovely to wear.



I hope this scarf goes with the ceangealtas mittens I made a while ago but I'm worried now. The Yarn Harlot says her daughter asked her to make her a hat and mittens but that it wasn't to be too 'knitty'. She's right, I'm marked as a knitter with my mismatched hats, scarfs and gloves.

To remedy this I have been knitting a hat to go with the mittens from the same wool so they are definitely going to match. The Brown Sheep Lamb's Pride is a lovely wool with a nice fuzziness from the 15% mohair. I don't think I mentioned this hat before even though I've been working on it since before christmas. It's my own design and well I'm quite proud of it.

I used to have a hat with bits sticking out the top so I wanted something like that. I also wanted to try a bit of fair isle stranded knitting. I found a chart of a snowflake so decided to put a ring of them around the hat.

I cast on in the round and did a few rows of ribbing before starting the snowflakes. I even managed to do two handed fair isle knitting. I used this knit picks video to figure it out. I decreased a bit at the top of the hat then I stopped working in the round and knit all the pointy bits back and forth. I french knit a tie for the top to keep them all together while on.

One thing I didn't account for was that the fair isle part of the hat didn't stretch as much as normal knitting would. When the hat was finished it was a bit tight and it needed a bit of aggressive blocking. I found a pudding bowl in a shop that was the same size as my head, yes I tried on the pudding bowl in the shop. I hope nobody saw me, they would rightly conclude I was a lunatic. Anyway I blocked (this is where you wet a piece and dry in the shape you want) the hat on the bowl for a while and then pinned it out to dry completely.





It came out really well and I'm pleased to have a one off hat. Also it may save me from looking too knitty when out and about. I now have no old projects that I need to finish off lurking in my knitting bag. It's exciting thinking about what I'll do next. I have some plans but that's a whole other post.

Oz and James Drink to Britain

The series Oz and James Drink To Britain has started on BBC 2 at 8pm on Tuesday nights. The first two shows have been very entertaining as Oz Clarke and James May drive around in their Rolls Royce and Caravan taking a light-hearted look at drinking culture in Britain and Ireland.



A sneak peak at the book accompanying the series shows that the evening filmed in the Bull and Castle didn't end up on the cutting room floor after all. There I am at the left of the picture in my luminous orange brewing t-shirt. The slot on the show will be called Strictly Come Drinking and is a homebrew competition. Look out for me on the show though I should be recognizable with my day-glo t-shirt. Here's the link to the shop if you want one, it helps support the Irish Craft Brewer website.

It would also seem that I am being cyber stalked by the James May Fan club. They seem to like my Brewing T-Shirt. I'm not at all sure about this. The Beer Nut told me about this thread, how he found it is a whole other question.

Secret Santa Goodies

The Irish Knitters group on Ravelry had a Secret Santa swap for Christmas so of course I joined in. It was great fun finding out about and then shopping for a fellow knitter. None of my friends or family knit except my Mum so I don't get to buy many woolly presents.
The swap was started late so it was decided the presents would be sent for Little Christmas or Nollaig na mBan. This was a nice touch as traditionally it's the day women get spoiled after Christmas by their husbands and children.



I received my present and spoiled I was! Loads of wonderful goodies. Lovely yarn which with it's lovely summer colours might make a lovely lacy crocheted scarf. Lots of sweets which are now gone, the percy pigs didn't make it past the first hour. There were even doggie biscuits which Westley was very pleased about.

There's a pack of roving which may be spun into yarn or maybe needle felted into a cool accessory for a bag I'm planning to make soon. There's a pack of very nice, very very handy stitch markers. Those purple buttons are fabulous, I'll have to find something special to put them on. The little dog and cat are very cute.

Lurking there is some hand cream which is great as I have no hand cream left after this week. My allergy caused a lovely rash on my hands which has lead to them peeling. I can't crochet or knit at the moment as my hands get stuck in the wool. So the hand cream is great.

Thanks a million Secret Santa!