Kegs and Kitchen

I’ve been under an all-out attack from some of the worst allergies of all time. Fuck you cedar trees! I wish you’d all just die already! Hmm, I think I actually feel a little better now. Given that my sense of taste and smell is completely shot at the moment, and that all that I really want to do is sleep, I haven’t been up to any cooking or drinking fancy beers. So, I thought I’d report on one of my other favorite things, technology. I had to keep it food/beer related, so these are a few items of interest I’ve come across lately in the world of cooking and brewing on the internets.

First, I started searching early last year for a piece of software that would help me to take the leap into all-grain brewing. At the time, I was limited to apps that would run on Windows or Linux. Well, since then I bought a Macbook and decided to alter my search. There are several versions for the Mac, but the most established one seems to be Beer Alchemy. So far, it seems like it’ll do everything that I want it to. It will help me to create and tweak my recipes and keep track of the results. It will calculate how much grain I will need to reach a specified original gravity, or how many hops to reach a certain IBU. It will keep track of my ingredient inventory as well as suggesting recipes based on what grains I have on hand. If I decide to brew something that I don’t have ingredients for, it will build a shopping list for me. All of this for a measley $20?

Along the same lines, I was also looking for a recipe program that would allow me to save my own recipes in the kitchen, so that I could duplicate them in the future. I’m not one to follow someone else’s recipe, and I’m even worse at keeping track of my own. I just get so caught up in the creation of it, I don’t really pay attention to how much of this or that I’m putting in. I know this isn’t good, so I wanted something easy to keep track of it all. Enter Connoisseur, also for the Mac. This little gem looks like it will be exactly what I need. It allows me to easily enter my ingredient list and cooking instructions. Once my recipe is built, I can ask the program to scale it for me. So, if I’ve made something for just the two of us and decide it would be good to serve at a dinner party, I just scale it up. Another cool feature is the ability to export a shopping list to my iPod, based on the recipes I’ve selected. I haven’t tried it with my iPhone yet, but I suspect that will work. Also nifty is the feature that makes it possible to follow along with the recipe without having my precious laptop right in the middle of the kitchen chaos. With the touch of a button, the program will format the ingredient list and instructions in large type and will even read them to me! There’s also a feature that allows me to easily import recipes from websites that I find online by just selecting all of the text on the page, and it formats and stores it for me. Again, all of this for a paltry $20.

The last bit of nerd news is that my lovely wife gave me a shiny new video camera for Christmas. I’m sure she was wondering why I wanted it in the first place, but she didn’t ask any questions. I’ve been wanting to incorporate other types of media on this here blog, and now I’m one step closer. I’ve come across lots of DIY cooking videos on the web and felt inspired to give it a try myself. Most of them are a little dry though, so I plan to go a slightly different direction with mine. Stay tuned for Kegs and Kitchen video insanity! In the meantime, check out some of the others ones that are out there at www.imcooked.com, www.foodtube.net and http://www.ifood.tv. Plans are also in the works for an extensive video library of “how to brew” information.

And now, back to sneezing. Sorry for the lack of posts and this half-assed attempt. I’ll be back in full force soon!