spring rolls with carrot ginger dipping sauce

It's summer, it's hot outside, and we don't have air conditioning so, Self, please refrain from the stove at least a few nights a week!!  We've posted about spring rolls here before but here's a twist on our old standby that includes more colorful veggies like red peppers and beets!  The sauce is pretty great too!  Thanks again to a recipe from Martha Stewart's Meatless cookbook.  Have I ever mentioned that one of my favorite leisure activities is leafing through cookbooks from the library?  I wonder which cookbook I will borrow next...

Ingredients:
rice paper wrappers
radish sprouts
3 carrots, julienned
3 candy cane beets, peeled, julienned
1 cucumber, julienned 
1 red pepper, julienned
1/2 lb. firm tofu, sliced into long strips

Sauce Ingredients:
3 carrots, chopped
1/4 onion, chopped
2 T. fresh ginger, peeled
1/4 c. apple cider vinegar
2 T. tamari
1/4 t. toasted sesame oil
salt
black pepper
1/4 c. sunflower oil
1/4 c. water

Soak rice paper wrappers in warm water until just pliable.  Put the rice paper wrapper on a plate, load it up with veggies, and roll.  Dry off the plate between spring rolls so you get a good sticky surface to pull the wrapper taught.

For the sauce, blend everything but the oil and water until smooth.  Then add the oil and water while the the blender or food processor is running.

crystallized ginger

I'm a ginger fiend. I like my chai and ginger snaps to be overpowering with ginger. So, I made crystallized ginger the other day, using Alton Brown's recipe. It was surprisingly easy. Watch close, because the moment the liquid sugar recrystallizes happens in the blink of an eye. I made some delicious ginger snaps using this homemade crystallized ginger.

Boiling it:

bottled the ginger brown

We bottled our ginger brown ale that we started back in November. The recipe is on hopville, a nice calculator tool and way to keep track of recipes.

We now have a big enough collection of flip-top bottles to fit a 5-gallon batch of beer, without needing to use wine bottles (too big) or crown-top bottles (requires borrowing the capping tool). Conveniently, all of the bottles fit (just barely) in our dishwasher for sanitizing.

For a little experiment, we used three different priming sugar recipes (priming sugar is added just before bottling to create carbonation). One gallon was primed with blackstrap molasses, one gallon was primed with cane sugar boiled with 1 oz. ginger root for extra ginger flavor, and the remaining three gallons got half molasses half cane sugar for priming.

make something day: ginger brown ale

The day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday, a day in which stores hype up the x-mas shopping season and crazy shoppers wake up super early to stand in long lines and catch some "deals". Eric and I do not participate. In fact, we are so good at breaking traditions that it is nice to sometimes create new traditions. Established alternatives to Black Friday include Buy Nothing Day and Make Something Day so we decided to make something!

For our first annual beer brewing extravaganza on Make Something Day, we made a ginger brown ale which includes cinnamon, cloves and orange peel. Mmmmm... Looking forward to this one!