Tonight's brew, from the company website: "Wells Banana Bread Beer partly takes its name from the Saxon phrase for beer - 'Liquid Bread'. Combining a traditional ale recipe with the flavour of 'Fair Trade' bananas it creates an intriguing and flavoursome pint."
This is quite good. The nose is 100% banana bread. The taste is also banana bread with just a bit of tang. Very little bitterness.
That's something I've found over the past several months. There is a world of beer out there and they taste nothing like what I always used to think of when I thought of beer. I thought all beers were foul swills until recently. How wrong I was.
Tonight's dinner! Meatloaf! Hooray meatloaf! Seriously, growing up, meatloaf and pot roast were my two least favorite dishes but I've realized now, now that I'm a grown-up (SHUT UP!) and cooking for myself, that the reason I didn't like those dishes was simply because my mother just....well....doesn't know how to cook meat. To her, it's not dinner until it's shoe leather.
My meatloaf is super moist and flavorful because I finely chop a bunch of veggies and sweat them (and then let them cool) and then mix 'em into the meat mixture. Makes a world of difference from just using egg and breadcrumb. Matter of fact, my loaf has NO breadcrumb.
Incidentally? I keep typoing meatload. Heh. I said load.
Now, get this! This will surprise you and it surprises me as well. Mashed potatoes? From a box? Can be damned good, yo. I bought the Potato Buds a few months back because I saw something on Iron Chef America. Mario Batali coated a piece of fish with a mixture of breadcrumbs and potato buds and I thought that sounded interesting so I bought the buds and made the fish and in fact it was very tummy but I was left with this box o' buds so one night I was making chicken fried steak and needed a quick side so I made boxed mashed potatoes but I added stuff to 'em to try to make them taste not boxed or something and it actually worked out well and now I make them all the time, and I mix in goat cheese or blue cheese or parm cheese (I think cheese is the key, actually)
Hey! My keyboard is squeaking! Why is my keyboard squeaking? I have a WIRELESS mouse, not an INTERNAL mouse! Stop squeaking or I'll sic the cat on you.
Okay, gotta go. Gotta top the meatload.
(Heh heh....I got your meatload right here, baby!)
