Alcuin

I don't use raspberry syrup in my Daisy, but sometimes I do sub out the liqueur from curacao to creme de mure and it's good (you could call it a Bramble Daisy really). I don't see why Chambord wouldn't be good there.

I do this one sometimes too which is fast (but does have a little tomato and some non pantry ingredients): Begin cooking whole wheat pasta. Cook sliced garlic in olive oil ((and some optional onion, small dice), add plenty of cherry tomatoes cut in half cut side down. When the toms are soft, toss in a few handfuls of spinach (oil cured olives are a nice addition here too but not necessary). Add pasta water and cover for about 30 seconds. Add pasta and a knob of butter and toss. Plate and top with pecorino (or parm).

Good call! Made this with Havana Club Especial and TBT orange bitters, serves as a slightly mellowed dram of Cynar with powerful orange aromas. Drank this one last night-fantastic. With the orange and added power from the rum (used FdC 7) it reminded me of amaro Nonino. Definitely a keeper-thanks!

And of course theirs the beautiful combo of sausage, broccoli (preferably broccoli rabe), red pepper flakes, and pecorino romano with orechiette. The new Cucina Italiana has linguine with lemon, penne with sausage and saffron, tagliatelle with asparagus, taglietelle with mushrooms and prosciutto (all these are cream base), olive pesto, walnut sauce, anchovy sauce, spaghetti with onions and Vernaccia, etc. Once you get the basics down of how to do a cream based sauce (butter, cream, cheese), a pesto (sauce pounded to a paste), and a sauce with fat/alium base (the fat is maybe usually olive oil, but also may be rendered from diced charcuterie), its easy to riff by just elevating one thing, maybe a nice vegetable (broccoli, onion, zucchini), or a meat (guanciale, prosciutto), or a cheese (cacio e pepe), or even just the oil (aglio e olio). One of my favorites is peppercorn pasta: lots of toasted peppercorns (they take on a beautiful mellow fragrance) with spaghetti, olive oil, and salt. These is by no means meant to be rules, just a rule of thumb that seems to make sense to me from my experience. The success of these pastas mainly rests on the quality of ingredients. A lot of these pastas that I mention are meant to be eaten with other things so they're not necessarily designed to be one dish meals, though I think they can be especially with a chunk of cheese and bread, or maybe some lightly pickled veg and some charcuterie, if you feel like it.

Lemon, pine nut, parsley with angel hair Zest the lemon with a rasp, chop parsley, slice some garlic, get your pasta water going. Add a good amount of olive oil to the pan and add slivered garlic and the pine nuts, toasting the pine nuts a bit and cooking the garlic till just blond in color. (Add optional red pepper flakes now and cook a few seconds). Add a bit of pasta water and stir to mix into a sauce, then add very al dente pasta. Squeeze in lemon to taste (half lemon usually works for me, using about 1/2lb pasta) and add parsley. Turn off heat, add zest and drizzle some raw oil. This is a very fast dish, taking probably 3 minutes or a little more once your mise is ready. It makes a great side dish with grilled items too. Very summer-y.

Where do you get squash blossoms? In a grocery store? Outdoor market? Do they have a short or long season? Are they expensive? We're off to Utah again soon, and I've never seen a squash blossom in the local Kroger's, but then I didn't look. Not sure of the local Hispanic population. Certainly no Hispanic grocery stores. I've seen them in farmer's markets, but they tend to go down hill pretty fast. I just pick them from my garden where they're plentiful most of the summer.

I realize that - but I am interested in the vegetable usage in Mexican cuisine. Sometimes the only veggies we see in the more accessible Mexican dishes are in the salsas or the add-ins. When an employee was helping me out at home and saw zucchini flowers in my garden he commented on his mom making quesadillas with them. That sort of usage interests me. Have you taken a look at Bayless' _Authentic Mexican_? There are some nice vegetable dishes there too, like stewed squash blossom quesadillas, stewed mushroom quessadillas, potatoes and rajas, chile bathed vegetable tostadas, and vegetable enchiladas he calls I think enchiladas de la plaza. Good stuff. A lot of times I like to add a couple of squash blossoms in my cheese quesadillas too. You need a lot of blossoms though-they tend to shrink away when you heat them.

