Sunday, November 21, 2010

Drunken Mushroom Mashed Potatoes

It's the kind of fall day that makes you want to eat warm and cozy things. We went to the park this afternoon with Gilda and then made drunken mushroom mashed potatoes:

- boiled potatoes
- beech, oyster, shitake fresh mushrooms (handful of each) and 1gm of dried morel mushroom (cooked down with enough butter, black pepper, nutmeg, a dash of soy sauce, New Holland Cabin Fever brown ale, and Buffalo Trace bourbon. More beer and more bourbon added and cooked down again - three total times).
- potatoes mashed with butter, cream, nutmeg & black pepper
- mushroom mixture whirred up with 2 cloves of roasted elephant garlic (brushed with oil and roasted at 300F)
- mushroom mixture mixed into the potatoes.

Delicious :)

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Baked Apple Pie Toddy

Eric and I just made this up today, after fiddling with the Hot Toddy recipe that's in the Dec-Jan 2011 Mary Jane's Farm magazine.

- 1 baked apple (peeled & cored, filled with 1 pat of butter and some cinnamon, then baked at 400F for 1hr - we made 4 at once, baking them in pyrex)
- black tea (we used Tulsi tea b/c we had it and it was caffeine free)
- 1 T brown sugar
- 1 pat of butter
- shake of sea salt
- small splash of vanilla extract
- nutmeg
- 1 oz of bourbon (or however much)

We whirred everything up with a hand blender, adding the butter after first blending everything else a little.
It was so delicious - like a hot apple pie drink. There's a Szarlotka in Poland (apple juice and Zubrowka) that taste like a cold apple pie, but this is amazing for cold nights by the fire!

I think next time we'll use mead instead of the bourbon. On our honeymoon last month, Eric and I stopped at the Shady Grove Meadery in Tennessee. How could we not stop at a place called Shady Grove that made mead?? Their mead is so delicious - I generally prefer dry wines/meads/ciders/etc but their sparkling apricot mead blew me away. We also got some amazing honey and honey-rosemary jam. Later we were kicking ourselves for not buying a whole case of the sparkling mead. I made really simple but delicious drink when we got back to Indiana with their non-sparkling dry mead: mead with San Pellegrino Limonata soda (my absolute favorite soda - along with the aranciata).