Chris Amirault

Cream soda and tropical flavors? Sounds like Miami Deli Fizz to me.

Very Don the Beachcomber, Katie, which I mean in the most positive way! Had to make it immediately: Laird's, Marteau, M&R rosso, & Dole. No lime. I like it a lot: the aroma of pineapple sits atop it, but the drink itself uses pineapple as base, not fruity front. My one suggestion would be to omit the Peychauds and stick to the Angostura/absinthe duo that Beachcomber discovered. What with the vermouth, it's a bit noisy to have the Peychaud's in there, too. I also toyed with adding an egg white and shaking the thing. How in the world did you come up with this?

Really good lemons today, and I was out, so I put up more preserved lemons. Ended up using them in just about everything, frankly.

Made this 2 to 2 from the Rogue Cocktails book and, as I suspected, dry shaking an egg white with the gum syrup creates a very rich, smooth meringue.

Five rums, max, I think: white/light PR, dark PR, demerara, aged Jamaican, Martinique rhum. You can't really sub for the demerara or the Martinique rhum, imo, but you could use the Appleton Estate for your dark PR rum (decadent substitution, I'll add) and get away with those four remaining. What light PR rum are you considering? I'd urge you to seek out Flor de Cana, Brugal, or Don Q white rums -- and PR style -- and avoid Bacardi like the plague.

Just made the 2 to 2: 1.5 Aperol, 1 Lucid (I used Kubler) 1 lemon, 1/4 simple (I used gum syrup), orange bitters (Angostura). I also added an egg white. Mouthfeel is great, and the drink is very "rogue": I love the bitterness competing with the absinthe, but if you've hated the other weird ones for being too bitter, you'll definitely hate this one.

Wondrich's Tombstone leaps to mind.

Hi Nick and welcome! I'm also having some high humidity in my cooler, with tropics-quality 90% humidity this morning. Cracked the door and shut the thing off to see what happens. We've talked a lot about mold around here, and I've come to the conclusion that I'm not going to get agitated about it. White is happy, others I'll wipe off. Ditto light: it's quite something to see those sausages hanging in the well-lit Calabria Pork Store.

Agreed that the decanter bitters require more volume (about double, in fact) than, say, Angostura. Also true for the Boker's reformulation. Don't know if that's about authenticity or something a bit more banal (like lucre).

The salt-cured anchovies will be a revelation. I'm hoping to branch out into cooking more offal, which I've never really prepared but have enjoyed at restaurants consistently. I just got my first bar of belacan (trasi), so I'm looking forward to figuring that out, too.

I think that the Boker's go best with gin drinks, not as well with rye or bourbon. The Bittermens mole and grapefruit are excellent. I also really like the Jerry Thomas Decanter bitters, which I'm still experimenting with but find are remarkable in Improveds and basic Old Fashioneds.

Yup: powder. I whisked the amount Tri2Cook indicated into warm water and with a little elbow grease it was pretty smooth sailing (though I did catch a small clump or three in the fine strainer at the end).

1 tsp, following Wondrich following Jerry Thomas, and the difference is definitely notable. Luscious, I would say, in fact. Frontier Coop.

Just made an Improved Whiskey Cocktail (Rittenhouse BIB, Luxardo maraschino, Jerry Thomas Decanter Bitters, Marteau absinthe) with the stuff and it was fantastic. The mouthfeel that everyone touts, for sure, but also the slightly malty quality was an excellent foil for the spice in the rye and bitters. I'm sold.

Eager to see the results in this topic as I'm headed to Anaheim in November. When I was last there I really enjoyed Thai Nakorn and LaPalma Pie Shop. Click here for a post about the former.

This bugger is pretty hardy: it was in the basement with almost no light for a year. I've no hope of installing a dedicated growing light for the tree, either, since it's sitting in the dining room (the only viable window with full southern sun exposure).

Had a pretty local shop at the farmers market Saturday, where I was on the lookout for a grassfed eye of round from a local farm (Aquidneck Farms came through) to cure for bresaola, and I was prepared to (and did) pay premium for it ($8/lb). I also needed coffee so grabbed a pound from New Harvest and used a gift certificate to grab three different VT cheeses from Matt Jennings at Farmstead. But I also found that the price of eggs had dropped at a few stands, which saved me a trip out to Stamp Farms for eggs (about 15 min drive), and with a bit more intelligent shopping I grabbed a few other things (carrots, turnips, garlic) that probably cost about 10-20% more than Shaws but were of superior quality. It was about the most well-rounded locavore haul in a while, but there's no way I could sustain this sort of pattern, both bc of the limited availability of certain products (the folks whose parents send up citrus from their farm weren't there, sadly) and the cost.

And it was tasty? You happy with the results?

And there's the dilemma in a nutshell: I'm not trying to follow whatever Michael Pollan's latest food rules are at 7:15a with two kids to get fed and out the door. I lean Maggie on Lunchables, but you'll tear General Mills and Kellogg's breakfast cereals out of my cold, dead hands.

Got and installed the "scratch n dent" Vinotemp 58-bottle cellar I mentioned above. So far, so good.

The first photo I uploaded to ImageGullet was of my beloved baby kaffir lime tree: Within a year or so, the thing was dead. I can't remember why or how, and probably didn't know either when it happened anyway. I was bemoaning the loss of that tree to a Khmer friend of mine, and a few weeks later she stunned me with the generous gift of this tree, from a cutting taken off a wild tree in Cambodia. It's now in the south window soaking up the rays and sending off little light green shoots: I'd like not to kill this one. Tips? NB: I live in Rhode Island USA, so this little bugger isn't likely to see the outdoors much at all.

Sam's blender method doesn't work so well with the smaller amounts in Tri2Cook's recipe, so I went with the whisk -- and then a fine strainer. The stuff tastes slightly... malty?

There are also a lot of notions of value floating around here: value of saved money, value of labor, value of leisure time. I thought about those different forms of value and this topic a lot yesterday when I was curing couple dozen pounds of heritage pig and grass-fed beef -- items that nearly everyone I know would consider certifiably crazy to make yourself.

Can you say more about the Cape Verdean canella liqueur? Photo would be especially nice, since I can hit a liquor store on the way home that will probably have it.

Shelf of the liquor cabinet or fridge?