A Short Review of Beer: Baltika, Grade 9

Hello, dear readers!

Here is something that hasn't been seen for a while in these parts: a beer review!

Look at that golden lager goodness!

Today, after my husband made some herring paste using smoked herring he bought at the Euro mart, I decided to break out one of the Slavic beers I bought. Since herring is a common Russian food, I thought it appropriate to consume the Russian beer with it.

Named for the port on the Baltic sea where the Russian Navy is anchored, Baltika has since grown from its incorporation in the early 1990s following the fall of the communist government to become the largest brewer of Russian beer in the world. True to Russian tendencies, the brewery is state-owned and based out of St. Petersburg. Its different varieties, labeled as "grades", are exported all over the world to be enjoyed by consumers everywhere.

This is not the first time I've had this particular grade of Baltika. Shortly after the baby was born, a friend of mine was moving and needed to get rid of her alcohol because they were moving to another state (apparently, there is some stupid law on the books left over from the Prohibition days that says alcohol can't be transported over state lines). I took the beers since I'd been reading about how beer could help with milk production for breastfeeding (I never had problems with my supply, but it doesn't hurt to make sure everything's working as it should). She had a number of exotic beers, as well as domestic brands, and Baltika Grade 9 was one of the imports.

Then as now, I broke out my trusty frosted beer mug and popped open the bottle. It had a modest head and a light golden color. The smell is nice and malty, but not pissy. After taking a sip, the beer went down nice and smooth with little bitterness which is good because it's a lager. It's not terribly light, having an 8% alcohol volume, but with sufficient food in the belly, there's not much of a buzz.

Just as I thought, Baltika Grade 9 goes well with salted and smoked fish like herring. I also found that it went well with some canned spaghetti that I had for dinner. In general, it's a good all-around beer and I was reminded about how pleased I'd been with this grade the first time I tried it. Baltika Grade 9 is definitely a keeper.

For more information on the Baltika brewery, check out their website here.

As always, please drink responsibly.

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The Palacinke

Greetings!

I hope you all had a safe and happy Cinco de Drinko yesterday. Yes, I know it's actually Cinco de Mayo, but what was originally a minor Mexican holiday celebrated locally in the city of Puebla where the famous battle took place, has been co-opted blown up into an event for the express purpose of pushing cheap, crappy booze here in the US. This is why I call it Cinco de Drinko. It's like a boozy version of President's Day.

Everyone's Mexican for a day on Cinco de Drinko!

While the rest of the nation made fools of themselves getting wasted on Mexican food and margaritas, I decided to try out my grandmother's recipe for palacinke (pron. pa-lah-cheen-keh). Palacinke are kind of like flat pancakes, very similar to crepes. I hesitate to use the word "crepes" as an analogy because to me, palacinke have more char to them than the light-colored crepes. This could just be because of the way my grandmother made them, as hers always had some char to them (she considered light colored palacinke to be underdone).

In a major departure from my usual protocol, I actually followed the recipe as it was given to me! I suppose this was probably because I was making it for the first time, and I didn't want the batter to come out too thick (palacinke batter is thin). I had tried making palacinke on my own in the past from memory, but they never seemed to come out quite like how I remembered them. Maybe now, I had a chance!

After combining the ingredients, I pulled out one of the cast iron skillets. My grandmother makes her palacinke using a Teflon-coated skillet, but since we don't have one anymore (the one Teflon skillet we had was used until the Teflon literally started disintegrating off the surface of the pan!), all I had to work with was cast iron.

The first palacinka

My husband likes to say that the use of cast iron cookware is a verifiable demonstration of one's cooking skills. Despite some recent successes in the kitchen of late, on this family recipe I failed miserably. Even though I poured some oil into the skillet, the rough surface caused the batter to adhere to the bottom of the skillet and thereby completely destroy the palacinka (singular version of palacinke). Even after I changed skillets to the smaller, enamel covered iron skillet that I usually use for frying eggs, I just could not get the resulting palacinke to stay together or fry to the point where it was cooked, but not crispy (properly done, palacinke are flexible enough to roll up). I changed the heat levels, the amount of oil and batter in the pan, and I just could not get them to come out the way my grandma made them. If they stayed together, they were hard and crispy, not soft and flexible like how she made them.

