Photos Lately

1. Remember that time I got excited about the pink beer we made? Well the pink beer will remain a dream, because this is what became of it.





Maybe the photos are self explanatory, but I'll write some words to go along with them. Maybe writing words can be part of my grieving process.

The pink beer was over-carbonated. We've never had a batch of beer over-carbonate, so this was a new experience for us. Normally when home brewers face this problem it means exploding bottles---glass and beer and danger everywhere. I guess we were lucky though? I managed to not put at least one cap on properly, so one evening we just heard it start to make a fizzing sound. Greg sprang into action, knowing the cap had to come off to avoid the risk of an exploding bottle. If I was as quick on my feet as he was, I would have made him wear the safety glasses. The first bottle got its cap removed indoors, and as you can see from the above photo, this resulted in pink beer dripping down our wall. The rest of the bottles were opened outdoors, using the open-inside-a-plastic-bag technique we learned from our experience eating surströmming.

2. Our garden is not a complete waste!



We got these three carrots recently. I was really excited to grow these because of their unique radish-like shape. They may be small, and not very substantial when split between two people, but we were really happy considering the last time we tried to grow carrots they got eaten/trampled by a cow (I have never owned a cow).

3. We took a long-ish bike ride to explore a new section of town.





4. I made some really delicious pizza.





I used this recipe and this recipe, both of which I'd recommend.

5. Right now there are blue skies, but about an hour ago there was a total downpour, resulting in all sorts of rainbow delight.

Sometimes life calls for pink beer

Somehow I got it in my head that Greg and I needed to brew a pink beer. Probably it started because we had this idea to brew a beer with lingonberries, and then I realized that the result could be a pink beer. So we designed a recipe to ensure that the result would be pink. Mostly that involved making it as light in color as possible so the lingonberries had more opportunity to provide the color. Behold.

7QT - mostly on food/beverage

1. Sometimes it is the perfect day for sushi, and you spend most of your day thinking about dinnertime, and then it is time to leave the office, and as you pull your bicycle up to the sushi place you realize things are looking a bit dark. The sushi place is closed for summer vacation! Why??

2. Then it took me an hour to decide egg salad sandwiches would be a suitable replacement. I almost never eat egg salad sandwiches, but I don't know why. I made this with hard-boiled eggs (I used to start the eggs in cold water… shameful), an avocado (makes the color questionable, if you care about that sort of thing), a scoop of mayo, a scoop of mustard, some shakes of hot sauce, salt, pepper, and paprika. On a sandwich with some cheap-o lettuce? Super tasty.

3. Speaking of mustard. I bought a new mustard the other day. I was trying to twist the lid off of the jar when I realized it was just a pop-off kind of lid. And then I realized that the 'jar' the mustard was in was eerily similar in size/shape to our drinking glasses. And I now I am 99% convinced that our drinking glasses originated as mustard jars.

4. Lemonade-Beer. I did a quick check to see if I had written about this gem of a beverage before and I was led to this post. I am definitely wearing the same exact shirt as I type this, but I am not located in France (no worries, I like Sweden better).

5. I have a small obsession with beer in cans. I just love been in cans, okay?! Sometimes I pretend like I am a beer snob, but really I think this makes me the opposite of a beer snob.

6. Yesterday I made the perfect dinner to accompany beer in cans - nachos! Greg thought I was not being serious when I suggested nachos as a meal, but I was as serious as a thing that is incredibly serious. I even made some nacho cheese, loosely following this recipe, which was super delicious!

7. I have just returned from a little city walk with my Swedish class. I had seen most of the sights that we stopped by, but I learned some new and interesting things. Plus it is a gorgeous day to be spending several hours out wandering around.

Mostly I guess that wasn't so interesting to write, but I felt the need to mention one non-food item this week(:

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The End & The Link-Up!

Initial ginger beer research

There is so much information to know about making ginger beer! I have spent my entire Saturday morning reading up on the different options.

Now I just need to decide how 'hardcore' I want to be about this. The simplest option would be to boil some water with ginger root and sugar, essentially making a ginger simple syrup, which I could add to bubbly water.

Taking it up a notch, I could do the same sort of thing, but add a bit of yeast. This would result in a (probably negligible) amount of alcohol, and a time-sensitive beverage. Here is a really nice article about this method, designed for school children to make, I guess.

The thing is, it is tricky to have and store a sweet and carbonated beverage. The addition of yeast in the beverage will carbonate the beverage by turning sugars into alcohol + CO2. But since you want your beverage to also be sweet, you have more sugar than you want to turn into alcohol. So when you make ginger beer this way, you need to drink it within a day or two of putting it in a bottle. This is probably not a huge concern (especially if you avoid glass bottles), but it does mean making very small batches. And if you have small batches, then you don't really want to use champagne yeast, because the amount in a package would be total overkill. Maybe there is dry champagne yeast, which you could just use as you need? We normally buy liquid yeast packages though. And I'm getting disorganised in my thoughts here, but I've read that using bread yeast can add strange flavors.

