Adventures in Wyoming and South Dakota

Driving through southwestern Wyoming we found the Chugwater Soda Fountain in Chugwater, Wyoming. It is one of a handful of buildings and claims to be the oldest soda fountain in Wyoming. Great homemade milkshakes there! Chugwater is also known for its chili. This cafe serves bowls of steaming chili. I settled for taking home a packet of their chili seasoning which includes a recipe for making the chili. The Chugwater Chili Corp. will ship all kinds of chili items.

The Wyoming countryside changes around every turn from grasslands with mountains in the distance to spectacular rock formations.

Mammoth Site in Hot Springs, SD is an indoor working palentological site where more than 61 mammoths have been unearthed.

Many cultures used the bones of the mammoths to create their homes.

You can walk inside, this is a view from inside looking out the door.

The Colombia Mammoth was larger than the wooly mammoth. This replica was on exhibit at the visitor's center.

 In Hill City, SD John Lopez created a sculpture of a horse using all kinds of metal objects.

Majestic, just like his live friends who can be seen all over South Dakota.

Maybe tomorrow we will see some buffalo!

Every Monday for 23 years...Yum!

We went to the Night Shift Saloon for a late lunch because my husband and brother-in-law had a craving for a burrito, not just any burrito, the Night Shift Burrito. Some years ago I went with them to the Night Shift Saloon and enjoyed a burrito, but since it was Monday, and one of the specials was a bean and ham hock soup I was temped to stray from the guys as I ordered.

The deciding factor was when I learned that this soup had been served here for the past 23 years, every Monday. Anything that merited that degree of longevity deserved to be sampled.

It did not disappoint. The bowl of thick soup with white beans and tender morsels of ham was delicious. Tiny bits of orange (carrots) appeared as I was scooping up each spoonful. An enormous piece of tender cornbread accompanied the soup and I made quick work of both.

Susie, the creator of the soup, shared that she uses onion, beans, carrot, garlic and smoked ham hocks and cooks it in a pressure cooker. She has been doing this for years and has created a masterpiece. The seasoning was perfect, the serving temperature was in the Goldilocks zone, just right, not too hot. I wish I could have eaten another bowl full and it was a generous portion of soup. I was praising the soup and a customer asked about it. When his bowl of soup came out, I snapped a picture of it.

If you are anywhere in the Denver area, the Night Shift Saloon should be on your list of places to eat...especially on a Monday!

More fun with spent grains!

This auvergne crown, about 14 inches in diameter, was created using Daniel Leader's recipe with a few changes. His recipe uses 3.25 cups of bread flour. I substituted one cup of spent grains for one of the cups of bread flour. After drying the grains thoroughly, they were ground in the blender to a fine consistency, not quite as fine as flour.

Wort from the beer making process was used instead of the 1.5 cup of water. The wort was heated to about 90 degrees before adding to the flour.



This recipe begins by activating a stiff dough levain with water and flour, it doesn't use any yeast, just this starter. (The starter is created by capturing wild yeast in a flour and water mixture over several days. Daniel Leader's book explains how to do this.) The dough mixes easily in the mixer and the mixer was used to knead the dough. It is a little sticky and kneading with the mixer works very well. The inside of the bread is light in texture, as dark in color as you see in the picture on the outside and is great for sandwiches.

Shaping the crown is easy. Just form a boule and make a hole in the middle. Then insert your fingers to gently open the hole in the dough. Just picking it up in the middle will create a loop that you then place on a piece of parchment to allow the dough to proof. You don't want to degas the dough, handle it as gently and briefly as possible.

Sift a veil of flour over the surface of the crown, cover it and allow it to proof for about 1.5 hours at room temperature. Just before baking, slice the surface with a wet serrated sharp knife.

To compensate for the loss of heat in the oven when opening the door, I preheat to about 50 degrees higher than the recipe calls for. I tend to lose about 50 degrees when inserting the bread and ice cubes to create steam. Once the bread is in the oven I re-set the temperature called for in the recipe. This seems to work well.

Daniel Leader's book, Local Breads, is a great resource if you want to learn about starters and sourdough and other whole-grain bread recipes.

Yellow soup..what is in it?

This time we are starting with the final result, the soup. 

It's not butternut squash, carrot or any other yellow root vegetables you might think of.

It is tomato soup made with Sun Gold tomatoes!

The Sun Gold plants have produced an incredible amount of tomatoes this year. Recently I wondered what a tomato soup made just with these tomatoes would taste like. The tomatoes are so good, I keep a bowl on the counter just for a snack. 

And so I began, tomatoes, onion and garlic...