It would start out like this in the skillet...

...And then turn into this crumbly mess every time I tried to flip it!

Despite this disappointing first batch of palacinke, they were as tasty as I remembered. They tasted lovely with some raspberry jam. My husband was quite pleased with them, and encouraged me to try making them again. I suppose cast iron is not the most optimal cookware for making palacinke, but until I can find a small Teflon pan, this is all I have to work with. Maybe it is a matter of finding the right heat settings or oil-to-batter ratio. My grandma wasn't specific on what level of heat she used, but she does have a gas stove (ours is electric) in addition to the cookware differences. This will make for an interesting journey-the quest for the perfect palacinka!

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May Day

Happy Sunday, dear readers!

On this first of May, be thankful for the workers who are the real driving force behind the economy, not trickle-down-piss Reaganomics with its fetishization of the rich.

Workers of the world unite! Pic found here

But, in spite of my socialist leanings, hubby and I celebrated May Day by going to Sunday Mass at the church we were married in. After last week's trip to the Carmelite church ended with my husband coming to within an inch of knifing a rude parishioner who cut in front of us with his children in the Communion line, it was time to reevaluate where we went to Mass. As much as I love our Carmelite church, the fact is that people there do not behave reverently while in the presence of the Lord! They talk, they clap for the mariachi, they come and go whenever they please and have no respect for order. It's largely out of ignorance that they behave this way, and I have my disagreements with the homeboy padre who is the administrator there about how to go about correcting this huge problem. Our homeboy padre is a saint compared with alot of the other American priests I've met, but he's not terribly bright. I don't want to stop going there because I do feel that the Lord wants hubby and I to be there so that we can provide a good example to others on how one should behave in God's house, but it's so frustrating! It's easy to fall into despair when seeing how bad the modern church has become.
I've had a long history with the Carmelite church because I was going there for Sunday Mass long before I became a Catholic and it was there that the seeds of Catholicism were firmly planted in my heart. I do not want to abandon it because despite the bad behavior of the parishioners, they uphold traditional Mexican Catholic practices and don't deviate from orthodox Catholic dogma. That counts for something, right?

It's hard being a priest. You've got to evangelize, educate, and counsel people when they're spiritually vulnerable. It's a job made all the more difficult when your parish is ignorant of God.

Fortunately, the Lord rewarded our decision to go to our wedding church when a dear family friend came. He brought with him his good friend whom we helped move into her apartment a few months ago. The woman was delighted to see how much the baby had grown, and since it was before Mass, she got to sweet talk the baby in French for a bit (she was born and raised on the Caribbean island of Martinique, where the dominant language is French). We were worried about our friend for a while because he'd gotten himself caught up with a heretical outfit that under the guise of being pro-life, was pushing overpriced rosaries of poor quality and some condemned "visions" of the Virgin Mary to boot, but with this appearance, it helped put hubby and I at ease. After Mass, the woman told me that she had recently been attending our wedding church for the last few weeks because she wanted to come back to the Church. I knew she'd been away from the Catholic Church for a long time, but now that she is elderly she wants to have her spiritual affairs in order. She let me know that she'd recently contacted a priest at the church to arrange for a Confession, but had yet to hear back to set a date and time. This being the Year of Mercy, now's as good a time as any to recommit to living a lifestyle in accordance with the teachings of the Church and partaking of the Sacraments as often as possible.

Take that, Pebbles Flintstone!

And, most importantly, the baby got to radiate lots of cuteness beams! Her hair is finally long enough on top for me to make a ponytail of it, though the back of her head still has a ways to go before I can make a tail out of it. And to think, when she was here, my mother wanted to give the baby a haircut!

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The Swamp Cooler

Good evening, dear readers.