The ultimate project then would lead to pasteurization. This allows you to put a beverage with sugar and yeast in a glass bottle, cap it, let it ferment a tiny bit to produce carbonation (while leaving some sugar to result in a sweet beverage), and then you pasteurize to kill the yeast, thus preventing further fermentation and the risk of bottles exploding. Pasteurization is a whole other animal. I'm not sure if I'm ready to tackle these risks just yet.

Actually when I was doing all this reading it reminded me of the time I gave away all our de-labelled and cleaned bottles when we moved from NH to Sweden. Basically I was thinking that we had spent many hours taking labels off of so many bottles that it would be a shame to just recycle them all. So I put an ad on freecycle, just to see if anyone wanted them. I actually got a few responses in a timely manner. I gave them to the first guy to contact me, who told me he was so glad to get them since he had tried making a batch of rootbeer which had resulted in exploded bottles, so his supply of bottles was lacking.

This is getting really wordy, but I have to say, I have a pretty big concern about exploding bottles. That isn't something you want to take lightly.

At the same time, Greg and I (mostly Greg) have a slight interest in making cider, so learning the art of pasteurization could be a useful skill for our future.

For me, it all sort of comes down to my goals for making ginger beer. A few weeks ago I was trying to find an interesting restaurant in Stockholm, and I found a dumpling place and they had ginger beer on the menu, and ever since then I've just been wishing I could more easily get myself some ginger beer. (That restaurant was, sadly, not open on the weekends, which I didn't realise until we were standing outside the door.)

So if I just want the experience of ginger beer, any of these methods should suffice, so logically it makes sense to just do the simplest and cheapest option, which would be one of the first two. Both are really simple, and I'm sure both are quite economical, but I could check the numbers to maximize that benefit.

I think my plan will be to start with one of these methods, because I just really want to drink a ginger beer. Then, after I can do more research on pasteurization and gain some confidence in my (our) skills in that area, step up the ginger beer-making game.

Also, for reference (for my future self, mainly), I read this entire forum which was really useful. And here is one that will be useful for pasteurization research, but really? I can handle 17 pages, but 108?

I've done a lot of other reading as well, but if anyone has tips or sources I'd love to hear about it. Brian, are you still lurking? When you made cider did you pasteurize it? I think we had some friends 'pasteurize' by exposing their cider to some sort of light? I don't know, but is this a thing?

7QT: language learning, dancing, and the existence of mint-fig ice cream!

1. Long live flashcards! I had been thinking a lot about how a key element to learning a language is learning vocabulary. And in high school when I was taking Spanish classes, the only way I passed my vocabulary tests was to study using flashcards. So then I was thinking that there must be a new 'modern' way of doing this, and that surely a flashcard program (or 'ap' (or is it app) as the cool kids say) must exist. Well well well. Much to my luck I had a couple to choose between. I was immediately sold on Anki when I saw a youtube video demonstration, which showed that decks are shareable. This means I can go to the Anki webpage and search Swedish/Svenska, and immediately have a deck of flashcards (more than one actually) ready to go. Amazing! Even more amazing is that someone has shared a deck of the vocabulary list from the textbook I am using in my class. Bonus!

2. Greg and I have two beers fermenting right now. The first is our Christmas beer, which is now in a secondary with vanilla and cinnamon, and I have such high hopes that those flavors will really be present in the end product. The second is a pale ale, which is our first hoppy beer and also our first beer that we designed (as opposed to following a recipe). I have some brewing photos to share as well, so at some point in the future I might write a post dedicated to the topic.

3. Tonight and tomorrow are full of Swedish folk dance! I am really super excited, especially since the concert/dance tonight is free. Even though I go to our regular dance session every Wednesday, I feel like it has been awhile since I've gone to a proper dance event. On Wednesdays we usually focus on learning a new dance, or trying to improve a particular aspect of a dance, or things like that. So while there is plenty of dancing, it is geared toward instruction and learning. The dance events are more like a party where you just go and dance all the different dances!

I really have to work on making my words about folk dance sound as enthusiastic as I feel about folk dance. Just adding an exclamation point doesn't really help much.

4. In two weeks Greg and I are spending a weekend in Denmark. For a dance weekend of course:) A Contra Dance Weekend! Basically Sweden has no contra dancing, but Denmark has quite a lot. So we will travel there for the weekend. Contra dancing has been in Denmark for 25 years now, which also means that the group of people who enjoy the dance have aged by about that much. It is often said that the popularity of contra dance sort of goes in waves, and sometimes it gets really popular with younger people and sometimes it sort of fades away. I guess in Denmark right now there is a big lack of young people, so we'll be bringing down the average age of attendees. If people only understood that they were missing one of the greatest contra dance bands and two of the greatest contra dance callers, they would regret not going. And for the record, I have no familiarity with the other band, so I can't claim that they are a favorite.

