The Local Food Report: meet chicory

The last time I ate radicchio was at our friend Sally's house in Panicale, Italy. Alex and I were on our honeymoon, staying at Sally's, and we'd just been to the big Wednesday market in Castiglione del Lago. We bought artichokes, branzini, and radicchio. Then we came home and made a feast.

I prepared the radicchio the only way I knew how—tossed with olive oil and balsamic and a sprinkle of sea salt. Alex hated it—he can't stand bitter. I loved it. I'm not sure what that says about our compatibility, but I can tell you that it made both of us happy. He ate a whole plate full of branzini, and I ate almost a whole head of radicchio by myself.

Since then I've come to love radicchio even more. I've discovered it grilled, and I've also met a few of its relatives. They're all in the chicory family—endive and frisee and escarole and witloof and even wild dandelion-style chicory greens. I was at an event in Harwich a few weeks ago and met a man named Steve Coleman, who runs the Eldredge Farm CSA, and grows a lot of these varieties. He showed me his seed order, and I got inspired. I decided to order radicchio seed for the first time ever—an Italian variety called Radicchio di Treviso. I told this to my editor, Viki, who used to live in Italy, and she freaked. Apparently this was an excellent choice. 

It's an open-pollinated variety, and it takes about 80 days from seed to head. I'm planting mine indoors in seed trays—now's the time—and when they're a few inches high, I'll move them out into the big garden. They want a spot that's sunny but that gets a little shade, because once it gets hot, they tend to bolt. This particular variety is supposed to look a lot like romaine lettuce. It starts out green and slowly turns a deep burgundy. Toward the end of the 80 days I'm supposed to take a ribbon and bind the tops of the heads to blanch the inner leaves and make them grow more tightly. We'll see!

Steve's choices are Keystone—a frilly endive; Natacha—a big endive with a blanched heart and bright green outer leaves that are a little bit wavy and not so tightly packed; Rhodos—a small, curly frisee from France; Indigo—a tight purple radicchio that does well in both hot and cold weather; Chiogga Red—a spring radicchio with a large, ruddy-colored head; and his favorite, Pan de Sucre, which is a big tall green radicchio that looks a lot like romaine. It's only mildly bitter, which is why it's also called Sugarloaf, and is very crisp.

Most of these chicory greens I eat pretty simply—in a bitter salad with olive oil and balsamic, or halved and grilled and dressed the same way—but I like to get creative with frisee. There's a salad at the restaurant where I work that I like to attempt at home—a big pile of very curly frisee tossed with a mustardy dressing, lardon chunks, and a panko-fried duck egg. 

I don't get quite so crazy at home—I pan-fry the egg over-easy, so that the yolk runs, and I crumble regular old bacon over top. It's nothing fancy, but it really hits the spot when you have a hankering for frisee. If you'd like to make it, you can find the recipe here.

And in the meantime—while we wait for our endives and radicchios and frisees to get big—I'd love to hear. What varieties are you growing? And where?

On the roster

My sister is here. This means a lot of things. For Sally it means her favorite playmate and an audience. (She's here! Watching me! ba-ba-ba-babble, comin' up!) 

For me it means naps, projects, and hopefully lots of work. For her daddy it means more time at the office, and for everyone it means cooking. Lots of it. Anna and I spent most of our free time together in the kitchen growing up and on visits, it's the same. We just made a batch of this lemony olive oil banana bread, a vat of homemade vanilla ice cream from The Art of Simple Food, and an anchovy-Narragansett feta-spinach frittata to use up all the leftover egg whites. 

We are not done yet. Not even with the planning, but here's what we've got on the roster so far:

• this crunchy kale and coconut bowl with oat groats from our grain CSA and pan-seared Maine shrimp
• this buttermilk roast chicken courtesy of Smitten Kitchen and the never-ending parade of freezer meat
• Melissa Clark's zucchini latkes with grated "Our Garden 2011" zucchini from the freezer

Last but not least a kidney special! Thank you for all of the suggestions. I think we have settled on an attempt at Darina Allen's rendition of scalloped potatoes with steak and kidney. It addresses the potato supply along with the kidneys so we are leaning that way for the time being. What do you think? We will report back as soon as we cook and eat.

