Friday April 10th 2020
Friday was a day for All The Cooking. Yes, I do cook a lot generally – even before the Covid Plague of 2020 I liked to exercise my creative energy through the medium of food preparation, be it sweet-savoury cakes, huge batches of chilli or finding new dishes to add bacon to whether they need it or not. I find cooking fun and relaxing, although I balk at anything too complicated and still don’t really understand why some recipes make you separate eggs. That is way too technical for me. Anyways, All The Cooking. While lovely JB slaved over mowing our ridiculously tall grass I developed a strong and immediate craving for cheese scones, which were easy enough to whip up in about half an hour. Trying a new recipe was a mixed blessing, lovely texture but a little lacking in the flavour department (I really should have added some bacon) but a tasty snack nonetheless. Dinner was a much more complicated affair. Inspired by JB’s family WhatsApp feed, I decided to attempt traditional Jewish latkes – an awesome-tasty but highly labour-intensive dish of fried potato cakes which I paired with chicken legs marinated in Sri Lankan spices, to be nice and international! While there is no denying that the results were worth the rather epic effort, I am very glad I prepared such huge batches of everything as I don’t need to cook again for a while. Of course, as soon as I get bored again I’ll be back in the kitchen looking for something else to add bacon to.
Sierra Nevada Wild Little Thing
This was a lovely surprise! While I always expect the best from the legendary Sierra Nevada, sour beers haven’t really been a thing for them til now, so I was delighted to discover that this shiny new ‘slightly sour ale’ is really rather exciting. The qualification in the name is wise in terms of expectation-management – this is not a sour beer, it is a tart fruit ale which is bright and zingy but also deliciously dry from the strong hibiscus flavour. I absolutely love hibiscus and don’t see it enough in beer – the slightly powdery sensation it invokes on the back of the tongue is beautifully moreish, and ensures that any beverage that contains is ascends above the level of fizzy pop and into something much more sophisticated and adult. This is a wonderful summer beverage and I envision lazy days by the water with a cooler of these juicy, lip-smacking delights to hand, somewhere in a Covid-free future. This beer is (for me at least) low ABV enough to be daytime-drink friendly at a weeny lil 5.5%, which also opens doors for its use in summer cocktails – it would go very nicely in a fruit punch. We took ours on a little distanced walk around the neighbourhood between sessions in the kitchen, and it slipped down a total treat. Sierra Nevada doing what they do best and cooking up another go-to beer – excellent stuff.
Craft Beer Amethyst 