Guinness Pot Roast

 Nothing says St. Patrick's Day quite like putting beer in all your food. I just opted to add it to my main dish, as I wanted to reserve some of my Guinness for drinking. I decided on a pot roast, since Costco had a good deal on a pair of them recently, I had one handy.

 
It's a fun St. Patty's Day twist on the usual slow cooker roast. Instead of just beef broth, you add a bottle of Guinness to the cooking liquid. If you don't have any Guinness on hand, you could certainly substitute any beer you like, but I would stick with dark beers like stouts and porters for their strong flavor.

For some crazy reason, it's still winter here around DC, despite being March. I intended to make this pot roast for St. Patrick's Day, regardless of what silliness the weather had in store. However, the clouds spent the better part of the morning dropping snow on us, so now the leftovers will make a nice hot lunch on this snowy afternoon.

Guinness Pot Roast
makes 4-6 servings, depending on roast size

What You'll Need:
2-3lb pot roast
small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 carrots, sliced
1 lb of small red potatoes, halved
12oz Guinness beer
2 cups beef broth, low sodium if possible
1 package onion soup mix
2 tsp thyme
2 Tbs coarse salt
2 Tbs cracked pepper
2 bay leaves

The Process:
   Heat up a skillet on medium heat with some olive oil and let it get nice and hot. Combine the coarse salt and pepper in a bowl and then rub the mixture over the surface of the roast. Sear each side of the roast for 3-4 minutes per side. Place into the crock.

   In the same skillet, cook your onions for 5-6 minutes until soft and then add the garlic. Cook for an additional 3-4 minutes. Make sure to scrape the bottom for the burned bits from the roast. Add to the crock along with the carrots and potatoes.

   Put the onion soup mix, thyme, and bay leaves into the crock. Add the Guinness and beef broth over top and mix it up to combine the onion soup mix. The roast and vegetables should be almost completely covered. If not, add a little more broth or water. Cover the crock and cook on low for 6-7 hours, until the roast is fork tender and the potatoes are soft. Remove roast from the crock and let it rest, tented with foil, for 10-15 minutes before carving.

   If you prefer a thick broth, as I do, remove 2 cups of liquid from the crock and thicken it in your preferred method. I use arrowroot starch, but cornstarch or flour work just fine. Stir the thickened liquid back in with the rest of the liquid and vegetables while the roast is resting. Carve the roast, spoon vegetables and broth onto your plate, and serve.

   Don't forget to have some bread on hand to sop up the broth on your plate!

My First Brew- the Very Heffelberry!

For Christmas, my father (who has been brewing up a storm in the past year) gifted me a brewing kit to make my very own beer. We brewed it while I was home, and it was just finally finished. I shared it with several friends this weekend because it was ready for the big reveal.

The beer he bought was a Bavarian hefeweizen, because I really enjoy the wheat beers. But, we added a special ingredient and that's why it's such an especially dark wheat beer. We added Elderberries! (insert Monty Python joke of choice here).

The ingredients!

 We were lucky to find the elderberries at a local home brew supply shop, but everything else we needed came from the kit. Dad was cool enough to give me the kit a little early so we actually brewed the beer on Christmas Eve because I was already up visiting for the holiday.

Spent Grain Dog Treats

My dad has really gotten into brewing his own beer since the summer, and after each batch, he's left with a big pile of spent grains. He tossed them the first few times, but later learned you can save the grains and use them to make things like bread... and dog treats!

We have no shortage of dogs barking around in the family, so I took what he had recently and turned them into dog treats! Piper, my mischievous hound, and Dante, my parent's dog, both really love the first batch my dad made. I took some tips from him when he made them and improved on the recipe to make it possible to use cookie cutters on them- bone shaped cookie cutters!

Baking these was essentially a waking nightmare for Piper, or so she'd have you believe. She knew what they were, smelled them for over 4 hours, and could see them cooling on the counter. I should go to jail for putting her through this kind of extensive torture.

Beer Grain Dog Treats
makes approximately 30 treats, depending on the size of your cutter

What You'll Need:
2 1/2 cups (approx) of spent beer grains that have not been mixed with hops*
1 cup peanut butter
2/3 cup flour (all purpose or whole wheat)
1 egg

The Process:
Mix all ingredients together well. I used a wooden spoon at first and then finished it off by mixing with my hands. If it's still really sticky, add a little more flour. If it's too dry, add a little bit more peanut butter. Chill in the refrigerator for an hour. Preheat oven to 225 degrees. Roll out dough to about 1/4" thick and cut out desired shapes until all the dough is used.

Place cut biscuits onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake for 2 1/2 hours, turning them after 90 minutes, until they're really well dried out. Using hot pads, break one in half to make sure they're dried all the way through. Cool completely and store in an airtight container.

*Hops are toxic to dogs, do never use grains have been mixed with hops.


I had three different kinds of grains on hand, so I made quite a few of these (almost 150), but they're getting spread around between four spoiled dogs. Poor Piper has been stalking the kitchen all evening. Too bad she has to wait until Christmas for these.

It's a Bird! It's a Plane! No! It's Beer Bread!

   I recently made some bread from my Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day book. There is a plethora of recipes in there, but one kind of bread is conspicuously missing from their book- beer bread. I love beer, and I love the beers that the fall season brings- the Octoberfests and the pumpkin ales.

   After a little trial and error, I finally came up with a modification to their basic recipe. Most beer breads I've seen are soft loafs that you pour into a loaf pan and bake. But I'm in the market for a crusty loaf, akin to the ones I often make. I started with that recipe for Basic Bread to make my modifications.

   The first batch I tried by replacing half the water with beer. Conveniently, a 12 oz bottle of beer is 1 1/2 cups of liquid- precisely half of the water in the original recipe. I also reduced the yeast by half. The beer flavor was very mild in the resulting bread, and it didn't rise quite as much as it should have. This means I needed more beer, and a little bit more yeast. Another batch was made with these changes, and the result was breaded beery goodness.

Beer Bread
adapted from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day
makes 4, 1lb loafs

What You'll Need:
2, 12oz room temp bottles of beer, I used and Irish Red.
2 tsp granulated yeast
1 Tbs salt
6 1/2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
a large container, preferably with a lid

The Process:
   When selecting a beer, just remember this is where you'll get almost all the flavor. If paring it with a meal, choose a beer that will go well with your meal. I chose an Irish Red because I like that style a lot. Also keep in mind that the beer has to be room temp in order to get the yeast to activate correctly.

Beef and Beer Stew

   It snowed yesterday, was in 20s overnight, and our heat is broken. This series of events called for some serious comforting, warm food. Queue an amazing recipe I've made a number of times by Not Quite Nigella. It is seriously fantastic, especially if you slow cook it. That's what I did this time, but it just depends on what I have going on during the day. Either way, though, this stew is wonderful.

   The original recipe is in metric, but I have used it and tweaked it so many times that it's now in measurements more familiar to us weirdos who use inches and pounds.

Beef and Beer Stew with Dumplings

What You'll Need:
For Stew:
    2 pounds beef cut into bite sized
    2 onions, diced
    2 garlic cloves, minced
    3 tablespoons flour
    2 cups beef stock
    1, 12 oz bottle of beer*
    3 bay leaves
    1 Tbs brown sugar
    2 Tbs Worcestershire sauce
    pinch of salt, to taste

For the dumplings
    1 cup flour
    2 tsp baking powder
    1/2 tsp salt
    1/4 cup melted butter
    2 eggs
    1/2 cup grated cheese