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paw

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Posts posted by paw

  1. There must be some sort of convergent evolution going on in the cocktail world. I "invented" a pomegranate cosmo over the weekend. My brilliant friend Steven turned me on to the fact that Pernod or any licorice-flavored spirit does wonderful things to pomegranate juice. Hence, this cocktail:

    Doctor’s Orders

    1.5 oz vodka

    1 tbsp Cointreau

    1.5 tsp fresh lime juice

    1 oz pomegranate juice (fresh or Pom brand)

    splash of Pernod, Ouzo, or other licorice-flavored spirit

    Splash some Pernod into a chilled cocktail glass, swirl it around well, and dump it out. Pour all remaining ingredients over ice in a shaker, shake and strain into the glass.

    I wouldn't consider this a perfected cocktail--I'm going to tinker with it a bit--but it's highly drinkable nonetheless.

  2. Lucy,

    I too want to thank you for sharing that recipe.

    I've been playing around with homemade infused aperitifs lately and have a couple cookbook recommendations. Alice B. Toklas's Aromas and Flavors of Past and Present (pretty sure i've got the title right) has a wonderful chapter on what she calls "ratafias." I've made the apricot and it was unbelievably delicious. Some others seem cool too. Another Alice, Mme. Waters of Chez Panisse, has a couple ideas in her Fruits cookbook. I've made the vin de pamplemousse (very nice although I modified it a bit--she has you use whole grapefruits and I removed all the white pith first, which took forever, but was worth it, because the drink is now just bitter enough to make it a great aperitif whereas I fear that with full-on pith it would have been really tough to take) and the vin de peche (made with peach leaves, as ludja mentioned below; find yourself a friend with a peach tree, or just wait til peaches are in season and pick the leaves off the fruit at the farmers' market--nobody else will want them and even if the farmer charges you for them, they weight next to nothing) which was cool but I'd cut back on sugar next time.

    There's definitely more out there if you keep looking. James Beard's American Cookery has an old recipe for Raspberry Cordiall; many of these infused wines and spirits went by the name Cordial or Cordiall in the Olden Days. They were also generally made with brandy but as Beard notes, the Raspberry Cordiall is better made with vodka, which wasn't available to 19th century Americans. At some point I'll dig up some of these ancient cookbooks and look for more recipes.

  3. Doctor’s Orders

    There must be some sort of convergent evolution going on in the cocktail world. I "invented" a pomegranate cosmo over the weekend. My brilliant friend Steven turned me on to the fact that Pernod or any licorice-flavored spirit does wonderful things to pomegranate juice. Hence, this cocktail

    • 1-1/2 fl oz vodka
    • 1 T Cointreau
    • 1-1/2 tsp fresh lime juice
    • 1 fl oz pomegranate juice (fresh or Pom brand)

    splash of Pernod, Ouzo, or other licorice-flavored spirit

    Splash some Pernod into a chilled cocktail glass, swirl it around well, and dump it out. Pour all remaining ingredients over ice in a shaker, shake and strain into the glass

    Keywords: Cocktail

    ( RG916 )

  4. Doctor’s Orders

    There must be some sort of convergent evolution going on in the cocktail world. I "invented" a pomegranate cosmo over the weekend. My brilliant friend Steven turned me on to the fact that Pernod or any licorice-flavored spirit does wonderful things to pomegranate juice. Hence, this cocktail

    • 1-1/2 fl oz vodka
    • 1 T Cointreau
    • 1-1/2 tsp fresh lime juice
    • 1 fl oz pomegranate juice (fresh or Pom brand)

    splash of Pernod, Ouzo, or other licorice-flavored spirit

    Splash some Pernod into a chilled cocktail glass, swirl it around well, and dump it out. Pour all remaining ingredients over ice in a shaker, shake and strain into the glass

    Keywords: Cocktail

    ( RG916 )

  5. I both write and edit--and I've long thought that one of the dynamics that hurts the overall quality of food writing has to do with how people become food writers. To wildly overgeneralize: food writers do it primarily because they love food, not because they love writing, or are any good at it. Food writing in general tends to be a second or third career--typically, somebody's punching the clock at a law firm or whatever, and they realize that the only happy hours of their life are spent in the kitchen or at the table, and they try to break in to food journalism. Only in rare cases do writers who've honed their craft in other fields remake themselves as food writers. This we can call the Trillin Trajectory: an already great writer realizing the food is fertile territory for his talents. Of course Trillin obviously loves food. And a love of food is a great asset to a food writer. But he already a great writer before he started writing about food. Liebling too.