3.27.12 Update! The crunchy kale and coconut bowl was superb. We didn't have dino kale so we subbed regular old kale. We also ran out of olive oil midway so used a bit of walnut oil instead, which gaves the leaves a wonderful buttery taste. And we couldn't get big coconut flakes, so we used small ones instead. Anna said they weren't quite the same, but I thought they were pretty great. We will be eating this again and again, for as long as the oat groats hold out.

Happy sunny

days to you everyone. Get out in those gardens, get that dirt so far under your nails you can't scrub it out. Dip your toes and thighs and oh-what-the-hell! your bottom in the pond and above all soak up that sun. xoxo

The Local Food Report: roe scallops

Have you ever shucked a live sea scallop? Here's how it's done:

The coral colored stuff you see attached to the muscle is the roe. Usually, it's taken off during shucking—either out at sea, before the boats even come in, or at a shucker-packer facility on shore. Occasionally, though, day boats land their scallops live. Markets sell them that way to consumers, and once you get the hang of it, you can open them yourself at home.

Geoffrey Day, the guy up there in the video, is a big fan of eating sea scallops with the roe on. He got into it in the eighties, when he met a few guys in Wellfleet who were selling scallops this way to chefs in New York. He grew up on the Cape and had studied ecology, and he was worried about the fisheries. He wanted people to get more into what he calls "esoteric" seafood, seafood we don't normally eat and that isn't fished out. Scallops with roe fit the bill.

For starters, they're delicious. The roe tastes very similar to the scallop muscle, only a little more briny. It has a different texture—the Portuguese call them livers, and that's a good description. On the females it's coral colored, and on the males it's off white. On both it's nearly as large or sometimes even larger than the scallop muscle itself, which means if more people ate scallops this way, we'd double our yield. Its presence also guarantees the scallop is fresh, because the roe deteriorates much more quickly than the meat. That's part of why you don't often see scallops with the roe attached.

The other reason is that Americans don't really have a taste for it, or don't know about it. In Europe, scallop roe is a delicacy. It's also packed with omega-3s—good for everyone, and especially important for mamas and babies. Geoffrey says it can carry red tide, but that the waters around here are tested regularly, so there's no need to worry.

He cooked me a batch the other day at his house. I have to say I wasn't entire sold based on appearance—the texture looked a little weird, plus he had just told me that what we were about to eat was the scallops' gonads—but they were absolutely delicious. Alex and I ate them again a few nights later, pan-seared in butter and olive oil and served over a bed of wilted garlic and Swiss chard from our garden.

What do you think? Would you try them?

Now's the time of year if you're feeling adventurous. Sea scallops spawn at the end of the summer, so spring and early summer are when the roes get big. You don't always see live sea scallops at markets, but that said, most fishmongers around here can get them if you ask.  

If you end up getting into scallops with roe, be sure to tell Geoffrey. He's into all things roe scallop, including new eaters and sharing recipes. Which reminds me—if you're looking for cooking ideas, check out this cookbook by Elaine and Karin Tammi. It's all about scallops—both with roe, and without.

Every bite

Speaking of things Sally has changed, there's this: I am so, so much more careful about food waste. If we're going to spend money on good food, we're going to eat it. Every bite. As my friend Sarah puts it, "buy food that is so insanely delicious and nutritious you wouldn't dream of wasting even an ounce or a gram."

This is even easier with things we've grown. The other night, for instance, we ate a squash that grew out of the compost pile. It was long and kind of thin, like a cross between a butternut and a tromboncino. When I peeled it I explained to Sally that it didn't look quite orange enough, but that didn't matter. It was still firm and sweet and we would eat it. And so  we tossed it with thyme and olive oil and salt and pepper and a drizzle of balsamic, and we ate it roasted, hot, tossed over arugula with a good salty feta cheese.

Recently I've been trying to meal-plan with an emphasis on cleaning out the freezers and  eating up whatever root and storage vegetables we have still in the fridge. This means lots of strange meats (kidney ideas, anyone?), and a steady diet of homegrown butternut squash, potatoes, and all-things cranberry. I bought a huge bag of cranberries at the Orleans farmers' market just before it closed for the season in November, and we're still eating our way through it. 

Last week I made  Laurie Colwin's Nantucket Cranberry Pie. If you aren't familiar with Laurie, she was quite a writer and also quite a cook. In addition to several novels and books of short stories, she also wrote a food column for Gourmet. Out of this came Home Cooking, which I have and love, and later on More Home Cooking. They're both essay books with recipes at the ends of every chapter. If you ever see them at a library sale or used book store, nab them.