5. They make mint-fig ice cream here. Mint-fig! I found this out the way I find out about a lot of good things you can buy in Sweden - someone was reusing the container for their lunch yesterday. And clearly I have not been paying enough attention to the ice cream section of the grocery store, because if I had seen this I just would not have been able to pass it up. I cannot even imagine what this would taste like. My new goal in life is to find this ice cream.

6. Shall we talk about the weather then? It got below 0°C a couple days ago. The outside temperature likes to surprise me, although it is not too difficult to do so. Our apartment is always very warm now that the heat is on, and it never occurs to me that I should be expecting the outdoor weather to have changed drastically in just one day. I'm bored of talking about the weather now.

7. I found this really nice flickr photo stream called Beautiful Uppsala. Such a nice reminder that I really live in such a beautiful place. This also makes me want to take my camera out more. Plus I love seeing this city in all the different seasons. Here is a particular favorite (note this is not my photo, but clicking it will take you to the photo stream).

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As always, that is all from me for Friday Quick Takes; thanks for reading!

7 Quick Takes: bicycles, beer, and dancing with Bill Nye version

- 1 -

I saw a game of Segway Polo in action the other day. That's right. Who needs a horse when you've got a segway. And if you were thinking, 'What other crazy things do people do with segways?' here is a short list.

- 2 -

Did you know there was such a thing as dining in the dark? I was just told about a restaurant in Paris where all of the waiters are blind, and the dining room is completely dark. Apparently one of these restaurants exists in San Francisco also, and I laughed so hard reading about a review that said a person lost a piece of food on the table and had to spend a really long time finding it.

- 3 -

Our bicycles are in working order as of writing this! Last weekend Greg and I decided it was time to fix those bicycles right up. We each worked on our own, and we managed to fully change a tire each in about one hour. (I am really happy about that time, plus it was the first time I fully changed a tire on my own with no help.) My tire wasn't technically flat, but it had this hole where the tube was bubbling up and sort of pushing through. So I decided preventative action was necessary, and I changed the tire so that I would be able to save the tube.

- 4 -

I love it so much that Bill Nye is on Dancing with the Stars. So much! It bothers me that there doesn't seem to be a clear explanation of what percentage of the final standings is due to the judges and what is due to the peoples' votes, but I just had to vote anyway.

What a great person though. I think at one point he says something like, "Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn sometimes." That it does, Bill.

- 5 -

The evening after writing number 3 up there I had my handlebars come loose while rounding a turn on my bicycle. I've always had issues with my handlebars being a bit wobbly or turned crooked, so I am often tightening and adjusting. Well I didn't do a very good job I guess. Somehow I managed to get enough control of my front wheel to not slam right into the curb at a speed at which one would not want to be slamming into a curb. Kind of terrifying.

- 6 -

Maybe I've written about Humans of New York before. I really like it a lot. Maybe I've even linked to this exact post before, but I just like it so much. Such incredibly practical advice.

- 7 -

Greg has been in Belgium this past week. He returns home this evening, and I'm pretty sure the first taste test of our beer is going to happen. Hopefully it is delicious. When we were bottling it, I thought it had a very strong banana flavor and considering I do not really like bananas, I did not consider this to be a good thing. So here's to hoping that flavor mellowed out.

- The End and The Linkup -

hooray for tuesday

This is me right now. Enjoying the sea-view and a cold beer on my balcony (almost). I tried sitting out there yesterday, and that lasted all of four minutes before I retreated back to the safety of the just-inside-the-door area.

I'm feeling so successful with my vacation today!

First of all, I got into this beer with no bottle opener, so that is a good feat. In addition to my cheap beer, I also bought some incredibly expensive (and incredibly worth it) macarons. I only ever had macaroons before, and I never really understood the macaron thing. And I probably won't ever be able to have macarons again, because they just won't be as good and they are dyed all sorts of showy colors.

I was going to try to get lemonade, because lemonade-beer on a summer afternoon is one of the finer things in life. I couldn't find any lemonade though, so I got grapefruit juice, and once that is cold we'll see if it does the trick.

Also, I took a photo for a couple who asked if I would take their photo. I didn't even have my camera out at the time, so they just took a gamble with whether or not they had asked a person who cared about things like framing a shot. I can't vouch for whether or not they were smiling or making weird faces, but that photo sure was framed well.

Before that happened I went to the market and got a baguette that was longer than my arm for 90 euro cents! Extraordinary lunch bargain!

So you see? So many successes, and still multiple hours of afternoon left for reading on (sort of) the balcony!