cdh

Reminds me of an NYC take-out menu classic: steamed little juicy buns... which were sorta soup dumplings...

I grew up in a cocktail house as well... you could tell the season by the contents of the liquor cabinet- Gin in the spring, rum in summer, and Bourbon for the rest of the year. But what really engaged me in the cocktail culture was Hotwired's Cocktail column back in the mid-90's when they were still adding content. It was great! A friend and I would get together weekly and make the drink of the week... Paul Harrington and his cohorts inspired me to go hunting for Luxardo maraschino, Fee's bitters, and Amer Picon, and any number of other obscure cocktail accessories.

I decided to experiment with these recipes this year, and since it is time to pick the walnuts, I just did so yesterday. I have about two dozen halved little black walnuts presently sitting in about a pint of vodka... no change in color so far, so it doesn't look anything like motor oil yet. I figure that 2 dozen walnuts will be enough for a quart or so, judging by the recipes upwards in the thread. At only 80 proof, the vodka seems suboptimal. Has anybody tried making this sort of thing with 151 proof rum as opposed to just plain vodka? Would the nutty herbal thing go with the rum flavor? I live in a state that outlawed Everclear, and haven't noticed it in the neighboring states either, so that seems out of the question.

Sam- I can't recommend the Boyajian citrus oils enough. They are really the same as the stuff the you get out of the zest of a citrus fruit. There are citrus scented olive oils out there that would not work, but these oils really do. I've got both lemon and orange, and they are just like the effect of a twist. I regret I didn't pick up a bottle of the lime when I bought these two (back in 1998, if I recall correctly.) Need to track down a supplier and round out my citrus oil collection. I recall seeing them sold in much smaller bottles the last time I saw them... which is actually kinda reasonable, since the 5 oz bottles I've got have seen maybe a half ounce of use in the last 7 years, and that includes using some as an adjunct in a brewing experiment when the orange peel I was planning to throw into a Witbier just didn't have enough orange aroma going on. Edited to add: did a bit of googling, and they still sell their oils in 5 oz bottles... and in 1 oz bottles too. And they offer a tangerine oil... which sounds quite interesting too.

A good garnish is part of the value added by a good bartender. At home when mixing cocktails, I admit that I hardly ever garnish with anything at all. The effort is just not worth it to me. If a drink needs citrus oils to be right, I already have a lifetime-and-a-half's supply of Boyajian oils (back when they sold them in 5 oz bottles)... a chopstick tip dipped in the oil and then dipped in the drink does the trick quicker and more easily than molesting a lemon or lime zest in effort to make a pretty twist. Getting a pretty twist in a drink ordered out is a sure sign of a truly competent bartender, however... and makes me happy. Maraschino cherries are kinda gross, and I gladly omit them when making manhattans. The cherries they put in Manhattans at Angel's Share (in Manhattan), on the other hand are wonderful, and further evidence for how they strive for cocktail perfection there. (They also do a mean shiso leaf garnish for a couple of drinks that is out of this world!) What garnishes really make the cocktail? Besides the Martini/Gibson/Buckeye thing, what other drinks are truly dependent on their garnishes?

Didn't we have a Daily Gullet article a year or two ago that featured somebody's adventures fermenting anything he could get his hands on for free?? I say again: ICK! ACK! BLECHHHH!

Down in Texas the Mexican markets sell cast aluminum ones for dirt cheap... I bought one for something like $2.99 and used it for a few months before I ran into a particularly ornery lime... which snapped one of the handles off... not the joint pin, but right in the middle of the handle. I then picked up a very pretty lemon yellow enameled one like Fat Guy admires, and have used it ever since with no problems... Great tool. A stainless one would be very pretty and probably the most resistant to the destructive powers of ornery citrus fruits.