In the meantime, I highly recommend her cranberry pie. It's not so much a pie as a cake—in fact, it's quite a bit like Goodin-Pudding, except with an almond twist.

NANTUCKET CRANBERRY PIE

If you're looking for a very quick and easy cranberry dessert, this is it. Despite the name, this involves non of the fuss of a pie but delivers all of the flavor. It's good with vanilla ice cream, but it's just as good on its own as a late afternoon snack. 

2 cups cranberries

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1/2 cup sugar

2 eggs

3/4 cup melted butter

1 cup granulated sugar

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon almond extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. 

Get out a 9-inch pie plate and spread the cranberries, walnuts, and sugar evenly over the bottom. 

In a mixing bowl, whisk together the eggs, melted butter, sugar, flour and almond extract until they're smooth. Pour this batter over the cranberries and nuts, and bake for 40 minutes. The batter should be just set and starting to turn golden on top; don't overcook it, as you want the middle to be ever-so-slightly soft.

Out there

Yesterday, all three of us headed out to the greenhouse for a bit. The rain poured down the sides of the plastic and we cozied up inside: Daddy weeding, Mama seeding, and Miss Sally banging a tiny wooden set of pots and spoons.

Here's to weekends, and to getting out there again. Happy Saturday, everyone.

The Local Food Report: March chores

I am itching to get into the garden. Sally and I went out the other day—that first glorious day over 60—to weed the greenhouse. I brought out her playmat and she worked on grabbing monkeys and parrots while I pulled clumps of grass. It was so nice, and so overdue. It made me realize that when it comes to garden chores, it's time to get started. So I talked with a bunch of farmers, did a lot of reading, and made a plan. Here's our list of March garden chores:

1. Prepare the soil:

In the greenhouse, this means weeding first. And both inside and out, it means picking out any stones that have turned up over the winter (we don't have that problem, but up Cape, Tim Friary does, so I'm guessing some of you might too), turning the soil over, and dressing it with at least an inch or 2 of compost (Veronica Worthington recommends as much as 5 or 6 inches).

2. Make a plan:

Decide what you're going to grow, where. If you haven't ordered your seeds yet, now's the time. (Check out our 2010 and 2011 guides to seed ordering or listen to the shows here and here.) Think about what grows well together—read up on companion planting.

3. Plant early and slow-to-mature plants:

Now is the time to plant things that can stand a little cold—think peas, radishes, lettuces, spinach, Swiss chard, anything in the Brassica family (kale, cabbage, broccoli), carrots, and seedlings that take a long time. For the cold weather crops, you can direct seed this time of year in a cold frame or greenhouse or wait a couple more weeks and plant them in your regular garden outside. For the slow-to-mature types—things like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, celery, winter squash, or really anything in the 80-100+ days category—you want to get your seeds started now in flats in a sunny window inside. 

4. Take care of established plants:

Do you have roses? Hydrangeas? Lilacs? Plums, apples, pears, peaches, or mulberries? Raspberries or blueberries? Grapes? Maybe a potted Meyer lemon hanging out inside? Once these plants get established, they need regular care. For instance, fruit trees and things like blueberries and raspberries and grapes need annual pruning. (There's actually a pretty good guide over here.) It's also a good idea to check your plants for disease this time of year—I went out to take a look at our peach trees the other day, and it looks like they have something brown and sticky and gooey strung across a few of the twigs. (If you have any idea what this might be, please let me know! I am having no luck researching.) 

5. Finally, enhance your soil:

Once you've planned out where you're going to plant things this spring, enhance your soil selectively. For instance, in my reading I discovered that kale is a heavy feeder and likes a good dose of nitrogen—1/3 ounce per square foot of ground every three weeks—during the summer. A lot of other plants don't need quite so much.

Here's a scan of the plan I drew up for our big garden. You'll notice for some rows there are multiple planting dates—those are where I'm planning to do succession plantings of things like greens and radishes and carrots. You'll also notice there aren't many tomatoes. What you can't see on this drawing is our hoophouse, which is 8' by 20', and which will be filled this summer with heirloom tomatoes and green peppers. We've been growing greens in our hoophouse for a few years now, and tomatoes in the big garden, and it's time to switch things up both for the soil, and for the sake of experiment. We'll see how those heat loving plants do with an extra layer of plastic! I have my fingers crossed for early peppers and tomatoes.

