Buskers, Burrito Bowls and Beer

 Here in Waterloo, ON we have a street festival every year. It's the Busker Carnival! It's an international street performers festival and it's always guaranteed fun! I had a little bit of time by myself so I decided to stop by on my way to get groceries for my dinner.

Bob was hilarious! And very talented! He put on a great show and really got the crowd going. There were also a few scary moments:

He was juggling knives while doing that! Craziness! I wish I would have had more time to see some other performers too, but I was getting hungry and headed to the grocery store instead.

 

I wanted to make a dinner that would require a bit more time then I usually have since I had the day off work. I saw Burritos Bowls on Closet Cooking and knew that I had to make them! They were a lot of work since I had to make so many different recipes, but it was so worth it! The rice was tangy and fresh tasting and the Pico de Gallo was so good! Nice and spicy! I didn't want to buy tequila just for this recipe so I used some of the pre-cooked chicken I had in the freezer and heated it up with lime juice and cumin. Though if I made this again I would just skip the chicken all together since the jalapano spiced black beans were more then enough :) And again, just the right amount of heat! Yum!
And of course a nice cold beer is a great way to end a hot day:

Brewing up trouble?

One of the really fun things that we have been doing in the Netherlands is brewing beer. Not only is it fun, but the people we brew with are hilarious.
Let's just say that those who are easily offended or faint of heart need not apply to be in our brewing club ;)

Yesterday was the bottling of the beer that we recently brewed. This is our third batch of beer that we have made here (and we always make 2 types per brewing session).
This time we made a German style Oktoberfest beer and a Saison. In the picture you'll see one is darker and one is more orange (the Saison is the more orange one).


We tasted both (though at this point they are still flat); the Saison was really sweet and the German beer was really tasty. I'm looking forward to see how these will turn out :) Since we were brewing these for Queen's day we wanted them to be as orange as possible. That is also why we named them the following: The German style is called l'orange and the Saison is called orange dragon.

Now let's move onto the process of bottling:
When we bottle the beer we are not only putting the beer in bottles, but also adding some more sugar so that the beer will carbonate in the bottle. And before we can bottle the beer we need to save up old bottles and then clean and sanitize them.

Here are the bottles being sanitized:


We had an assembly line going on ;):



And here the beer is being filtered (and then we add the sugar):
Notice how we like to drink on the job ;)


I forgot to get a picture of the actual filling of the bottles, but I'm sure you can image what that would look like ;)

And here is a picture of our dinner (or what was left of it):


And the final product (but we'll have to wait 2 weeks before drinking) :


I'm really looking forward to brewing beer once we are back in Canada (at least in Canada we will actually save money by brewing; unlike here in the Netherlands where you can get a case of 24 for 6 Euros...haha). But it will also be great to brew with our friends back in Canada :D.

I'll post another update once the beer is finished!