    One more thing: writing about food is harder than it looks, as all the writers here well know. So a lot of perfectly competent writers can quickly find themselves in over their heads when they try to describe how something tasted, how a meal made them feel, etc. This is hard-core stuff.

    I don't mean to suggest that passion and knowledge are not necessary to great food writers. But they are not sufficient.

    But is this an exclusively American phenomenon? I doubt it.

  6. This is something a have a bit of experience with.

    First, on Absente vs. true Absinthe: The only difference between the two is that Absente is palatable, while true absinthe is generally not. I was just a small child when van Gogh and Verlaine where flirting with the green fairy, but my recollection is that nobody ever thought of the stuff as an epicurean experience.

    I've had three brands of true absinthe--two from Portugal (actually not entirely positive the portuguese use wormwood, i've heard conflicting reports) and one from the Czechs. For my first taste, I ordered a glass from a Lisbon cafe on a hot summer afternoon. You want ice, the waiter asked? Not me. Well it was abominable. You need the ice. You need the sugar. You need all the help you can get because the taste of absinthe is bitter and aggressive. Hence, the much-romanticized tradition of holding a sugar cube on absinthe palette over your glass and slowly trickling water over it.

    So why did anyone drink it? I believe the answer to that is that it was outrageously strong. The absinthe I brought back from Portugal (by the case, don't ask me how I got it through customs) was 69% alcohol. I held in my hand a bottle that was 75% but I saw my life flash before my eyes and put it back on the shelf. I also believe that most, if not all, of absinthe's effects--both the sought-after stoned state and the not-as-sought after degeneracy--were not due to the wormwood but were simply the result of people getting really seriously wasted. (However I have experienced the "blurred edges" phenomenon that mayapple reports. This is particularly pleasant when you're drinking absinthe by candle light, as you should. Never had any hallucinations, though.)

    My criticism of Absente is that it's a bit too sweet. Michel Roux was going for a mass audience, and wanted his product sold at bars and restaurants, so I think he overdid it with the sugar. By no means should you follow the label instructions and add even more sugar, even if you have a fancy silver absinthe palette that you found in an antique shop in the Marais.

    Actually, there's another absinthe substitute on the market that I prefer: Versinthe. (At least it was on the market 2 years ago; I haven't seen it lately.) Less sweet for sure, and more complex, with fun herbal flavors. Even better than the real thing if you ask me. If you can find it, check it out.

    If you're curious about Absente, give it a whirl. But don't do it because you're hoping it'll taste like true absinthe.

  7. Well I plunged fearlessly forward, following Alice B to the letter, and have been rewarded with a truly delicious apricot aperitif. I highly recommend this to anybody who's even mildly interested in experimenting with homemade infusions. The recipe is in her Aromas & Flavors of Past & Present.

    Tonight, I bottle it. (My only deviation from her recipe was to refrigerate the white wine/brandy/sugar/apricot/cinnamon stick mixture rather than leaving it at room temperature. The air's been so humid lately I was afraid the apricots would grow mold.)

    Emboldened by success, I now plan to make my own version of Southern Comfort with bourbon and peaches. Beans do you remember the proportions of your peach brandy recipe?