Today, we were blessed with a cloudy and cool day. My husband decided that today would be the day he would tune up the swamp cooler and get it ready for the summer because it is going to get very hot next week. Though we'd been running it periodically over the course of the last few weeks, the cooler was in need of some servicing, especially today when it wouldn't turn on this morning!

My cooler looks like this since it's mounted at the front of the trailer, but with more rust and scale from wear (pic found here)

For those of you who may not be familiar with it, a swamp cooler is a home cooling unit that works by blowing air over water to cool it. It is also known as an evaporative cooler since, well, that's basically how it works. The cooler also adds humidity to the air from the water, which makes it quite an effective cooler here in dry Arizona as opposed to someplace humid like Louisiana or Georgia. Also, swamp coolers use less electricity than air conditioners and are easier to maintain. You also have the benefit of leaving windows open when the swamp cooler is running since it helps enhance the airflow, unlike air conditioning which performs best in a sealed environment.

Basic diagram of how a swamp cooler works. Pic found here

When he opened up the cooler to investigate, my husband saw there were a few things that needed servicing in there. A spider bearing had disintegrated and the belt was shredded. The motor still works, but it's not in good shape. We need to get a new motor as soon as we can afford to so that it will be in reserve when the old one finally dies. The pads were pretty weathered and needed to be changed too.

A quick trip to Home Depot to get the necessary replacement cooler parts, and an auto parts store to get brake shoes (one of the front brakes was discovered to be in dire need of repair. We have the drum, but the shoes we had were the wrong size-too small to fit the drum properly), and my husband spent the rest of the afternoon working on the cooler. It wasn't too hard of a job and was fixed by sundown.

Basic diagram of a swamp cooler. Mine looks a little different internally than this one, but I suspect that has more to do with age than anything (ours is kinda old). Pic found here

As he did that, I worked on cleaning up the yard. It wasn't any messier than that of our neighbors, but it was getting to be too cluttered for my liking. A spring cleaning was needed so that the baby has plenty of space to play in the yard when we go outside. Also, on a recent trip to the recyclers, we learned that no outfit in town was buying plastic. With the price of oil being so cheap right now, the price of plastic was too low to justify paying out. I was disappointed because my husband and I try to be ecologically responsible and recycle our plastics and metals. But, since management is too cheap to incorporate recycling into the weekly garbage service, we have to go elsewhere to recycle our pop cans and bottles. Out to trash went several garbage bags of empty plastic 2L pop bottles which would ordinarily have gone to recycling. As disappointing as it is to have to throw away recyclables, I'm tired of our yard looking like something out of "Hoarders". By the end of the day, the yard was still cluttered in a few places, but much more orderly than before. My hubby will finally have the room he needs to build a carport to shade our cholomobile from that beastly ball of gas in the sky.

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The Burek

Happy Monday, dear readers! I hope your weekend went well.

Recently, I decided to call upon my Serbian roots and make some traditional food. The fillo dough I bought at the Euro mart a few weeks ago was sitting in my freezer and needed to be utilized. When she was here, my grandma gave me her recipe for making cheese pita, a kind of savory pie that is a staple of Serbian cuisine. Though she always made her dough from scratch, her advanced age had caught up with her and my grandmother was now using fillo dough to make her pitas.

Fillo dough, out of the box. It's supposed to be available in major grocery store chains, but I have yet to find them outside of the Euro mart here. Pic found here 

Though I understood her reason and rationale for doing so, this admission saddened me because my grandmother's pitas were always doughy and thick, which was what I came to understand pita as being (though to make things especially confusing, pita can be made with thick or thin dough and that pita, gibanica, and burek are all mostly interchangeable terms to describe savory pies in Balkan cuisine). However, when she made burek, that was the only time she used fillo dough for something that wasn't a pastry.

Burek, like pita, is a savory pie from the Balkans. Just about every country and dialect there has a name for burek, and it is usually filled with cheeses or meats (though vegetables like spinach are common). Burek can be rectangular, round, horseshoe, or spiral shaped (the latter is common in Bosnia). It is usually made with dough stretched thin that can be either handmade or from fillo.

