No Whey, José!

so josh has been really interested in home-brewed beer lately, so he bought a book about it. in the back of the book there’s all the recipes for the beer, and then there’s a few pages with desserts that you can make with beer..yada yada yada, we made chocolate sauce with reduced stout and caramel sauce with reduced pale ale!!

here’s some shots of josh’s beer reduction factory. for the chocolate sauce, we first reduced some stout until about half the original volume, then added chocolate syrup and reduced again until it was thick and creamy. for the caramel, we reduced some pale ale the same way and then added brown sugar to make a crazy delicious caramel sauce. the end result was amaaaaaazing..you could really taste the beer in the caramel sauce, and at first you’re probably thinking ew beer on ice cream? but no! it was delicious. seriously. beer lovers would have a blast with this, trying different kinds of beers and such.

i will say it did take a bit of time and lots of stirring and checking for all of this to come together, but it makes about a cup of each sauce so we store them in some plastic squeeze bottles to enjoy for later! they go wonderfully on some nice soy ice cream. i think we’re going to be experimenting more with beer in our baking as well..maybe a chocolate stout cake with the stout sauce drizzled on top? mmm yes please!

i have to confess- we’ve been back from vacation for 2 weeks but still have yet to post about it :/ well better late then never, right? we had a GREAT time in florida.. disney world was great even though we had a few problems with that pesky finding food we can eat thing, but we didn’t let that stop us from enjoying our time. we stayed at the disney pop century resort for 2 days and 3 nights, and then we went to venice to stay at my aunt mar’s house for the remainder of our vacation. i grew up in that area so it was really nice to go back and see what’s been going on (a whole lot of nothing).

we were there for the 4th of july, so we decided to rent a boat for the day! it was awesome..my family used to rent boats a lot when we lived there and we would go out on the intercoastal and putz around for the day. it was always so much fun. we even were lucky to be greeted by this beautiful dolphin!

then we watched fireworks on the beach..it was really a super awesome day. so we had a lot of lazy beach days, and it was just what we needed after such a long year of work and school and fantasizing about opening vegan bakeries.

so two days after we got back, josh went on a camping trip with my dad and two cousins. they went last year and decided to make it a yearly tradition. so he was gone for 4 days and i was here by myself, cooking for one. it was a lot more difficult than i thought it would be..mostly because it took me a long time just to get the motivation to cook if it was only going to be for myself! dinner time is probably our most favorite time of day, mostly because we love to cook together but also because we love to make yummy food and enjoy eating it together. so the first night i had put off cooking for a while, and when my stomach started to eat itself i decided it was time to just shut up and cook something for myself. i ended up throwing together this really delicious pizza that came about after many ideas that had to be changed when i realized we had just about nothing in the house to make. it had caramelized onions, olive oil, garlic, a big bunch of fresh oregano and basil, and fresh from the garden sliced tomatoes. it was something that i threw together out of desperation but it was so good that i think i’ll make it for josh next time we make pizza.

lets see…what else have we been up to….well right now i’m in the kitchen cooking up some roasted veggies to make our roasted vegetable ziti. i changed it up a bit and used some organic yellow squash and zucchini, an orange bell pepper, and a yellow tomato. i think i must need whatever vitamins are in yellow and orange foods because i was immediately drawn to them in the store and i was like i HAVE to buy these. my sister made this pasta with squash and yellow and red peppers and she said it was really good, so i thought i’d give it a try. i think it’s a nice twist on the original recipe…more summery perhaps.

i guess i’ll end the post with some pictures from our trip!