A beer’s name doesn’t necessarily tell you what you should pair it with: a porter might not complement a porterhouse, and just because it’s a Kwak doesn’t mean you should eat it with duck. But happily, sometimes names make things easy; take India Pale Ales, which in the first word of their name make as good as a suggestion as you could hope for. Drink me with Indian food!

The affinity of Indian food as we know it in the West and India Pale Ales is no mistake — the beer and the cuisine grew up together. IPAs, distinctive above all for their extreme hoppiness, were first popularized among Britons working in India in the days of the British East India Company and the Raj, at least partially because the extra hops helped the beer survive shipment halfway across the world.

Indian food as most of us know it — the kind you get in Indian restaurants everywhere from London to your local strip mall — is also a product of the British presence in India, as Britons and their local cooks adapted Indian culinary traditions to suit the British palate — particularly the British taste for meat. You can bet that as these Brits and Indians worked to develop this new cuisine, they made sure it paired well with the beer that was most widely available — that is, India Pale Ale.

Popular though they may have been in India in the 18th century, I think it’s safe to say that IPAs are even bigger today — it seems like craft breweries are leaping over each other to bring out the next big IPA, and to see how many more hops they can cram in. The selection of IPAs in a decent liquor store can be pretty overwhelming. Looking for something a little bit different, I picked up a six pack of Summit’s latest addition to their Unchained series: an India Style Rye Ale — an IPA with rye thrown into the mix (an IRA if you will).

Summit’s IRA pours with very little head and is quite dark in color, reminding me of a brown ale. As the beer hits the tongue, the brown ale description continues to be apt: the first flavor note is a very strong roasted, caramel flavor. After that initial impression, the beer takes a turn into more traditional IPA territory; that is to say the hops hit and hit hard. I thought I detected a slight grassiness in the flavor from the rye, though that might well be the power of suggestion (a power that should not be underestimated in beer rating and pairing!). Although the beer poured with very little head, it had great carbonation, with little spritzy bubbles that danced across the tongue. Overall, this is an enjoyable, well balanced beer, provided you like hops. And if you’re drinking India Ales, that seems a safe assumption.

With India Style Ale in hand, all that was needed was some India Style Food. As a centerpiece for our meal, we turned to that mainstay of the Indian buffet: chicken tikka. Starting with a recipe from Bon Appétit (a practice I don’t normally recommend) I marinated a cut up whole chicken in yogurt, cilantro, salt, garam masala, and garlic. After an hour in this yogurt bath, I roasted the chicken pieces for about 40 minutes at 500ºF, until the meat was cooked through and the skin was starting to blacken. Following through on Bon Appétit’s full menu, Martha roasted carrots with oil, salt and cumin seeds, and I made raita and white rice. All these elements combine to make a fulfilling Indian food experience: moist and roasted-tasting meats and vegetables accented by warm and citrusy spices that fill the mouth, all cooled and brightened by the yogurt and cucumber in the raita. Comforting and enlivening at the same time, it’s the kind of food that could help you feel at home in a place a few thousand miles away from home.

Food like that, or a cold beer. Better yet – the two of them together. I had a hard time trying to explain intellectually why the India Style Rye Ale and the Chicken Tikka worked so well together; each seemed to tame and complete the other. Maybe it was the acid in the yogurt cutting through the hops’ bitterness, or maybe the fact that the big flavors of the beer were a match for the big spice flavors in the chicken. Perhaps the beer’s roasted malts found their soulmate in blackened chicken skin. None of these elements really suffice in explaining what made this combination so satisfying. Ultimately, their affinity may owe to their shared history; a few gulps and bites might be enough to express the perfection of 200 years of codevelopment, but they are probably not enough to understand it. I’d better do this again.

After a long hibernation, this morning was my first opportunity to return to work in the Common Roots Garden since the final fall harvest. Danny Schwartzman, owner of Common Roots, was up early to help me and fellow volunteer Elise (pictured below) to get some of the early seeds into the ground.

As you can see in the images here, some of the plants from last year (garlic and lettuces) are already coming back on their own. Other pieces of last year’s harvest also remain. A few frozen beets with their bright flesh stuck out from the now-thawed earth, leftover dried bean-pods spilled their contents, and turnips littered the freshly turned soil.

Today’s work went toward planting peas, spinach, arugula, and radishes and re-stringing the twine surrounding the planted beds both to help us know where we’d already planted seeds and to prevent others from walking over the beds. Danny took care of spreading fertilizer over the planted areas, using a liquid sourced naturally from worms fed on coffee grounds.

In its second year, the Common Roots Garden is still in need of volunteers for mulching, planting, and weeding throughout the season. If you lent a hand last year and would like to return again or if you’re looking for a new volunteer opportunity, contact the café at info (at) commonrootscafe (dot) com.

For Christians, Lent is a season of solemn reflection on the trials of Jesus Christ in the desert; its central themes are prayer, fasting and almsgiving. All very noble concepts, if a not a little dour. Lent is also a time to enjoy delicious fried fish on Fridays, all thanks to a longstanding Catholic ban on Friday meat-eating during the season (which may or may not have been a giveaway to fisheries special interests — some things never change).