This is how I remember burek from my childhood. If fillo dough is not used, then the dough is handmade and stretched very thin over a large surface area and folded over with the fillings. Pic found here

Since my husband positively despises cheese, I decided to make meat burek. I remembered there was a Serbian deli a few towns over from where I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and to this day I remembered how good the owner made his meat burek. He used ground beef seasoned with a little salt, pepper, and a pinch of paprika. I don't remember if he used anything other than beef, but the taste has remained burned in my memory all these years. This would be a good way to use up my fillo dough.

After I let it thaw in the fridge for a day or so, I took out the fillo dough along with some canola oil, and a pastry brush. When making these pies, it is essential that the dough be greased with each layer.

I started off by cooking the meat filling first. We had a leftover pound or so of ground beef that needed to be eaten, and I added in my customary chopped onion and garlic for flavoring. I then added some salt, pepper, and a touch of paprika.

Filling in progress

When the meat was finished, I turned on the oven and as it warmed up, I set about assembling the burek. I had no clue how fragile fillo dough was until I began unraveling its sheets from the roll and layering them in the pan. The sheets were tearing and literally disintegrating in my hands, no matter how carefully I picked them up. My grandmother and mom made handling them look so easy! HOW?!

After oiling each sheet and before laying the next one down, I added my meat filling after every few layers. With the fillo dough fast becoming dry, I finished off the package by just throwing on the last few sheets, oiling them up and putting them in the oven. My grandmother's baking instructions were just to let the pita (or burek, in my case) bake at 350 until golden brown, which I figured wouldn't take that long.

FINALLY assembled and ready to bake!

Despite me periodically opening the oven to check on the burek (our oven does not have a light), it took almost an hour and a half before the top looked even halfway tan, but as I would discover when I cut the burek to eat, I had overcooked it. The bottom was kinda burned, the middle layers were alright, but the top layers were dry and the whole thing was quite greasy from all the oil I'd slathered the fillo sheets with. Despite the amount of meat I made, I felt like I hadn't used enough for this dish to turn out as good as I remember it being.

Finished

My first burek. Needs more meat and less time in the oven

Even though I was disappointed by the way this burek turned out, it was a learning experience in a number of ways. Fillo dough is fragile and dries out very quickly, so I have to figure out an easy way to keep the layers moist and if there is a way of handling the sheets so that they don't disintegrate as I'm handling them. I could also take a stab at making the dough from scratch, although my counter is tiny and I may have to get creative about space. Also, I feel like my dough to meat proportions were off and that the next time I make burek, I'll see how well 2 lbs of ground beef works with a package of fillo dough. I'll also use a different pan next time to see if the kind of pan I bake with has an effect on how the burek turns out.

It may take a while and a few bombed bureks before I finally get it right, but for better or worse, I don't give up. To make a good burek is an art, one that I aim to achieve.

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Pictures of the Day

Greetings!

Recently, I was changing the bed sheets after hubby and I woke up to a carnage of fig bars smeared all over the covers. I keep telling him not to leave food in the bedroom, but he never listens because hubby is a chronic snacker and needs to satisfy his munchies when he wakes up at night. In addition to tempting the baby with mischief, I'm tired of having to brush crumbs out of the clean bed every time I lay down in it as well as vacuuming the carpet every other day.

As it were, the baby decided to "help" me with putting on the sheets...

There's a ghost in my bedroom!

Like many small children, she discovered the magic of a bed sheet. Flare it up, and it's like an instant tent! When she gets older, she'll probably run around the house wearing a sheet as a cape, just like I did when I was little.

It wasn't a ghost, it was my baby daughter!

The bed eventually did get made and the carpet vacuumed of all the crumbs that came out of the blankets. I really should make my hubby do the vacuuming in the bedroom. After all, the one who makes the mess is the one who needs to clean it up, right?

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The Vacuum

Hello, dear readers!

Sorry I haven't written for a few days. Life has kept me busy. As the baby becomes more mobile, I have to constantly chase after her so that she doesn't hurt herself or do something bad. She's not walking yet, but she's getting better at pulling herself up on furniture and standing up for longer periods of time. Her preferred method of transportation, for now, is crawling on all fours.