I don't have the recipe in front of me, but the problem lies in it's simplicity. The ingredients are vinegar (I used apple cider), water, cinnamon, clove, oregano, chicken and salt and pepper. There is just nothing there, but the vinegar and the spices; the oregano is totally lost. I keep wanting to compare this dish to a Filipino adobo, and while I realize that is not a fair assessment, at least adobo has the umami from the soy sauce and the fattiness/richness from the pork (which is browned before cooking) to balance out the vinegar. This recipe is just watered down vinegar and spice and that is what the chicken ends up tasting like. Personally I thought the beans helped add the richness the chicken was missing, but the chicken just wasn't very good to begin with. Not to say this recipe couldn't be tweaked. I'm sure it could be, but I think Bayless was deliberately trying to keep this one simple. He even names it "Easy Tostadas," but in this case I believe minimalism did not make for the best final product. I really don't like the idea of shredded chicken in escabeche. The reason I really like this dish is that the flavors are deep and layered from the initial poaching (resulting stock makes good rice) to the searing with the spice paste that brings out their aroma and adds some crust to the chicken, to the specially prepared and tweaked pickling sauce. One of my favorite dishes, but like any thing if you pare it down to much it;s no longer greater than the sum of its parts. It becomes just equal to the sum of its parts, maybe the worst thing to happen to a dish. Ah well, it's at least good to confirm the superiority of one method, even in contrast to the lameness of another.

I always find myself adding a lot more vinegar than I read in recipes for things en escabeche, maybe even a 1/4 cup but I don't measure. I like things tart though. It looks like the chicken in this recipe is pulled right? I like whole pieces poached, slathered in spice paste, grilled broiled or seared, then put in the pickling sauce. That might not work on a tostada though and its probably not easy either. But it is delicious (with extra vinegar!). edited for clarity

For a wine centered (but not just wine) blog I think Craig Camp's Wine Camp Blog stands out. For booze, Erik Ellestad's (AKA eje in these forums) Underhill Lounge where the Savoy project is now housed is pretty outstanding too.

I'm pretty sure they use the solera method (which I think was invented for sherry correct me if I'm wrong) in which rums of different years are blended together, from six on up to twenty three year old vatted together. edited to add: just went and checked and my bottle of Metusalem clasico is marked "solera blender 10." My bottle of Zacapa clearly says solera too.

Actually, bostonapothecary has suggested just that here. I can't recall if I've tried it or not, but I agree that it sounds like a worthwhile idea (even for those rationing the last of their Saint James). Looks interesting but I don't have St James and I was thinking of something a bit different anyway (ie not rhum). Maybe some experimentation is in order tonight. But it's true that a Gilroy variation probably won't highlight the rum unless you use something powerful. Maybe on second thought rhum agricole blanc is in order. Also, now that I think about it, I'd put a Ti Punch on the list too.

Nope but it is a favorite of mine: gin, cherry brandy, dry vermouth, lemon juice, orange bitters. Did you mean yes? Oops I guess I did-that's what I get for dashing off posts without thinking. Sorry. Then again, it might be fun to switch it up a bit and try it with rum-that'd be like an El Presidente with a bit of lemon. Tequila and creme de cassis might be nice though too...

Nope but it is a favorite of mine: gin, cherry brandy, dry vermouth, lemon juice, orange bitters.

I'd add an El Presidente to Chris' list, for something that goes in a bit of a different direction. It's not my favorite, and I drink one only every once in a while but it's a different look for rum I think.

I'm pretty sure I remember him saying that on Jacques and Julia Cooking at Home. Not apocryphal, just awesome.

It's important to keep this in context. AB is talking about accepting hospitality. It's one thing if you tell your mother in law that you can't eat her pot roast because you are a Hindu and can't eat beef. It's quite another thing if you say that you feel that slaughtering helpless animals is immoral. The former is a limitation you have (had) placed on yourself. The latter is a tacit accusation of immorality on behalf of the cook. What if someone does think its unethical to do though? It sounds like you're saying that there are limits to someone having such a belief: at some point it's not acceptable to think that way. If someone thinks that way though, they do and I'm not sure it's fair to say to a person that they just can't always have their convictions. That's what I don't like about the argument that if you have religious convictions, they're ok but if you have, say, philosophical convictions there's a point at which you have to give them up and just do what you don't want to do. I don't think the two are different and it's just as bad to deny someone their beliefs (about food) as it is to deny their gift of food (behind which stand some cultural beliefs).

I think you're making some excellent points, although diagnosing Bourdain as "self-loathing" goes a bit far ... I'd say it's reductive in the same manner as Bourdains own arguments that you're critiquing. It's worth remembering that the chapter in question is a rant, not a philosophical treatise. He characterizes it as "sputtering indignation," and this is what he delivers: broad strokes and a lot of passion. There are holes in his argument that you could drive a truck through, but I believe much of it is defensible. Kudos to you for critiquing his actual book and not some imagined version of it. You're probably right about the self-loathing bit-I thought when I wrote it that it's a bit ridiculous to psychologize a writer's persona and certainly presumptuous to diagnose a writer. And it's true Bourdain's generally pretty good at hedging and characterizing his writing to pull it towards witty and away from serious most times, which is why I like watching his show too.

