Spent Grain Brownies

Spent grain brownies - absolutely delicious re-purposing of spent grain from the beer brewing process. A goodly portion of the spent grain from our Milk and Honey Stout was chocolate malt, which smells, as one might suspect from the name, like dark chocolate. I'd like to think that this makes the brownies extra chocolate-y but to be honest, the main culprit is likely the fact that there's more cocoa powder than flour in this recipe.

Ingredients
2 1/2 sticks of butter, slightly softened as much as patience will allow for (for us this was just slightly less than hard as a brick)*
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups cocoa powder
4 eggs
1/2 cup spent grain flour (we recommend something that uses chocolate malt like a stout or a porter)
3/4 cup all purpose flour
1 cup walnuts, smashed with a rolling pin by your girlfriend who will cut you if you take this from her... sorry, where were we? Oh right, brownies.
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

Cream butter and sugar together (if you're like us this means trying to cream the butter and then trying several methods of varying degrees of failure to get the butter to soften). Add eggs 1 at a time and mix (or all at once, we're bloggers not cops). Meanwhile, mix dry ingredients together. Add dry ingredients 1/3 at a time to wet, mixing thoroughly after each (this step is not negotiable, your kitchen will look like Pompeii otherwise). Pour into greased 9x13 inch pan, and bake on 325 degrees for 35 minutes. Cool completely before slicing. Seriously. Completely cool. There is nothing so heart breaking as f*@#ing up your brownies because you couldn't control yourself. Go for a walk or something.

Enjoy!

Brewing Beer, etc...

Here in this household, frequently food ingredients are repurposed.

I'm a huge proponent of a "bone and fat bag" to make from scratch stocks when I get enough. Food recycling is great. You can get tasty good bits from undesirable pieces (organ meats) and turn something that is waste into something productive.

Recently, I purchased a beer brewing kit, and finally got around to doing the first beer on it. It's a Milk and Honey stout, with an expected due date of just about Thanksgiving. The recipe called for a partial mash.

I had heard that one could use spent grain to make things, so conveniently enough I found http://brooklynbrewshop.com/themash/category/spentgrainchef/ which described how to dry your mash, and then a multitude of recipes to use the spent grain flour in.

At first blush, thus far, it's been a smashing success. I used my dehydrator and cheese cloth to dry the grains out, and then ground it all in a heavy duty blender. The grains for the beer were caramel malt, dark chocolate malt, roasted barley, and honey malt. The flour is sweet and chocolaty smelling, and I plan to use it for some spent grain brownies.

We all have dreams. Sometimes those are literal dreams (encompassing hopes, goals, real life waking dreams). Other times, those dreams are more esoteric (the American Dream!). There are also, thanks to the joy of the english language, those sleeping dreams that occur. Magical places where one can breath underwater, pick raspberries with your mother who passed away, spend time with family that you haven't seen in years, or eat dumplings with the gods.

This blog, then, is something representative of all of those dreams. I am Rachael, a 20-something Transportation Planner. I live with my boyfriend and partner-in-crime Chris. We make stuff. Most of the stuff we make has to do with food, mostly because we really enjoy eating.

Sometimes, that stuff is beer (Our first! A 5-gallon batch of Lavender Wheat that was born in July.) Sometimes its bacon (Peameal bacon because we live in an apartment and can't smoke bacon.) Or Bread and Butter pickles, or pickled mushrooms, or corned beef...Occasionally we cook dinner together. (Today, slow-cooker cassoulet because the cold weather has finally hit!)

So in honor of those dreams, we figured that we start a blog to put everything together in a place.