Happy planning everyone!

P.S. If you click on this drawing, it gets bigger. Just so you know...

Dear Bugs That Eat My Cabbage,

I have tried kindness. I have tried garlic oil spray and planting early and planting late, and I think you should know that this year I MEAN BUSINESS. You will not devour my Brussels sprouts; you will not attack my cabbage. Most of all you will not eat holes in my dinosaur kale, because that lacinato stuff is precious. I will have perfect kale and perfect broccoli and I will grow Savoy cabbage. I will grow tiny perfect heads, heads that swirl and bump like this. 

I will make my favorite dishes, sautéed cabbage in butter. Raw kale salad. Raw Brussels sprouts with grated Pecorino and lemon juice. And I will have so much cabbage—so many perfect heads—that I will also make Marion Cunningham's Stuffed Cabbage Rolls.

That's all there is too it, that's all there is.

STUFFED CABBAGE ROLLS

When I was a kid, my mom worked at a boys camp as the cook for a few summers. One of the specialties was a dish called Kababa Burgers—basically a big cabbage leaf with all sorts of goodies like ground beef and carrots and mozzarella cheese rolled in. Marion's dish is a more grown-up version of what I fell for as a kid. This recipe serves 4-6, and is nice alongside a toasted slice of homemade rye bread.

1 large head Savoy cabbage, halved and cored

3 tablespoons pastured butter

1 medium onion, peeled and diced 

2 cloves garlic, peeled and minced

2 cups tomato sauce, preferably homemade

1/2 cup water

1 teaspoon ground allspice

sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper to taste

2 tablespoons packed light brown sugar

1 and 1/2 cups cooked rice, farro, or oat groats

1 pound grass-fed ground beef

thick whole milk yogurt or sour cream, for serving

applesauce, preferably homemade, for serving

Grease a 13" by 9" baking dish and set aside.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Add the cabbage, cover, and cook gently for 4-5 minutes. Drain the water and set the cabbage aside.

In a large saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onion and sauté, stirring frequently, until soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook another minute, then add the tomato sauce, water, allspice, salt, and pepper. Turn the heat down as low as it goes and let the sauce simmer for about 15 minutes, until it thickens. (It should be thick, Marion says, but not so thick that it "plops" when poured from a spoon.)

Peel off the tough outer leaves from the cabbage and set them aside. Peel off 12 more leaves, and reserve these for the rolls. Chop up the remaining cabbage and spread it over the bottom of the prepared baking dish. Sprinkle it with the sugar, then season with salt and pepper. 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Combine about 3/4 of the sauce with the rice, farro, or oat groats (I used farro) and the beef. Mix well. Use a spoon to divide the filling evenly between the 12 cabbage leaves, scooping it into the center. Start from the stem end of the leaves and roll them, tucking in the side edges. Place them seam-side down on the chopped cabbage mixture. Spoon a little bit of the sauce over top, then layer on the outermost leaves that you set aside to cover the whole thing up. Bake for about an hour, then put the top leaves in the compost and serve with yogurt and warm applesauce.

Alive & well

Hi friends. I just stopped by to remind you that this farro and roasted butternut squash salad exists and is still very much alive and well in our household. I hope it is in yours too. It is so good and so easy, and today it brought the butternut squash count around here from five down to four. Wahoo!

The Local Food Report: counting calories

I'm guessing a lot of you know my friend Tamar. Hunts ducks? Smokes bluefish? Big laugh? 

I've mentioned her here before—she's the one who taught us to make Cape Cod sea salt on our woodstove—and also the woman behind the very informative and often hilarious blog Starving off the Land. I like her because while she is in some obvious ways very much like me (into local food, gardening, and all things living-off-the-land), she is also very different. Most notably, she is good at math.

While I have often wondered how many pounds of potatoes, say, or black raspberries we've grown, and have even twice attempted a freezer inventory to keep track of what we put up each year, I have never managed to keep at it long enough to learn much. So I was very impressed when at the end of 2011, Tamar tallied up an estimate of what percentage of her and her husband Kevin's caloric needs they met with first-hand food last year.