It seems to me that this debate is predicated on a pretty shaky foundation: foodways are fine as long as they are cultural. If they are not, and are new and highly individual, they are not fine. Bourdain's view here is highly reductive and seems to be coming from his own self-loathing: a westernized culture of individualism (maybe especially severe for Americans?) in which people who can afford comfortable shoes can also afford to turn eating into a kind of faddish personal expression. That's a pretty ridiculous caricature and I'd suggest that it is alive and well in Bourdain's work (I'm speaking generally about it here) and comes from his struggle not to be the ugly American in the face of cultures that demand respect. What's going on here (says me) in Bourdain is the confusion between foodways, culturally defined ways of eating, and Culture (with a capital C that includes everything from science/religion to clothes to the way you conceive of things like space). They're not the same and you can have your own highly individualized ethos and respect another culture that has a completely different ethos without having to debase yourself or aspects of your culture (like Western Vegetarianism even though there's no such rigidly defined thing). I think he's doing a bit too much debasing--I like self-deprecation as much as the next person but there's a point where it turns into something negative. I think his experiences have led him to be too simplistic about comfortable shoe wearing Americans, a camp he firmly belongs in (and no doubt would acknowledge and has if not in so many words). Plus, it seems a bit fascist to me (defined as the elevation of a particular to an axiomatic and highly rigid general) to say that it is always wrong to pass on an offering of food because that always means that you are rejecting and offending someone's Culture. I may believe the former myself, but I have trouble with the rigidity of the latter and the violence with which Bourdain hits people with it (rhetorically, of course). If you don't believe in the former, I might try to persuade you but I'm not going to write you off and outright attack you, even if its just for the necessary element of sensationalism that's built into the Bourdain Brand (make no mistake, there is one). Then again, maybe I would do it for the money-I'll tell you when somebody offers. I've enjoyed Bourdain's books and I still every once in a while watch reruns of shows I've watched before. For my money, No Reservations is a great travel show-the best. I also like Bourdain's persona and shtick most of the time or at least it doesn't annoy me too much when it does. But Bourdain is not a sage or a very flexible thinker and I don't really take a lot of his views seriously because I just don't think they're that well thought out. He's a damn fine entertainer, an anthropologist however he is not.

I'm certainly no authority but I did drink some Damrak this very night and it doesn't bear much resemblance to genever. It's got some more body maybe, but nothing like the maltiness of the real deal. As a baseline, I'd compare it to London Dry.

Not necessarily-Junipero has a traditional profile as far as I'm concerned while Rangpur does not. Bombay Sapphire is from England, etc. I'd say its a style, like international wine, which can be made pretty much anywhere. International style is inoffensive to the palate and pushes fruitiness and plushness. This is at the expensive of the structure that a core of juniper gives you which is a baseline around which other botanicals may constellate, making for broad usability as well as innovation. My two cents anyway. Edited to say: don't they market Damrak as "international style"? I wonder what they mean by this...

I like this and I think there's a resemblance to international style wines, made with little local character and designed to appeal to the masses who don't like the subtlety and structure you tend to find in local traditions, especially those from the Old World. As for gin having cachet, I do think that's kind of cool but when you boil it down to the fact that there's a saturated vodka market and the next best installed base is gin, with concomitant dollars spent by the likes of Tanqueray to market not just their brand but the spirit itself, this coat-tail riding has likely only just begun. But if I can get one or two good gins out of it, I can ignore the junk. I don't know if it fits this category, but I quite like Small's which I only use in some applications but when I do it shines (eg martini with grapefruit bitters, gin fizz). Still takes a bit of judgment to match it though, that's why Beefeater's is my go to.

When I make them (from Maseca) they get pretty stale overnight (say 12 hours) but I've never used fresh masa so that might change things. I even went out today and paid an outrageous price for tortillas to save time on staling them which Bayless also says is possible if you very lightly toast them on a dry skillet. They were out of my local so I had to go for pricey organic stuff from California. Oh well, I'm sure they'll be good.

In Authentic Mexican he does have a recipe for tostadas. Basically he says you should buy stale, storebought tortillas or dry them out until they are leathery. Then you just fry at normal temp (375).

Hmmm some Chinese cookery has very efficient ways of downplaying unpleasant odors through application of things like rice wine to marinades of pork or chicken--or so I've read somewhere and I like the effect. I assume that the rubbing of the skin with sesame oil in white cut chicken is partly at least for the odor as well. I guess there's Chinese cooking and then there's Chinese cooking (ad infinitum!).