Recipes and Creativity

I've been reading through the book, Radical Brewing, and have gotten about 60 pages in.  To put it gently, I feel stupid for thinking I was making anything close to good beer.  I guess I wanted to read some beer books to get a feel for the creative and technical side of brewing, but I was nervous that it would all be over my head.  I assumed that getting a good recipe and following basic directions was enough to make a quality beverage and it actually was.  But the beer competition got me thinking about how we could make a "very good" beer into a "world class" beer without crazy equipment.

It turns out, with some attention to detail and creative thinking, we could probably elevate the quality of the beer significantly.  The book had one interesting point which really stuck with me.  The author said he always adds something to the beer recipe that nobody would be able to guess.

We're brewing our Pilsner tonight.  What will our twist be?

Stuffed Chicken in Dark Ale

I took on a new venture last night - cooking with beer.  I've been meaning to try it for quite a while now, and I may have been subconsciously motivated by the new TGI Friday's ad campaign about meals for "craft beer lovers."  Ok not really.  I saw that commercial well after I decided on last night's recipe.

The meal was stuffed chicken breast over rice.  This is how it went down:

Cooked white rice in my rice cooker with lime juice, oregano, red pepper flakes and turmeric.  This turned the rice a nice yellow color and had a different flavor than the usual white rice.

Sauteed chopped leeks, garlic, red pepper and spinach in Black Toad Dark Ale (purchased at Trader Joe's...it's really good just to drink, by the way).  I sliced the chicken breast to make a fold and then breaded it with panko. Stuffed the chicken with the veggies and then placed each breast in the pan with the stout for about 3 minutes on each side.  Then it went in the oven at 350 degrees for 15 minutes.

Perfection.