Chili Beef with Broccoli and Oyster Mushrooms

INGREDIENTS (serve this dish over white rice, brown rice, or rice noodles):

2 tbsp. olive oil
1 medium red onion, chopped large
6 garlic cloves, minced
3 dried red chilies, pounded into small flakes
1 small head broccoli, diced
1/2 pound sugar snap peas, trimmed and halved
1/2 pound king oyster mushrooms, sliced into 1/4 inch lengths
12 oz. beef round stir-fry strips
2 tbsp. soy sauce
2 tbsp. water
1 tbsp. oyster sauce
2 tsp. honey or agave nectar, or 1 tsp white sugar
2 heaping tablespoons Thai chili sauce (naam prik pow)
1/2 tsp. white pepper
Salt and fresh black pepper to taste
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Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA

1) Heat olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed skillet. Add dried chili to infuse with the oil, about 1 minute.
2) Add onion and garlic, tossing until garlic is toasted, about 1 more minute.
3) Add beef, oyster sauce, water, soy sauce, sweetener of your choice, white pepper, and Thai chili sauce. Saute about 3 minutes.
4) Add broccoli to the pan along with sugar snap peas and cook for 2 minutes.
5) Finally, add the mushrooms to the hot skillet and cook until just wilted and tender, about 2 minutes.
6) Taste the sauce and add salt or sugar if needed for balance, cracking fresh black pepper over all.
7) Open Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA.
8) Enjoy together.

THE BEER:
Dogfish Head is at the forefront of East Coast craft brewing, and the sweet, malty richness of their 90 Minute IPA pairs great with anything spicy, anything influenced by Asian heat. The sauce for this dish was basically inspired by the Cashew Nut Chicken sauce I learned to make in Chiang Mai, but the white pepper gives the beef something to stand up against. Dogfish Head brewers are confident enough not to be afraid to experiment, and when they discovered that a flavor added continually during cooking evinces more nuances in the finished dish than if, say, you'd dumped two tablespoons of black pepper in a recipe right at the end rather than spicing it throughout, they knew they were on to something in the world of hops. This incredibly smooth, honeysuckle-sweet brew is the result.

THE ADVENTURE:

A Word to the Wise on the subject of Chili Lung:

AVOID CHILI LUNG AT ALL COSTS.

1) When adding dry (or fresh) chilies to a skillet of hot oil, do not hover over the skillet.
2) Should you happen to hover over the skillet, do not breathe in.
3) If you happen to inhale airborne essence of hot pepper while cooking, do not laugh, shrug it off, and continue on in the kitchen.
4) Open the window.
5) Run with all your speed.

Steve's Kidney-Punching Brisket

INGREDIENTS (our thanks to Steve Sokolov for this killer recipe, for being such a good egg, and for never pressing charges when I punch him in the kidneys):

1 7-lb very marbled brisket

2 giant sweet onions

2 habanero peppers

6-8 cloves of garlic

½ gallon mango juice

Salt and pepper to taste

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Ninkasi Total Domination IPA

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2) Generously salt and pepper your brisket. Sear it in a stove-top safe roasting pan on all sides, browning well. Remove from pan and set aside.

3) Chop onion into large slices and add to the roasting pan with diced habanero (be careful, gloves would be a good idea) and chopped garlic. Cook about 5 minutes until onions are sweated.

4) Add the brisket back to the pan and fill half way up with mango juice. Place uncovered into the oven. You should have plenty of juice to spare. Throughout the cooking, as liquid evaporates, continue to add more juice.

5) Cook until the meat easily pulls apart with a fork, about five hours, flipping the brisket occasionally in the liquid if you feel the need.

6) Open Ninkasi Total Domination.

7) Enjoy together.

THE BEER:

Ninkasi makes good brew, and we only get our hands on it when we're in the Northwest--this one is quite resinous, just the way we like our IPAs, and a little bit toasty, with clear copper-grapefruit consistency. Awesome with brisket, that's a fact.

THE ADVENTURE:

We were homebrewing when made this brisket! It's a great meal to stick in the oven for four or five hours without really thinking about it, when you've got some sort of massive project going on in the garage, like cleaning your motorcycle or building a shelf or putting the finishing touches on your taxidermied elk, or best of all, making some beer. We would obviously have loved to pair our own beer with this brisket, but...well, it hadn't actually brewed yet, of course.

Eric Braddock (Gabe's sister's husband and a fine upstanding young gentleman) makes some stellar homebrews with Jordan Lehner and other promiment guest stars, and on this occasion we decided on a rye malt IPA, to which--I know, I went a little crazy with this notion--we added caraway seeds along with the hops. It's gonna be awesome. Pictured are men brewing beer while drinking beer, the dried Amarillo and Centennial hops that went into the Rye-P-A, and Penelope Rose Braddock inside a mash ton--she's learning to homebrew and already makes some pretty canny suggestions from time to time.