  8. Gourmet has been doing stories like the fair-trade and jamaican coffee pieces ever since Ruth Reichl arrived. I'd like to suggest a somewhat more sympathetic reading of the situation. Ruth charged into the magazine, determined to bring it into the modern world. Her assumption, I believe, was that the world was full of people who took food just as seriously as she did. Hence, the investigative pieces, the emphasis on journalism over old-fashioned "ah-the-good-life" food stories. But then I believe she smacked her head against an uncomfortable reality, which is that Gourmet is a mass-market publication, not a niche magazine. And the mass market goes to a food magazine for help in figuring out what to make for dinner tonight, and perhaps for a bit of fantasy about a lovely holiday on the amalfi coast. Editing a magazine for hard-core foodies wasn't going to give her the 900,000 circulation she needed. So the negative, feel-bad journalism got pushed way down in the mix, and although it's still there, it's even more at odds with all the mainstream stuff than it was a couple years ago. Which is why, I think, it sticks out.

  9. The King Eider is very comparable to the Vya as far as quality.  The Eider is a bit more herbal though.

    King Eider has a more pronounced bitterness. It's also a bit less complex than Vya (not necessarily a criticism.) I find the Vya richer--more full bodied and just more going on in there. So much going on, in fact, that I wouldn't put it in a martini. It may be the tastiest vermouth out there, but that doesn't mean it's the best mixer. For that, I'll have to agree with the others who favor Noilly-Prat dry.

  10. So I'm trying to figure out what to do with all the summer fruit at the farmers market now, and I vaguely remembered that alice b. toklas gave a bunch of recipes for ratafias and other liqueurs in her later, less famous cookbook Aromas and Flavors. She says the best of them is made with apricots. It's basically fresh apricots steeped in brandy with sugar.

    Now before I commit several dozen lovely aromatic apricots to a boozy grave, I'd like to know if anybody has tried to make this or any of toklas's other home-brews. Some of the recipes in her first cookbook are notoriously impossible.

  11. I finally started reading it last night and stayed up much later than I should have. It's amazingly entertaining. Tower is a hell of a writer, all the more so because you never catch him working at it. Did I learn anything about food? Not sure. Do I believe everything he says? Hell no. Do I need his image of James Beard's bathrobe falling open, or Tower's comparison of Beard's penis size vs. hand size (hands win hands down)? Christ no. But I'd much rather read California Dish than any of the more sober works on Alice Waters, the food revolution, etc.

  12. Actually, you've got it backwards. I had the kobe burger at Old Homestead for lunch today. Yes, it is decadent (and I mean that in the traditional sense, before it started getting applied to chocolate chip cookies). Yes, it is sickeningly expensive. Yes, I felt oddly guilty about eating it, and I didn't know i had the Guilt gene. And yes, the thing is too damn big. Four of us ordered it, all healthy young men, and nobody could finish it. I'd have to guess that you're getting close to a pound of beef. And the kitchen makes the patties way too thick--an inch and a half minimum--so there's no way to cook them evenly. All four of us asked for medium rare, but the done-ness of the meat varied widly; mine was brown throughout, somebody else's was bloody-raw in the center.

    Nevertheless. This was one extremely delicious burger. Juicy (all that fat!), very flavorful, and well seasoned (decent salt level, although I think I tasted something less welcome in the mix, like steak sauce? not sure). I kicked the microgreens to the side of the plate where they belonged. Ditto the lobster mushrooms. Just beef and bun for me, and after eating half the burger, I gave up on the bun, too. It was just taking up valuable stomach space.

    The db burger, on the other hand, is a press release masquerading as a meal. I've had plenty of good things at db, so it's clear the kitchen knows right from wrong. I have to conclude the burger is just a gimmick.

  13. All right, now the same thing has happened to me.

    Going to Paris the end of this month with some friends who asked their hotel to book us a table at L'Astrance. Two weeks ago we got word back that we had a table for 4 at 8:30 on Saturday the 30th. Then late last week the hotel emailed to say that when they called to confirm the reservation, L'Astrance said they were fully booked on the 30th. Now we are wait listed.

    Normally I'd blame the concierge. But now I wonder. I'm going to investigate.

  14. A friend who just got back from Paris says Hermé has a new pastry shop on the rue Bonaparte. She reports that the macarons and the kougelhopf are the best she's ever had, and she knows her stuff.

    Is the rue Bonaparte address the one that was rumored to be in peril?

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