Monday, September 25, 2006

Beersteak Fajitas!

Hey folks. I made myself some fajitas the other night for dinner. They were tasty! I was all pro about it too, marinading the steak beforehand, slicing up some onions and red pepper, grating some cheese. Don't be surprised if you see me on iron chef pretty soon. Anyways, I documented the procedure with photos for your viewing pleasure.


The ingredients for the marinade: Beer, spicy death sauce, and a tiny bit of oil.


I had a minor crisis when trying to open the beer can... the tab broke off!! Not good at all. It was almost a major tragedy, but fortunately I was able to macguyver my way in.


This is what the marinade looked like. Kinda brown and gross looking, but whatever. I wasn't worried.


I dumped the steaks in the marinade and left them to soak in the fridge for several hours.


Several hours later I grilled the steaks on the BBQ. Hooray for BBQ's!


I fried up some onions and red peppers and I put a bit of the leftover marinade in for good measure. Let me tell you, if you've never fried up onions in beer and hot sauce before, it smells AMAZING! Combined with the smell of steak wafting in from the balcony I was like whoa man.... whoa.

And then my camera battery died, so unfortunately I don't have a picture of the finished product. I assure you though that it was quite tasty looking. I think I've discovered that I like cooking, especially with beer! ;)

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Beer & Cheese Soup

Today I came home from work and for some reason I had a desire to make some beer & cheese soup. I've only actually had it once or twice before, but I always remember it being tasty. I also enjoy the fact that it has beer in it. After a quick recipe search in google, I discovered that I already had most of the ingredients! Hooray! I used a variation of this recipe. Some ingredients I didn't have, so I substituted others. Also, I'm not a big fan of measuring, so I kind of eyeballed some stuff.


The first thing to do was to saute some onions and celery. I'm not 100% sure on what saute means. I think it means to fry up whatever it is you are sauteing in oil or margerine or whatever, so that's what I did.


I didn't have any celery, so I used half of a hot pepper that I had in the fridge.


The next step was to add some flour and garlic salt and some other spices to the mix. Garlic salt I could understand, but I was kinda doubtful about the flour. I've never heard of flour going into a soup before, and it seemed like I was supposed to add a lot, but I thought what the hey, I'll try it. What else am I going to use my flour for anyways?


This is what things looked like after I added the flour and garlic salt. My doubts at this time were increasing. If anything I thought I was going to have a messy pot to clean up afterwards.


Next was to add some chicken stock and the cheese. The recipe called for 8 oz of cheese. I wasn't too sure how much this was, so I just grated half a brick. You can never have too much cheese, that's what I say.


It was starting to look like soup, but it there were still some pretty big clumps of stuff in the bottom. It was kinda like melty cheese-flour porridge with yellow chicken liquid on top.


The final ingredient: a can of beer.


This is what it looked like after adding the beer. It got all foamy and wierd looking. At this point I was like "oh crap.. I've wasted a beer" Things eventually settled down though and after a few minutes of boiling the foam and the melty cheese flour clumps went away and it actually looked like soup.


The finished product. It was actually not bad. The first few spoonfuls were pretty tasty, but after awhile I realized it was a bit heavy on something. I'm thinking either garlic salt or flour or both. It was pretty filling too, I was stuffed after the one bowl. I have some leftover, and I'm hoping it will taste even better in a day or two. I think that's how it usually works with soup type things. If not then I'll just add more beer when I reheat it. Can't go wrong there ;)