Chris Hennes

OK, here are a couple more photos of the one I only had the front of before:

I was at our local megamart last night and started tossing packages of pickled mustard into the basket. Just in Every Grain of Rice alone Dunlop lists six different varieties of pickled mustard, and I'm assuming there are actually many more out there. I came home with four that I'd never tried before, but now I need help relating these to the six that Dunlop lists. Maybe in some cases they are literally the same product, or maybe they have some resemblance, or maybe they are fundamentally different. I have no way of knowing! The six that Dunlop lists are (using her characters and translations here): "Olive" vegetable (gan lan vai) Pickled mustard greens (suan cai, pao cai) Sichuan preserved vegetable (zha cai) Sichuanese ya cai (ya cai) Snow vegetable (xue cai, xue li hong) Tianjin preserved vegetable (dong cai) Now, here are the four packages that I came home with: 1) 2) 3) 4) Do any of these packages map to what she is talking about?

Last night, Crux .75 Cognac .75 Dubonnet Rouge .75 Cointreau .75 Lemon Juice The instructions said to stir, I shook. The color is really striking.

A couple from this past week I didn't get around to posting: Seattle Manhattan (a Manhattan with half the vermouth replaced by coffee liqueur) Corpse Reviver #2

Yeah, torn up and added to the tin. They add a fantastic flavor note.

Companero (by Sean Muldoon) 1 oz rum .5 oz white creme de cacao .5 oz lime juice 3 torn basil leaves .25 oz sugar syrup It doesn't need the simple syrup, IMO, but otherwise a fantastic drink.

Another La Louisiane, different ratio (.75 of all the main spirits)...

"Limp" is a good description. Totally drinkable, lovely thirst-quencher, not exactly an exciting flavor profile. Serve it by the pitcher.

This evening: Tango (from Hess's The Essential Bartender's Guide) .5 oz rum .5 sweet vermouth .5 dry vermouth .5 Benedictine .5 orange juice

I'd love some more recs for IAH in Houston -- I've got two standbys, Popeye's and Le Grand Comptoir. Popeye's is great, and I do love chicken biscuits for breakfast, but you can't exactly kill time on a long layover there. For that I go to Le Grand Comptoir, whose food is so-so, but they have a pretty decent wine list with basically everything available in four different sizes ranging from 100mL to the whole bottle. I think there's a Smashburger going in, but I haven't flown through since the beginning of the summer and it wasn't open yet then, and again, you can't kill time there. I've tried 3rd Bar Eating House a couple of times and it's been hit and miss. Barcüterie is fine for a quick bite and a drink, especially if you're on a puddle-jumper leaving from that mass of gates. Cat Cora's Kitchen only has one thing on the menu that I like (one of the salads), but if I'm in the mood for that salad I'll go there. I ate at Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen once, but don't really remember much about it.

I did, but I made it in 5x9 pans, not the 4x8 she calls for. So I wound up with two 5x9 loaves and one small free-form loaf that I ate immediately out of the oven. Which I figured was OK because the instructions say to cool before slicing, and I didn't slice it.

Using the loaf of bread I randomly made last night: grilled cheese sandwiches.

With the release of Modernist Bread imminent, it's time to revisit my bread-baking skills. For years I've basically only made the basic loaf from Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day, with an occasional kick over to Reinhart's Pain à l'Ancienne (which I consider the finest bread in my arsenal). Last night I took it into my head to dig through my old bread cookbooks and make something a bit faster. Which is to say, it was 8pm and I wanted to be eating fresh bread by midnight. Prior to the release of the other two books, my go-to bread book was The Bread Bible: Beth Hensperger's 300 Favorite Recipes -- so last night I pulled it off the shelf and made the Oatmeal Bulgur loaf: Obviously is much more of a sandwich loaf than the artisan-style loaves in the other books, but I did in fact have it out of the oven at something like 11:55pm. I enjoy the texture, and it really does make a good sandwich.

And round two: Bordeaux Cocktail (by Tito Class) 2.25 oz citrus vodka .75 oz Lillet Blanc I had an unopened bottle of Absolut Citron that I bought when I lived in Pennsylvania (a decade ago!). I am not sure what cocktail I bought it for, but I'm getting some use out of it this week. Obviously the drink isn't much to look at, particularly since my lemons are anemic and so I didn't give this one a garnish. All the color in the photo is actually a fisheye of the room behind the glass. I also tried taking the photo without the condensation on the glass, but the crystal-clear upside-down panorama of my living room didn't seem like a great subject

Which, I will add, is far and away the best breakfast at O'Hare. You can, in fact, sit down and get table service there if the line isn't long, or if there is seating at their small bar. I love Tortas Frontera. Even if I weren't trapped in an airport with it, I'd eat there.

Round one this evening, Bloomsbury (by Robert Hess) 2 oz gin .5 Licor 43 .5 Lillet Blanc 2 dashes Peychaud's

Terminal B at Denver International has been undergoing a food renaissance over the past year or two. Most notably, the previously dismal sit-down breakfast option (Pour la France) have been supplemented by the excellent Elway's. Elway's is a rather expensive steakhouse at other times of day, but their breakfasts are both reasonably priced and quite delicious. Which is not to say that at other times of day they aren't still your best sit-down bet at DEN right now, but there are several other new places I haven't tried yet. I'm also almost always going through DEN at breakfast time . Standouts at Elway's are their very non-traditional biscuits and gravy (served with scrambled eggs on the biscuits, and very large, thick, genuinely spicy homemade sausage patties) and the Short Ribs Benedict (short ribs replace the canadian bacon, and they add a tomatillo relish that is delicious).

Studies this small only have value as entry points for larger studies. The actual results aren't statistically significant enough to base any decision on, they just suggest that a larger study may be worth undertaking.

Still drinking the Peligroso (no idea its effect on bats)... Twenty-first Century Cocktail (Jim Meehan for PDT) 1.5oz tequila .75 creme de cacao .75 lemon juice pastis rinse

Tonight, Diabolo (apparently unrelated to the one in the Savoy?) 2 oz rum (I used light because it was handy) .5 oz Cointreau .5 oz dry vermouth 2 dashes angostura

No problem... Bridal (from Hess) 2 oz gin 1 oz sweet vermouth .25 oz maraschino dash orange bitters Garnish with a cherry.

Recipes for the Cosmopolitan seem to generally share the same ingredient list, but the ratios are profoundly different. Tonight I made Robert Hess's version, which is 1.5 oz citrus vodka .5 oz Cointreau 1 oz cranberry juice .75 oz lime juice Here at eG I also see @JAZ has posted a recipe in RecipeGullet, and Dale DeGroff posted his from the Rainbow Room. I personally like Hess's inclusion of so much lime juice, but I'm a sucker for citrus. What are your preferences for this drink? Other favorite variations?

Great news -- any difference between the two, or is the new one just a new outpost?

Bridal (gin, sweet vermouth, maraschino, orange bitters)

I made a Rosita tonight (using Peligroso blanco tequila, and including the angostura bitters that Hess's recipe calls for.