The recent mentions vanilla tea just jogged my memory and brought back very pleasant recollections of a tea sample I received 5 or 6 years ago... so my data is aged, but with luck the product is still around. Anyway, it was from Tea Trader, a Canadian tea vendor that was active amongst the Usenet community called rec.food.drink.tea. I have no recollection of what they called it, but it was a deliciously rich vanilla flavor blended into a nice black tea base. When the tea overstock situation in my kitchen subsides, I have to track this down and get some...

Just want to revive this thread to say these abominations are still on the market, and I finally tried one yesterday. The Kool-Aid comparison is spot on. These things don't taste like real grapes... they taste like fake grapes. And they smell like fake grape flavor too. Echh! Ick! Blah!

here's my stab at the quiz: 1 Parsley 2 Sage 3 Rosemary? 4 Thyme 5 Chives 6 Peppermint 7 Lavendar 8 Bay 9 ? 10 Lemon Balm 11 Oregano/Marjoram 12 disclosed as Dill 13 Sage 14 Borage 15 - 20 ? 21 Looks like yellow cilantro 22? 23 Sweet Woodruff 24 Purple Basil 25 ? 26 Lovage 27 -29 ? 30 Basil 31 Mint 32 Thyme

Hmmm... there went my thoughts about nos 12 and 15. 12 is a dead ringer for my tarragon, and 15 looks a bit like chervil... Wonder what they are, then.

Would love to see more photos of things growing. Your herb garden is prodigious. Do you dry or otherwise preserve any of your herbal crops? Also, are some of your herbs' leaves really yellow, or is that a result of lighting and camera effects? Your sweet woodruff looks much happier and healthier than mine... what do you do with it? It has a wonderful aroma almost like baked goods-- sweet and spicy... but I've not figured much to do with it besides incorporating into wheat beers I brew. I'd love suggestions.

Neat to see somebody trying to fight the meme about canned beer being bad beer. In PA, Yuengling does cans and they're indistinguishable from the bottled product (though less expensive). Cans have some things going for them: durability, chillability, light blocking... I hope more breweries follow this lead. Much easier to bring a 6pack of cans along than a 6pack of bottles. Canning beer certainly got a lift when Guinness started with their pub draught cans a long while ago. Guinness pub draft is a fine product. That said, the beers I drink most are my own homebrew, which only comes in bottles because that is all I put it into.

Wow! If Capogiro is really a pale shadow of Canadian and Bostonian top-end ice cream, I really need to go and visit those spots. I've not found any lack of vividness of flavor in anything I've had at Capo. If there are ice creams that make their stuff taste washed out, I MUST find and try them. Or maybe not... I'd be spoiling myself for what is readily available.

Hendricks Farm is right in my neighborhood... I'd say much less than an hour from downtown. Depends on traffic, of course, but in the evening when the Schuylkill and Blue Route are clear I can get from parked in CC to home in 45 minutes, and Hendricks farm is 10 minutes closer to town than I am.

Welcome indeed! Would love to read about your adventures in entrepreneurship!

Well, my wit is done (or at least retired to its bottles)... though I tossed a bit of the Roeselare culture in after the main fermentation subsided, so this will be a slightly different wit... I think the Rodenbach flavor profile might be fun with a witbier... we'll see. And I couldn't resist the call of all those empty bottles in my basement, so I did put together another beer to ferment off the sediment from tht wit... 3 lbs ultra light dry extract, 1 lb wheat dry extract, with 6oz each of 20L Crystal, 48L CaraMunich and 145L Special B steeped in. Sort of a light-bodied reddish beer is the thought... Maybe a witty red... maybe I should call this GB Shaw Ale... he was certainly a witty red... hmmmm.... Took a different tack with this brew, having read that malt extracts have already been boiled, so they don't need the really long boil that the hops do... Consequently, I did the steep as usual, the grain into a bag into cold water, onto the burner until the water boiled. This time I tossed the bittering hops (1 oz Magnum) into the cold water with the steeping bag, a feeble attempt at replicating the "first wort hopping" technique that I've also read about recently. Brought the kettle to a boil and let it boil for 35 minutes before I added any of the DME. Then let the malt boil for just 25 minutes in the hoppy steepy water... added 2.5 oz of finishing hops (1.25 Columbus, 1.25 Centennial) 5 minutes before I took it off the boil. Cooled this batch while bottling the wit, and then diluted it down to 5 gallons and poured it onto the yeast sediment left by the wit. A few hours in, it is bubbling away like mad. I'm considering tossing in the remaining ounce or so of Centennials and Columbus as dry hopping after the main fermentation settles down. I wonder if so light bodied a beer could handle a dry hopping.