Chop the onions and garlic. Saute the onions in a tablespoon of olive oil until they are tender, then add the garlic and cook for just a minute more. You don't want the onion or garlic to brown, just soften. Season with salt, pepper and thyme. If you have fresh thyme, cut some stems, tie them together with kitchen twine and throw the bunch into the pot. Dried thyme works too, add it before you add the tomatoes, let it cook 1 minute.

Add the tomatoes to the pot.

Cover, turn the heat down to a simmer, cover and cook until the tomatoes have burst, and cooked down. When the tomatoes are cooked, after about 45 minutes or so, turn the heat off and let the tomato mixture cook slightly. Process portions of the tomatoes in a blender or a food mill if you have one. The blender grinds up the tomato skins almost completely. 

Next pour the blender processed soup through a wire mess sieve to get a smooth soup without seeds or bits of skin. If you used a food mill, it will trap the seeds and skin as the soup is ground.

This has a very different flavor than the red tomato soup and is a great way to use up the massive number of tomatoes that the Sun Gold plants produce! If you just can't manage to eat it all as you make it, just freeze for a delicious winter treat and tasty memory of those great summer flavors!

Had some for lunch today...YUMMY!

Easy coconut cookies

There are lots of different ways to make cocadas, or coconut cookies. This is really easy. All you need is a 14 oz. bag of shredded coconut, a 14 oz. can of sweetened condensed milk and a lime.

Pour the shredded coconut in a large mixing bowl. Add the zest of a lime.

Use the juice from the whole lime.

I used the whole 14 oz can of condensed milk. It creates a thick mixture, but isn't dry.

Mix the ingredients. Use an ice cream scoop or two spoons to create mounds of the coconut mixture so that they are all the same size.

Place the mounds on a pan lined with parchment paper. Using a 1.75 inch scoop, I created 21 cocadas.

Bake at 350 degrees F. for 15 - 18 minutes. Watch them so that they don't get too brown. The bottoms will caramelize and the cookie will be soft and chewy. Let them cool completely before eating.

I turned one over so you could see how it will caramelize, yummy!

Hope you enjoy baking these!

Spent Grain Bread from beer 'left-overs'

If you like a hearty, nutty whole grain bread, you need to try making bread using the spent grains from brewing beer. Local breweries will give you the spent grains which many use for farm animal feed or composting and bread making. Not having a farm, I will use my spent grains to experiment with bread recipes.

The first spent grains I used were from Jade, a beer produced at Foothills Brewery in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

I dried the grain in the oven at 170 F and ground it up a bit in the food processor. It doesn't quite grind down to a flour consistency, but makes a fine grain which is great for the bread.

The recipe shows measurements in ounces and grams. A digital scale is useful for exact measurements.

 Then I make the spent grain bread.

Once the grains are dried and ground, they can be stored in the freezer for future batches. Tomas Rohner's directions for the spent grain sesame bread (see link above) are easy to follow and not technically difficult. It just takes time for the pre-ferment, 12-18 hours. The steps are shown using a bread machine, but I just mix in the Kitchen Aide and knead by hand.

Now I have another batch of spent grain from Natty Greene's Brewery in Greensboro, North Carolina. It is a pale ale spent grain. I also got a cup of the wort.

Doing a little research on the internet I found a recipe using the wet spent grain from the American Homebrewers Association and advice on substituting some wort for part of the water in the recipe. This was easy to mix in a large stainless steel bowl. I kneaded it, adding flour until it was no longer sticky, just a little tacky, and put it in the cleaned, oiled bowl and covered it to rise.







I made the bread a little differently using the second batch of bread from the Natty Greene's spent grain. Using the recipe from the American Homebrewers Association (see link in previous paragraph)

I used 1 cup of whole wheat flour in addition to almost 4 cups of bread flour and used honey instead of sugar. Just use 1 teaspoon of the honey to activate the yeast and put the rest in the bowl with the other ingredients. Instead of 3 cups of wet spent grain, I used 1 packed cup of wet spent grain that had been ground up in the food processor.  This wet spent grain recipe doesn't require a long preferment like the recipe from Rohner mentioned above. You can mix it in the morning and bake in the early afternoon.

The half sheet pan in the back has spent grain that has been dried in the oven, 170 degrees, stir it occasionally until it is dry and leave the oven door open slightly so that moisture can escape.





The loaf to the left has risen, been misted with water and slit with a serrated knife.

It has a light texture and browns nicely in the oven.

All ready for that tomato sandwich, it is summer after all!











Even if there isn't a brewery near you, so many people brew craft beer at home, it may be possible to find a local source for spent grain.

Happy Baking!

Snowy owls - another live cam

The snowy owls have a live animal cam too! Check out this Journey North link to see these owls and many more live animal cams! With 24 hours of daylight above the arctic circle there is lots of time to view them!