Chris Amirault

I think that scallions are better than onion, and that corn kernels are required here in late summer.

Tried a drink using the Art of the Bar lavender honey syrup, orgeat and WT 101 bourbon (1/2:1/2:2). Don't try it: waaaaay too sweet. But it was prompted by a query from a friend who liked that syrup and orgeat and wondered about a combo. Makes me wonder about using lavender in the orgeat. Thoughts?

Sounds like a fantastic event! Congrats to all -- and keep the reports coming. The planning topic for the 2009 event is here.

Good call with the Herbsaint. I'm no Bloody fan, but this one I'll try.

Try it and let us know. I haven't quite decided if it's too busy or not, but it's worth a shot. ETA: I just made one with some very old green Chartreuse and a dash of Pernod. The drink funkier than the usual LW, partly bc of that old Chartreuse but also bc the Maraschino and Pernod get a little squirrelly together. I really like it. I think that the first post has it right: Aviation, then Trident, then a Last Word. If you're still able to taste anything, try one with Pernod.

Mitch, how'd you choose your restaurants? I'm surprised that you didn't stop by (my favorite) the Clam Box in Ipswich, and glad you didn't waste time at Woodman's.

That's fascinating -- and as the doofus who was busy judging other places based on that lapse, mea culpa. But back to the drink at hand: is anyone else dripping a few drops of Pernod in there now and then?

Got my hands on both Oulde and Jonge Boomsma the other day, and I made the Improved Holland Gin Cock-Tail as described above: fantastic. It's a drink that will showcase lots of bitters, too. If Boomsma is just good, I'm eager to see what the rest of the world of genever will bring.

I'm confused by the Flame of Love a bit: doesn't the ice threaten to wash off the sherry rinse? Janet will surely soon weigh in on the Gimlet, one of her favorite drinks, shortly.

What would you use it for?

There are two important drinks in RI culture. One is coffee milk, and having a taste for neither milk- nor coffee-based cocktails, I'm taking a pass there. The other is frozen lemonade, which you can find throughout the city on ice cream trucks and at roadside stands all summer long. Del's lemonade is the standard, with New England the only other real contender. (The swell Christopher Martin explains on his quahog.org entries on Del's and NE that the latter runs a distant second.) The drink is a slushy lemonade that includes a few 1/2" chunks of lemon (zest, pith, and pulp) throughout. As reported on the Del's website and elsewhere, it's based on a 19th century drink from Italy: I tried to recreate a drink that is very lemony, and given the Naples connection, limoncello was an obvious choice. The drink also includes that chunky textural component in a style that can go up a straw; if you want something even finer (I like nibbling on the toothy zest), use a microplane. In honor of the Del's source, it's sweeter than my usual drink and perhaps yours as well, so cut back on the simple if you want something more tart. Finally, I fiddled around with Fee's orange bitters, but the slight residue of pith attached to the zest gave this enough bitterness so the final recipe leaves it out. Ode to Del's 1 1/2 oz limoncello 1 1/2 oz white rum the zest from one lemon, removed with a peeler in strips or shaved with a microplane 1 oz lemon juice 1 oz simple syrup 8 oz ice If you peeled the zest instead of microplaning it, blend all of the ingredients without the ice first. Then blend with the ice until slushy. Serve in a 12 oz glass with a straw -- or, for authenticity's sake, in a paper cup that you squeeze and fold to get the last bits out of the bottom.

This cocktail is indeed mindblowing. In a cocktails course I taught today, this was the final drink we made (with Montecristo white instead of Appleton), and it left the students literally speechless. I prefer it up, but that's a quibble: this is one of the best drinks I've ever made.

I think that the topic Dave started on his intermediate course has a lot of useful information even for a basics course. Click here for that.

devlin, On Food and Cooking is the second edition of Harold McGee's opus on food science and cooking. I think that Tri2Cook is suggesting that the depth of information in the book (it covers just about every food ingredient you can imagine) would allow him to figure out what to do on Fantasy Island, and he could come up with the step-by-step instructions for any given recipe. At least that's what I'm thinking. I'd want McGee, Herme's Desserts (I'm a baking dumbass), and David Thompson's Thai Food, both for the recipes and to have a like-minded pal around when I'm lonely.

That's a rather obvious point, though, isn't it? I'd bet that 90% of all photographs taken wind up being junk. I can't imagine why food photography would be any less or more lousy.

I find often that a photograph captures something ineffable about a dish. Take this example of yours, robyn: lots of description about variations in texture and hue. As you wrote,

Too sweet is right. I screwed around with that for a while and came up with a Maize Morning: 3/4 oz apple brandy 3/4 oz gin 1/2 oz Apry 1/2 oz Cointreau 1/2 oz lemon dash of orange or grapefruit bitters Shake, strain, and dribble a few drops of grenadine at the drink's base (sunrise effect, don't you know).

What a great topic, especially for those of us outside of the cocktail epicenters. I'm rolling up my sleeves and getting to work.

I know several people who have owned their Tilia FoodSavers for decades and use them all the time.

Dave's point exactly, I think.

I've consistently scaled the Ruhlman/Polcyn ratios for pink salt down by 25-50% without detrimental effect to meat or family. However, I've really come to appreciate the pink color, plus the flavor/texture difference Pallee mentions, so I use it consistently. No experience with wild pigs, but I'd think that the process would basically be the same, right? You're getting porkier pig, for sure, and probably leaner meat. But as for curing and smoking, I think there aren't too many adjustments to make.

More on Art of the Bar. I've been trying, here and there, some of their newer drinks, and I'm not quite sure what I think yet. One illustrative example is their Sidecar variation, a Lavender Sidecar, which uses lavender honey syrup made in 4:2:1 ratios by volume with hot water, honey, and dried lavender: 1 1/2 oz brandy (I used Landy cognac) 1/4 oz Cointreau 1/2 oz lavender honey syrup 1/2 oz lemon dash orange bitters I've made this a few times and, well, it's either unbalanced or too busy or I'm doing something wrong. In particular, I think that the characteristics of the lavender honey syrup are lost in this much commotion, which is too bad. In particular, I think that the citrus bullies the lavender.... In contrast -- for those of you who've made the syrup mentioned -- try this Lavender 3:2:1 drink, that provides a simple rhythm section for the syrup: 1 1/2 oz gin (Plymouth) 1 oz Lillet 1/2 oz lavender honey syrup You can add a dash of bitters if you want -- the house bitters I've been tinkering with work nicely, as would others, I bet -- or keep it simple to let the juniper of the gin and the fruit of the Lillet play alone with the lavender and honey. It's a pretty interesting ingredient to play with...

Made an Atlas with Laird's bonded, Lemon Hart 151, Creole Shrubb, and house bitters. It's both delicious and positively masculating, the sort of drink that my grandfather would say "puts hair on your chest."

In a previous post, I mentioned the following: This is hard to explain so please click on the above link for an illustration. Basically, you want minimal distance between the machine face and the base of vacuum well to allow for minimal bag loss between the seal and the edge. I'd also say that you want a vacuum well that's easy to clean.

Bar Drinks Wizard is also not worth downloading. It's got a hideous user interface, lots of useless extra crap, and lacks some basics.