Sounds like a fun winemaker, and a wonderful iconoclast. Anybody here tasted any of his wines? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/25/dining/25pour.html?8hpib

Your question seems as though it deserves a thread of its own rather than getting buried in here... but to answer it so that Katie or Holly can move the answer along with the question, I'd say that it is all in the palate of the taster. Leaving a wine open for 24 hours will certainly change it. Whether you like the change is another thing. It won't be acetic battery acid... but it may lose some of the flavor elements you liked in it... but then again, it may have developed other elements you might like too. It won't be "bad" in the sense that it might kill you... but it might be bad in the sense you won't like it as much. Taste it and let us know.

Late in the season? My fish guys got their first of the season last week. Granted they said they held off on the initial purchase, as the first offer they got was at $57/doz wholesale. They'd obviously dropped significantly below that price, as they were going at $4/each retail, and were delicious dredged in seasoned flour and sauteed in butter.

Since this event is now semi-commercial in nature, how would that affect us homebrewers who were thinking of bringing beer to the shindig? Charging for tix generally crosses the line from friendly party into a regulated space, at least up here on the other side of the Mason Dixon line. Would I have to become licensed by the state of NC and pay excise tax to donate homemade beer to the cause? Will you need to acquire a site license to dispense any booze that is brought?

Reasonable analogy based on empirical observations... but my issue with it is that by definition Vodka should have no taste, while chicken, on the other hand, should. The fact that chicken is like vodka is more of a statement of manufacturing defect about the chicken than anything else. That fact that tasteless things accept the flavors they're mixed with is not all that profound. Tofu would be easily substitutable for either chicken or vodka in the proposition.

I've got a South American set as well... Baker's writing about drinks is wonderful... I had no idea the SAGC was rare... I picked mine up for a song as well. Getting a pair of the original in the slipcover rather than as the bound-into-one-volume reprint would be nice... but I've got all the relevant Baker texts available...

Keeping it flat sure helps with preventing sampling. I'm considering doing it entirely force carbonated rather than bottle conditioning... there is already a big layer of dropped yeast at the bottom of my secondaries, so I'll need to rack it again into something... That saison recipe sounds simple and likely to be quite tasty. The simple ones are often really good. A couple of years ago I decided to do a breakin-the-rules brew and steeped a whole pound of Special B in 6 lbs of light DME. So much for all those warnings about keeping the Special B at 1/4 lb per 5 gallons... this beer was good! Need to do more experimental brews. Maybe I'll need to concoct a recipe to toss onto the yeast cake at the bottom of the wit that's fermenting now... hmmmmm.... maybe I'll just take yours... though the hops I've got lying around are Magnums, Columbus and Centennials...

That strikes me as the key distinction here. We must accept vineyards as farms because part of vineyard-ness is actually raising the grapes that are turned into wines. Wineries, on the other hand, may purchase all the grapes they turn into wine from other growers elsewhere. So, a vineyard is a farm that grows grapes and may (but need not) produce wine. A winery is a place that makes wine but does not necessarily grow any grapes. A vineyard that is also a winery must be a farm. A winery without a vineyard cannot be a farm (unless they grow things that are not grapes). Woo hoo! Fun with logic. Extra credit to anybody who can translate that into symbolic logic and generate the truth table.