I should backtrack to say that when Tamar uses the phrase "first-hand food," she is referring to anything she and Kevin grow, fish, gather, hunt, or otherwise procure from the water or land. It started as a challenge; she and Kevin moved here from Manhattan, and delighted by the abundance of natural resources around them, they decided as of January 1, 2009 that they would try to grow, hunt, fish, or gather at least one food every day. The blog grew out of this challenge, and this year Tamar's come up with a new goal: to meet 20 percent of their caloric needs with first-hand foods in 2012. 

Sounds easy, right? Ha. Despite the fact that they are way ahead of many of us when it comes to procuring their own food, Tamar and Kevin (according to Tamar's calculations) got only 11 percent of their food first-hand in 2011. Here's the breakdown:

Poultry: 48,500

They raised 6 turkeys, 6 ducks, and got one wild turkey via roadkill. 

Eggs: 22,500

About 25 dozen.

Fish: 87,000

This includes 10 striped bass, 25 bluefish, 4 trout, 4 sea bass, and 1 "magnificent" tuna.

Shellfish: 12,000

They caught 20 pounds of lobster, 10 Jonah crabs, and gathered/raised a gallon of steamers, 15 cups of chopped clams, and 500 oysters.

Squash: 10,000

Tomatoes: 3,200

Greens: 3,000

There were collards, kale, mizuna, radicchio, romaine, beet greens, Chinese greens, mache, catalogna, and herbs.

Assorted veggies: 8,300

This includes 1 quart of strawberries, 5 pounds rhubarb, 10 pounds beets, 6 pounds onions, 15 pounds cucumbers, about 6 cups of chopped hot peppers, 15 bell peppers, 10 eggplants, and 6 delicata squash.

Fungi: 1,500

5 pounds of shiitakes and 5 pounds of wild mushrooms.

Miscellaneous: 1,000

A handful of raspberries, a few tablespoons of honey, 10 figs, a few pine nuts, a handful of wild onions, two asparagus spears, several carrots, and a bunch of cattail shoots (not tasty, says Tamar).

The grand total comes to 197,000 calories. Since Tamar estimates that she and Kevin together eat about 5,000 calories a day, this means that to reach 20 percent this year they need to nearly double this. She figures that each month they need about 150,000 calories between the two of them, so they need to average about 30,000 first-hand calories every month to meet their 20 percent goal. 

So far, they're not quite there. January yielded 16,800 calories, mostly from eggs. February was better—18,500, but also mostly from eggs. Then again, that was January and February—hardly prime harvest months. They're looking for people to play along, so I tallied up our January and February harvest for fun. It consists of a single item—potatoes—about half of which Alex left in the ground and finally dug up last month. I estimated we got about 30 pounds, which according to the USDA is roughly 9,500 calories. So we're at 4,750 calories for January, and 4,750 for February. Using Tamar's same caloric needs estimate, that puts us at just over 3 percent.

If self-sufficiency is the goal, we have a long way to go. 

Inexplicably addictive

What's on your menu this week? We have a lot of leftovers to work through. There are a few bites left of a variation on these maple-roasted Brussels sprouts (if you're interested, the recipe will be in the Banner this week—so good!), half a chicken and kale casserole (instead of rotisserie I roasted my own and added feta from Narragansett Creamery—and a pot of ham, kale, and bean soup I made last night while Sally and Alex were sleeping.

In between, we'll be snacking on these:

They are Darina Allen's Irish oatcakes, and they are a find. When my sister was here last week, we embarked on a search for the perfect oatcake. What we had in mind was not at all what you see up there—to my mind, that's a cracker—and we were looking for something more akin to an Effie's Oatcakes. Effie's are like a cross between a cracker and a cookie—sweet but not cloying, with plenty of butter and rough craggy oats sticking out from all the edges.

We hunted through Darina Allen's Forgotten Skills of Cooking because she's Irish, and we figured the Irish know their oats. Her section on cookies had three options: flapjacks, oatcakes, and digestives. They all looked relatively similar, and they all looked like they could maybe be Effie's. So we tried all three.

Here's what I have to report. First off, flapjacks are Irish for Rice Krispie treats made with rolled oats. They are utterly delicious and very easy, as you bake them in a tray and simply cut them into squares. The dishes are incredibly sticky, but that's the worst of it. Digestives are Effie's—good with cheese, but also good with milk as dessert after dinner. (Check last week's Banner for the recipe.) And oatcakes—the ones we thought would be Effie's—are crackers. They are made with oat flour, not whole rolled oats, and they can be made depending on your mood and availability with either butter, lard, or beef drippings. They are unassuming, slightly bland, and inexplicably addictive.