And playing on the bed!

Though it may not seem like a big deal, I finally got a new vacuum! For pretty much the last year or so, I've been using a shop vac to vacuum our home. While it was good about picking up surface dust, hair and kitty kibbles, it simply could not get down deep into the carpet to get the ground-in dust and hairs. I needed a better vacuum, specifically a pet one because of the kitties, so I set about researching different brands and reading the ratings/reviews on Amazon. My hubby wanted me to get a Kirby vacuum, but I was NOT going to pay what we spent on our car for a damn vacuum! I found a pet vacuum by Bissel that was rated pretty well, but when I saw it at Walmart on a recent excursion, it was more than what I was willing to pay.

Fast forward to yesterday. While running errands, we stopped into a local refurbished tech shop. My hubby has a long history with this place as he used to hang out in this shop working on his various Linux projects, conversing with customers, etc. He even had his own little work station set up next to the register so he could do his computing. As such, we've gotten to know the staff pretty well and some of the regular customers too.

This is what I wound up getting. Pic found here

In addition to computers and other bits of outdated technology, the store also gets donations of furniture and appliances. It's less of a tech shop than it used to be and more like another thrift store. One donation they acquire pretty regularly are used vacuums. The proprietor had somehow acquired a whole bunch of Shark brand vacuum cleaners, and a few others. I noticed there was a fairly modern Hoover pet vacuum in the mix. Since it was priced at $45, I almost didn't buy it, until I saw on the announcement board at the front entrance that vacuums were on sale 25% off. Needless to say, I bought it. $33 is not a bad price to pay for a vacuum.

When we got home, I decided to try out the new vacuum on the living room carpet. It picked up the kibbles and kicked up a ton of dust...except they weren't going into the dirt canister (this vacuum is bagless). I tried out the hose extensions and felt almost no suction. It was then that I noticed the "idiot light" (it's not so much a light as it is a system check indicator. The term "idiot light" comes from my husband who uses it to describe the indicator lights in modern cars in which a light on the dashboard goes on saying that something's up, but provides no specific details about the problem; hence "idiot light") starting to go from green ("good") to red ("bad"). I figured at this point that there was a clog somewhere in the machine since this would occasionally happen with the shop vac, so I took off the bottom plate of the vacuum which covers the belt and brush roll. The belt and brush roll looked ok, but a small pile of dust and dirt appeared on the floor from the intake hose. I emptied out the hose, replaced the plate, and turned on the vacuum again. Same problem. My husband was itching to return the vacuum the next day, but I told him to hold off until all troubleshooting had been completed.

I then proceeded to look up the model number online so that I could download a manual. As it turned out, this was the Hoover Windtunnel 2 Rewind Pet vacuum, and despite the lackluster reviews I read regarding Hoover's other pet vacuums, this one rated pretty well for performance. Sure enough, the manual described the idiot light changing to red as indicating that there was either a clog or the filters were dirty. I checked the filters and they were fine, but sure enough, when I detached the main hose from the dirt canister, I saw the clog. I had my husband run a conduit pipe through the hose (the same way he'd unclog the hose in the shop vac when it needed doing so) and he was surprised by the gobs of dog hair that came out. Needless to say, once I reattached everything, the vacuum worked perfectly fine. The dust, hair and kibbles all went into the dirt canister like they were supposed to. It disappointed me to think that somebody had gotten rid of a perfectly good vacuum cleaner all because of a clog that could easily have been removed. A glaring example of disposable consumerama at its finest...

Seriously, we could have MADE a dog from the amount of hair that came out of the hose! Pic found here

So now that I have my new vacuum cleaner for the home, the shop vac will be designated to the shed where it will be utilized to vacuum the car. Now, I must research who's got the best rental deal on a carpet cleaner. I have no idea how long its been since the living room carpet was washed and cleaned. It's good to do that at least once a year. I wonder if my mom would send me her ancient Bissel carpet cleaner. She hardly uses that thing anyway...

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