New Year's Eve - Beer Tasting Menu

Still need suggestions for your New Year's Eve noshing? May I recommend a beer tasting menu! Cory & I did this for the first time 2 years ago and it was so fun!

To prepare our tasting menu, I researched some online to get my creative juices flowing and here is the menu we came up with. If you enjoy craft beers, this is the perfect way to try a few while also eating good food. We split one bottled beer between the two of us for each course.

Course 1: Samuel Adams Latitude 48 IPA with chocolate malted milk balls and Kettle brand sea salt chips (this beer is super malty and goes well with fried foods)

Course 2: Hefeweizen with Citrus Dressed Salad. This pairing was quite delicious. This dressing is very thin and liquify (recipe link here), I recommend tossing the chopped romaine lettuce to make sure it's coated well. We topped our salads with goat cheese crumbles, which was a nice smooth finish. Additional notes on this recipe: We were out of fresh oranges and grapefruit, so I doubled the amount of orange juice used in the mixture. Also, we did not have fresh ginger and used ground ginger to taste (about 1/2 tsp).

Course 3: New Belgium Blue Paddle Pilsner Lager with Pepperoni Pizza Puffs (recipe at the bottom of this post). The saltiness of the puffs was delicious with this heavier lager. 

Course 4: Homemade Pretzel Bites (recipe link here) - these are our favorite recipe so far. Even though the dough is made from scratch, it is not too complex. Since we had already gone through 3 courses at this point, there was not a particular beer we paired these with. They will go with any one of your choice. We dipped the leftover bites in chocolate, mmm, salty and sweet, yum!

Pepperoni Puff recipe:
1 can of crescent roll dough (I used Great Value from Walmart)1/2 pack of pepperoni1 c of shredded mozzarella3/4 - 1 c of tomato pasta sauce

1. Preheat Oven to 350 degrees
2. Open crescent roll dough on a floured surface. Pinch together any open seams so that the dough is in one piece. With a floured rolling pin, roll dough to about 1/8" thickness
3. Spread pasta sauce on the dough with a spoon - you should be able to slightly see the dough through the sauce.
4. Sprinkle cheese evenly over the sauce then layer evenly with pepperoni.
5. Cut dough in half lenghthwise in preparation to rolling into logs.
6. Cut dough at about the 1/2" mark to create individual pinwheels.
7. Place pinwheels into greased mini muffin pans, should make 16 pieces.
8. Bake at 350 degrees for about 12 minutes or until the pastry is golden.