So here are the two recipes—for when you're feeling sweet, and when you're feeling salty.

FLAPJACKS

These are very similar to Rice Krispie treats, only they don't  use marshmallows and you stir in rolled oats in place of puffed rice. They have the texture, though, and the very high edibility rating. This recipe makes about 24 squares.

1 and 1/2 cups butter

1 tablespoon corn syrup

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup granulated sugar

1 pound rolled oats

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. 

Melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium-low heat. Add the corn syrup and vanilla, then stir in the sugar and oats and mix well.

Spread the mixture into a jelly roll pan (any rimmed baking sheet will do). Bake until golden and slightly caramelized around the edges, but still gooey in the center, about 30 minutes. Cut these treats into squares while they're still warm, as they crisp up as they cool.

OATCAKES (OAT CRACKERS)

When my sister and I first made these, we weren't sure we loved them. They needed a little more salt, we thought. But as we ate them, they grew on us, and I started to like that they weren't overly salty. They go equally well with strawberry jam as they do with smoked fish or sharp cheddar. That said, if you want a good salty cracker just sprinkle a bit of extra sea salt over the cut dough rounds before you bake them.

1 and 1/2 cups oat flour (ground whole oat groats)

1/2 cup all-purpose flour

a pinch of baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons melted lard, butter, or beef drippings

boiling water

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. 

Whisk together the oat flour, all-purpose flour, baking powder, and salt in a mixing bowl. Add the melted fat and enough water to make a firm dough. 

Sprinkle a work surface with flour and oatmeal and roll the dough out as thin as you can get it. Use a biscuit cutter to make rounds and prick each round with a fork to make a nice pattern. (This will make them look nice and also help them bake without puffing up unevenly.) 

Bake on a cookie sheet for 25-30 minutes, or until crisp and slightly golden. Cool to room temperature, then store in an airtight container.

P.S. Hi from Sally. 

The Local Food Report: homebrewing, part 3

My final piece on homebrewing with Gui and Dennis airs today. First we talked history, then ingredients, and finally today, they walked me through the process. If you're interested in how water, malt, hops, and yeast come together to make a bottle of beer, I highly recommend giving it a listen. 

I know a lot more about beer now than before our conversations, and hopefully you do too. The most rewarding thing about this is that it's made beer drinking a lot more fun. Ok...or maybe a lot more interesting. It's always been fun, but now when I see a 90-Minute IPA or a Continuously Hopped IPA, I can give some serious thought to what to expect.

At the end of this week's piece, Gui lets me and Dennis taste his latest IPA. It's a beer he made from a so-called "clone kit" with the intentions of reproducing one of his favorite beers, Stone IPA. He made quite a few changes, and it was delicious.

He generously agreed to share are his notes. We're having a little trouble locating them, but they should be up here by the end of the day. (Update, 3.15: They're here! Phew.)

In the meantime, Dennis made an experimental Pale Ale that he thought turned out pretty well, and he shared his notes with me. Here's a little more on that in his words, and his notes:

Last night I opened the first of an experimental Pale Ale I brewed just before the interview. It was a little young, but drinkable. 

I almost always use brewersfriend.com to develop recipes. This Pale Ale was based on an idea from Gordon Strong's book "Brewing Better Beer." FHW refers to First Wort Hops. The hops are put in the boil kettle while the grains are being lautered. I made two small batches of this a few days apart. The brews were identical except for the yeast. 

If this makes you want to get into brewing, or if you're already into it, check out this list of resources. Happy homebrewing, and happy tasting.

Dennis's List of Homebrewing Resources:

Books

How to Brew by John Palmer
The Complete Joy of Homebrewing by Charlie Papazian
Brewing Better Beer by Gordon Strong
Farmhouse Ales by Phil Markowski
The Homebrewer's Garden by Joe and Dennis Fisher

Publications

Brew Your Own magazine (bimonthly)
Yankee Brew News (free, monthly, and available amongst other places at Wellfleet Spirits)

Calculators

Dennis says that brewing involves many calculations, and recommends these websites.
mrmalty.com
brewersfriend.com

Apps
iBrewmaster (Dennis says "indispensable")