AREPA! As fun to say as it is to eat. I was inspired to do Mexican weekend for 2 reasons. There was a lot of cilantro in my window sill boxes and as we were getting ready to bottle our brew we needed to empty some more Tecate bottles.
Arepas are South American corn meal pancakes and you use pre cooked corn meal, masa harina to make them.
2 cups of masa harina
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 cups of boiling water
Mix the corn meal and salt and add the boiling water. Mix it all together and make a dough, then let it sit for 10-15 minutes.
Make patties and fry both sides in oil until they get a crispy surface. Lay the patties on a cookie sheet and bake in the oven for 20 minutes.
We topped them off with cheese and broiled for a few minutes. Then served with refried beans and cheese and salsa fresca.
In my salsa fresca I put a crap load of vine ripened tomatoes, a crap load is about 10. Half went through the blender and half I chopped by hand. There's cilantro in there, both store bought and home grown. Sweet spanish onion. One jalapeño. Salt. I let it sit for a few hours and that's it.
We had left overs this morning and I poached some eggs and we had arepa bennies. Good one E!
Our Blue Jay Brew has been fermenting for a week and today it was time to bottle it. James was a good boy and emptied most of these. I helped a tiny bit.
Tasty.
We started by siphoning the fermented brew into the bottling bucket. There's a lot of yuck at the bottom of the fermenting bucket that you don't want in the bottles so we siphoned off the top. While it goes into the bottling bucket we also added the priming sugar that will build the bubbles.
We also took a little taste and you know what? We got beer.
From that bucket we siphoned into bottles.
Then you cap the bottle. With an insane smile on your face apparently.
And that, dear readers, is a bottle of Blue Jay Brew: batch #1.
We are going to crack one in 2 weeks to see how the process is going, but the bulk of it - 16 bottles - will wait for 4 weeks.
I don't even know where to begin. First of all, thanks for the arepas last night, and the salsa: all yummy!!! I apologize for not being able to warm myself up to the micheladas, but I'll help finish the tecate ... ;-)
ReplyDeleteThe beer looks great, and I'll be excitied to try the Blue Jay Pilsner. Oh, I forgot to tell you last night, but if you don't brew right away, save the slush at the bottom of the fermenter in a (sanitized) jar in the fridge, and next time around you're going to brew, just let it warm to room temperature, feed it a little sugar water (just like with regular yeast) and then dump it into the wort.
By the way, great smiles, and head-leaning-to-the-side-with-foretelling-look makes awesome beer.
You guys rock ... :-)
Dirk