book

A great cookbook to start your culinary beer adventures.

When I first picked up this book, I couldn’t help to first chuckle at the name Streeter F. McClure as it sounds like a fictional name from a bro-mance flick. And then reading his short introduction, I laughed out loud when he expressed that his inspiration was not only his love of beer but also wanting to impress the ladies. This is my kind of guy! After flicking through a few pages, I could tell I was going to enjoy experimenting in the kitchen with these recipes as they seemed extremely easy to follow, not to mention delicious.

I figured the best way to review this book was to just dive in and cook a complete meal with all recipes and that’s exactly what I did not too long ago. Friends of ours came over to feast on a delicious meal preparing and pairing these recipes with Philadelphia favorites.

We started with the Bacon Wrapped Beer Sausages which is literally as easy as wrapping some mini sausages in bacon, doing a quick boil in a pale ale and baking for about 15 minutes. The beer I featured with this appetizer was Sly Fox’s Phoenix Pale Ale. Everyone was pleasantly surprised by how much the characters of the ale came through the sausage and melted together with the buttery crisp bacon. Next came the White Bean Chicken Chili which I made with Philadelphia Brewing Co.’s Walt Whit. By the end of the meal, this was the favorite of many so we decided to feature it in “Cooking With Beer” this month (page 14). For the main course, I prepared the Beer Steak and Chimichurri Sauce. Putting together the sauce and marinade that comprises this recipe takes about 10 minutes to prepare and the results are awesome. The recipe calls for an IPA so I decided to use Victory’s HopDevil since our previous month’s issue featured a recipe for a Victory Hop Wallop Steak that was phenomenal.

The only thing that was missing was dessert, both from our meal and this cookbook. Although the book has tons of great, simple to prepare recipes that any man or woman could put together, I felt like the absence of some great simple desserts, perhaps taking advantage of rich dark beers like stouts and porters, left the book slightly incomplete.

Regardless, the meal was great and everyone was ending the night loosening their pants. What I appreciated the most, being the host of this dinner, was not feeling completely exhausted (or $broke$) by the end of it.

This book is suited for anyone who is new to the kitchen or just looking to start cooking with beer. And finally, it is worth mentioning since October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, a portion of all the proceeds from the sale of this book are being donated to breast cancer research. You can find this book for purchase online at thesinglemansguide.com.

Streeter F. McClure
“The Single Man’s Guide to Cooking with Beer”
Denver, CO: SMG Publishing, 2009
77pp.
$22.95
978-0-61232-256-5