Beer for dinner

Being the loyal Bigger, Better, Best reader that I know you are, you've born witness to the culinary creations made my Hubs, me and our friend Guy. We're the proud creators of Oktoberfest pizza, Thanksgiving pizza and  the home version of Chopped. We're bloomin' food geniuses up in here, friends.

This past weekend, we got a hankerin' for kitchen tinkerin'. The theme for this one was a three-course beer dinner. Here's what we came up with:

Round One:
The booze? Crispin cider
The dish? Ok, so, you know chicken fries at BK? Well, these are pork fries in a tempura/Crispin batter, covered in: cumin gouda, green onions, dried cranberries and a sauce containing the following effed up shizzle: horseradish, cinnamon applesauce, more Crispin, dijon mustard and curry powder.

Did you just gag a little? Well, seriously guys, gag not. This was amazing. It all worked somehow and we were quite taken with this dish. It was like nachos, but classed up and on meat overdrive. Which sounds really appetizing, right?

Round Two:

The beers? Widmer IPA and Murphy's Stout

The dish? We poached orange roughy in the IPA and made a risotto with the stout and some mushrooms. The sauce is a lemon and caper mayonnaise. It was good, but not very photogenic.

Round Three:

The beer? Bell's Porter

The dish? A hodge podge. Now, it is important to remember that we were obviously having healthy samples of all these beers as we dined and so by the time we were ready to make dessert, I was feeling a tad impish. I took a chocolate cake mix, subbed in porter for water and dumped in a boat load of hot cinnamon and cayenne. Hubs tried to scoop some of the cayenne out, but I just put it back in. I'm a sneaky chef.

We topped it with a porter and chocolate ganache and served it up with some Ben and Jerry's Cinnamon Buns. The cake was more warm and roasty tasting than spicy and I can attest to it's deliciousness as I took the leftovers to work today and received hundreds of glowing compliments.

Plus, this might be the single most enticing food picture I have ever taken.

We did decide in the course of this dinner that we desperately need a fourth food-minded person to attend these loopy dinner parties because no one, even you dear reader, ever believes us when we recant the wonders of the tastiness of our meals.

We're taking applications.