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Ktepi

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  1. I buy Campari the most often, by a significant margin. I go through Aperol and Punt e Mes about as quickly, but because I have to order them by mail, I don't buy them as often. The same will probably prove true for genever, but it's newer to me.
  2. Wow, thank you for posting this. This is terrific. I already loved that eau de vie -- but I never would have thought of combining it with grapefruit.
  3. I don't know how widely available it is (my bottle was a sample from the company), so this might not be at all workable/real-world, but Mozart Dry is very good, and because it's unsweetened, it gives you a lot of flexibility in terms of your chocolateyness/sweetness balance. I had a "chocolate Manhattan" last night subbing Mozart Dry for half of the rye, for instance -- I don't think it'd be sweet enough to convert someone used to chocolate martinis, but it was a great drink with a prominent chocolate flavor. Using something like Canton, Chambord, or the various orange liqueurs makes a pretty respectable sweet drink too.
  4. Calamondin juice and Aperol -- not sure of the exact proportions, I just juiced the calamondins into the glass and added Aperol until it tasted balanced. Man, this is good.
  5. Katie - I don't know if they have Trader Joe's in Philly, or if TJ's still carries these (since they are so weird about their inventory), but I've bought "dried sweetened hibiscus" there before. They're primarily whole flowers (a few of them were broken), lightly sweetened, texture sort of similar to fruit leather. I don't know why I never thought of using them as a substitute for those Wild Hibiscus flowers in syrup -- which I keep eyeing, and never buy because of the price.
  6. I've been playing around with variations on Giuseppe Gonzalez's Trinidad Sour -- 1 oz Angostura, 1 oz syrup, 3/4 oz sour, 1/2 oz spirit -- and I'm hard-pressed to find a version I DON'T like. Tonight's is my favorite, and I don't know how much of that is due to using 1/2 oz of Fee's whiskey barrel aged in place of the Angostura, which I abruptly ran out of while shaking them into the measure: 1/2 oz Angostura + 1/2 oz Fee's wba 1 oz Rose's Kola Tonic 3/4 oz lime juice 1/2 oz rum (Prichard's) Really great. The Kola kind of disappears next to the bitters, so it's not as rum-and-Coke-like as I thought it might be, but that's just fine. I need to pick up more Angostura, I don't want to use up the Fee's on these. But I want to try cachaca and tequila variations.
  7. This isn't candy, but -- in a lot of places (here included, I discovered last year), Boo Berry and Franken Berry cereals are only carried in October. Charleston Chew makes little boxes of Charleston Chew "bites" that I haven't seen except in bags of Halloween candy, though maybe they make them for movie theaters or something too. And those "Reese's pumpkins" always seem much better than regular Reese's peanut butter cups -- I don't know if it's the chocolate-to-peanut-butter ratio, or if they're fresher, or if it's just my imagination (I resist the third possibility, of course).
  8. I haven't had onion blossoms since the 90s. I'm not saying they aren't out there, and maybe they're bigger sellers now than ten years ago, but it feels like calling the Feelies reissues the best albums of 2009 -- technically correct, but sort of missing the point of a "best of ____" list.
  9. Do they carry Polar in Boston? Their birch beer isn't as easy to find here in southern NH as it used to be, but it's pretty good. I can actually find Boylans more easily than Polar, but it tastes less like the birch beer I grew up with. I not only miss local ice cream stands -- more of them here are year-round places, which isn't the same to me, and the ice cream's not always made on-site -- but black raspberries themselves. My local farmstand no longer carries them, and with all the new housing developments, I no longer know anyone who has them growing on their property. As for the ongoing butcher shop discussion, that was one of the first things I asked about when I moved back to New Hampshire from Indiana. All the "favorite must-see 'butcher shops'" here are places selling chicken breasts and steak tips in ten kinds of marinade, with a couple aisles of gourmet pickles and Kettle Chips. The marinade is the selling point, not the meat. At one place, I asked if they had skirt steak, and they offered to pound a strip steak out for me. I also miss Cajun Spice Ruffles, darn it.
  10. This thread is a good example of why eGullet is such a useful resource for me. St Germain is finally carried in NH -- it apparently arrived with no fanfare, because I keep a pretty close eye on the new arrivals list and never saw it, but there it was on the shelf today next to the lemoncello. Despite having heard so much about it, I was still pretty blown away by the flavor. My first thought was that I wished it'd been available during the brief strawberry season -- second, that it would have been nice in the stone fruit sangria I made last month. I'm going to get to the farmstand sometime before the weekend and see what fresh summer fruit is out there that would go well with this. Drinking Chris's Quatroni now (no oranges in the house, so no flamed orange twist), and it's terrific. I'm still new to Punt e Mes (not carried here), so there's a double novelty there, but even apart from that it's just plain good.
  11. Yeah, that's the problem I have with the New York Corn Whiskey. I paid a little over $20 for 750ml of Old Gristmill. The New York Corn Whiskey is $30-something for half as much, and the difference in proof certainly isn't enough to justify that. I don't know if I paid a clearance sale price on the Old Gristmill, since I bought it *just* before the NYCorn came out. Could be. But I can't talk myself into paying twice as much for it. I don't regret the purchase of the Baby Bourbon, and I bought it at the same time as the Old Gristmill so I could try them side by side, but I don't expect it to be a repeat purchase at that price.
  12. Tuthilltown Spirits' Old Gristmill corn whiskey is very cool stuff with a sort of cachaca-like funk. They've discontinued it in favor of a slightly higher-proof (92 vs 80) and pricier New York Corn Whiskey, which I haven't tried, but I'm definitely awake to the possibilities of unaged corn whiskey now.
  13. Given my success rate with Zirbenz Stone Pine Liqueur, it's not going to take many more failed experiments to use up the bottle. Last night's offering to the sink involved wheat whiskey, lemon juice, Zirbenz, and pimento dram.
  14. 5.39/lb in Nashua NH for softshells under 1.5 lbs; 7-something for softshells over that, 9-something for hardshells. I picked up two softshells for $12, made stock to add to a clam red sauce, and although I planned to add the claw and tail meat to some okra and tomatoes (we're finally getting produce after a long delay), I keep grabbing bites of cold lobster dipped in homemade Catalina dressing, and at this rate there isn't going to be any left.
  15. Ktepi

    Cynar

    I picked up my first bottle of Cynar recently, when I discovered drinkupny.com ships to NH (which has state-run liquor stores, and to which few vendors have a permit to ship). I've mostly been mixing it with Plymouth gin -- anywhere from 1:2 to 2:1 -- and adding a cube or two of frozen fruit juice. This was originally an accident, when I realized I didn't have any actual ice because I'd forgotten I'd filled the ice cube tray with Santa Claus melon juice the day before, but it goes really well with either melon or huckleberry... enough that I'm debating ordering more huckleberries just for the sake of filling more ice cube trays.
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