Thai Basil Beef with Chili Rice

Serves four--by the way, the ground beef can easily be replaced with ground pork.

INGREDIENTS:

FOR THE BEEF:
1 1/2 lbs. ground beef
1 white onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
1 lb. fresh green beans, trimmed and cut bite-size
3 tbsp. nam pla or Thai fish sauce
3-4 tbsp. fresh lime juice
2 tbsp. soy sauce
1-2 tbsp. brown sugar
1/2 tsp. to 1 tsp. (to taste) ground white pepper
1 bunch fresh Thai basil OR regular basil OR (despite the title of the recipe) mint works well, chopped rough

FOR THE RICE:
1 cup white rice
1 tbsp. olive oil
1 tomato, diced
1 onion, diced
1 tbsp. naam prik pow or Thai chili paste
1 3/8 cups chicken stock
1/8 cup fish sauce (you should have 1 1/2 half cups liquid total, combined in a measuring cup)
1 small bunch fresh chives, minced
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Stone 08.08.08 Vertical Epic Ale

For Beef:
1) Mix the fish sauce, lime juice, and soy sauce in a bowl with the brown sugar. If you desire more sugar, add to taste. Set aside.
2) Heat oil and cook the onion until sweated, 2-3 minutes. Add garlic and cook until fragrant, about 30 seconds.
3) Place ground beef in pan and saute over gentle heat 10-15 minutes, stirring and breaking constantly, until all the beef has cooked.
4) Drain any excess liquid.
5) Raise heat to med-high. Add the beans and the liquid and stir frequently, allowing the beans to cook until tender and bright green as the liquid absorbs into the beef.
6) When beans are done and liquid absorbed (more or less), turn off heat. Add the chopped fresh Thai basil and sprinkled white pepper, stirring both into the beef.

For Rice:
1) Heat oil and sweat onion, 2-3 minutes.
2) Add tomato. Cook until most of the liquid has been lost, about 5 minutes.
3) Add white rice and Thai chili paste to pot and stir (adding a little oil if necessary) until rice is opaque and coated with the other ingredients, 3-4 minutes.
4) Pour liquid into rice and stir, bringing to a boil.
5) Cover and cook for 15 minutes with the heat on very low.
6) Fluff before serving, incorporating the fresh chives.
7) Open Stone 08.08.08 Vertical Epic Ale.
8) Enjoy together.

THE BEER:
So Stone is doing ten years of beer, all to be tried in a vertical tasting on 12.12.12. They are all different and created to age. Sadly I've only been collecting since 06.06.06; so, I'll be missing the first four. This years was a delicious hoppy Belgian-style beer. The aromatics had some notes of strawberry with a light pine scent. On the palate you really get the floral and berries from the belgian yeast, but the citrusy hop flavors really cut through the banana. The florals and hop bite really balance out well against the strong Thai spices and the richness of the beef. The licoricy notes of the Thai basil accented the hops nicely.

THE ADVENTURE:
I (Lynds here) want to point out a potentially deadly activity when cooking both the beef and the rice dishes, to be avoided with all your power as you would avoid a Tijuana street dog who seems to have just brushed his teeth and finds water disturbing.

--Generally salt your onions while they're sweating? Don't.
--Like to put a bit of salt in the beef as it cooks? Not this time.
--Feel tempted to salt the green beans as you add them? Eat a Lay's.
--Often salt your rice before popping the lid on? DROP IT. Put the little girl with the umbrella down. Nice and slow-like. That's it.

See, we're dealing with fish sauce here. We're actually dealing with quite a bit of fish sauce, and whenever that happens, oversalting is as easy as breathing. So just don't touch the salt until the end, when you taste both. If they need salt, knock yourself out. Or amp the soy sauce a notch, which is also nice. Thai cooking is very heavily influenced by the Chinese.

THE FAMILY:
Jerry and Gail were here when we made this dish! Huzzah! We had a great time wandering through NYC steadily eating and drinking things, which is what generally happens when we have guests in town. Gail has two new dresses, a closet of shoes, and Jerry found an Italian suit for $45. I tell you, it's worth the price of a plane ticket for the shopping out here. Look at them. They dressed up all pretty for the 50th Street subway station. (It was for a Broadway play with my friend Mackenzie in it, actually, A Tale of Two Cities, but they look much more industrial-couture urban-decay chic in the subway. All formal wear looks better in the subway.) Anyway, we had a great time. I don't know when Gabe missed his parents more profoundly: when they left, or when he went to take a picture of the twice-baked potatoes without Jerry's new camera and SLR lens.