Martha and I have been taking full advantage of the season: we started with the wonderfully iconic Fish Fry at Saint Albert the Great’s. The very next week, we were off to the Red Stag Supper Club for the restaurant fish fry experience. I go out of my way to avoid talking about restaurants on this blog, so of the Red Stag I will say only this: I have seen the future of fish fries and it is sprayable malt vinegar. That’s right, malt vinegar in atomizers. Everyone should be doing this.

Having done the church and restaurant things, the only venue remaining for our Lenten self-denial was our own home. Part of my motivation was a desire to pay tribute to the recently destroyed Blackbird Café, who for a long time sold a “Fish Fry” on their menu consisting of deep-fried breaded salmon fingers, fries, and tamari-beurre blanc, garnished with a lime and pickled ginger. I have vivid memories of this dish: my burning of the beurre blanc not once but twice occasioned my first severe dressing down in my short time in a professional kitchen (there would be more!). A dish tinged with penance and regret, what better meal for Lent?

Our fish was salmon, which I cut in to strips, salted and peppered, and had Martha take care of the breading, using flour, eggs and breadcrumbs. Martha learned the hard way the importance of strict adherence to a wet-hand, dry-hand regime when breading. All Lenten meals should offer such learning opportunities.

On the side of these salmon fries, I cooked french fries using the usual two-stage method (blanch at 325ºF and finish at 375ºF). Since I had no reason to expect my beurre blanc to turn out any better than it had the first two times, I steered away from it for the sauce, choosing instead my old Turkish friend tarator. Tarator is, after all, a natural accompaniment to fish. To be extra fancy, I sieved the tarator after blending it, making it nice and smooth.

Comparing the home fish-fry experience to that of the church and the supper club, I can say my biggest deficiency at home is the lack of a commercial fryer. Whereas the cooks at the Red Stag can throw a pound of fish or potatoes in the fryer and expect a fluctuation of no more than a few degrees, my addition of that much food to a pathetic gallon of oil drops the temperature by more than 100ºF. And our pitiful little apartment stove just can’t kick out the BTUs to improve the situation very quickly. It doesn’t mean you can’t fry at home, it just means it’s going to take longer. But really, what’s your hurry? It’s Lent; use the extra time to reflect, damnit.

Just don’t spend so much time reflecting that you don’t realize the season’s almost over! In fact, this Friday is the last day to enjoy delicious Lenten fried fish, be it at a church, a restaurant, or at home (Good Friday is a fast day, FYI). Of course you could also fry fish after Easter, but that just wouldn’t be the same, would it?

In addition to making food so good that people everywhere request that I end our relationship so that he might be available, Tom commutes by bike five days a week to North Minneapolis (~3 miles) rain, shine, or snowstorm. We moved to the city in 2008 and in all that time Tom’s been riding a too-heavy 2005 Raleigh mountain bike everysingleday. Ever since I upgraded my mountain bike (a teal Mongoose Switchback circa 1996) to a Dahon Mariner last July, Tom has been talking about upgrading his own.

Finally (!) Tom bought a new bike this past Saturday after visiting each of the two Hub Bike Coop locations in Minneapolis. With a bit of deliberation between the Surly Cross Check at the LHT, Tom decided on the Surly Long Haul Trucker in Truckaccino (the color of cappuccino—only truck-like). Knowing that a new bike was coming, I’d given Tom a Leonardo Single-Bike Rack & Da Vinci Tire Tray having written about it here. And, since I received a Christmas wish of my own from my father, I was able to install it right away with proper anchors and all. Truckaccino fits in pretty nicely in our living room, I have to say. This weekend we’ll be heading back to the Hub to outfit the new bike with racks worthy of Midtown Farmers Market produce come May.

In other cycling news, Google released Biking Directions for Google Maps today. Biking Directions have been a long time coming—we can’t wait to plan a long ride. Lastly, I couldn’t resist sharing the Minneapolis trio of 2&21‘s lated project posted yesterday under “Forget Lakes. We got bikes”. Full of facts on “what keeps bikers rolling through Minneapolis,” it’s well worth a look.

You may have heard that much Italian cuisine was born out of deep poverty, but would you believe they go so far as to eat mouse tails? Mouse tails made from pasta, that is. Code di topo are another gem from Oretta Zanini de Vita’s Encyclopedia of Pasta.

Although not made from actual mouse tails, this simple pasta shape is a testament to economy: the dough consists of only flour and water. Usually, I make pasta using flour, eggs and water in the food processor, pulsing the flour before adding the eggs and just enough water to bring everything together in a ball. I was glad to discover that this technique — using the food processor — works just as well omitting the eggs, slowly adding water until the dough coalesces. As with egg pasta, pasta made this way needs to rest for a half hour or so to allow the gluten to relax and make the dough workable.

The formation of the code was simple — probably a great activity for young helpers. Pinching off a piece of dough the size of a walnut, one simply rolls the dough out into a thin thread with one end tapered to look like  a mouse’s tail. The pasta should dry slightly on a kitchen towel before boiling it al dente.

Traditionally, this pasta is served with potatoes — a concept I couldn’t quite get my head around — but in Rovere, it is served in a simple sauce of garlic, chilis, olive oil and walnuts. This is one of my favorite pasta sauces, all the more so because I usually have all of those ingredients on hand. And that’s a good thing, since by the time you’ve decided to feast on mouse tails, you’ve pretty much ruled out going to the store.