My parents often buy persimmons in the winter, which for some reason we never do. I took advantage of the opportunity to shoot a few images of this one. I love both the color of the fruit and the texture of the sepals, making it hard to decide whether I like it better in color or black and white. Which do you prefer?
This week’s Caturday features my parents’ cat Katie, now a media celebrity after her photo appeared in the Wenatchee World last week, as well as her status as Miss September in my Cats 2011 calendar, on sale now at Qoop. We are informed she has rather a swelled head about it all.
No matter how many odd original cocktails we try, sometimes you just can’t do better than the classics. A plain gin martini, served cold and up. A Manhattan with good vermouth. Or a Negroni.
In some ways the Negroni is the perfect holiday cocktail. It’s easy to make, being equal parts gin, campari and vermouth. It can be served up or on the rocks. The campari gives it a festive color, and its bitterness cuts through salty and fatty foods beautifully – I once made gougeres and stuffed them with bits of truffled salami, and after washing them down with Negronis can hardly imagine a better pairing. The drink acts as a digestif, settling the stomach and readying it for more eating. Sounds like Thanksgiving weekend to me.
Negroni
Stir the first three ingredients with ice, and strain into a cocktail or rocks glass. Garnish with a lemon or orange twist.
Stay warm, drive safely, and have a wonderful holiday. Thanks for reading.
The problem I have with the endless emails and web articles I see about “16 Thanksgiving side dishes” and “10 million pies” and “what to make for Thanksgiving this year” is that, like many people, I like to make the same things for Thanksgiving every year, and I don’t use recipes for most of them. When I’m in charge of dinner, I generally make turkey, mushroom-sage stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, roasted sweet potatoes, creamed spinach, and pecan pie. And I don’t need other people telling me how to make those things, as I’ve already done them, thanks.
I was going to do a roundup of Thanksgiving recipes from the past three years of my blog, only to discover that I haven’t really written most of them down – for the above reason, that I don’t really follow recipes for this sort of cooking. I do use a recipe for pecan pie, but it’s pulled straight from Baking Illustrated
And, since I’ve been so lame on the Thanksgiving post front, here are some posts from other bloggers giving a nice range of holiday experience and planning from past years, many of whom avoided all kinds of stress by simply leaving out the turkey:
It’s been very wintry around here the last few days, with snow and temperatures rapidly heading downward from freezing. We’ve been doing a lot of cooking with spices, ginger and chiles to take the edge off, like the udon and shrimp in Thai-spiced broth we had last night, or the Parsi goat curry the night before.
We were so excited when we found frozen halal goat meat at a small Indian grocery in Everett. We’ve thought about sourcing goat locally, but haven’t actually cooked with it before, so this seemed like a good opportunity to try it. When we thawed it out and took a look, though, it appeared that someone with a bandsaw had randomly passed a whole goat through the blade and tossed the chunks in a bag – I couldn’t tell what parts we had to work with, and there were odd pieces of bone everywhere. Oh, well, we were going to be braising it anyway.
We had completely run out of udon and soba, not a tenable state of affairs for our kitchen. We decided to make a run down to 99 Ranch Market in Edmonds to restock our Asian food pantry, and as long as we were down there, go out for Korean BBQ. We enlisted a pair of friends to help us out with dinner, which turned out to be a very good thing.
We went to Ka Won, a place I picked more or less at random but which was supposed to have good banchan. It was a great night to sit at one of the barbecue tables, as it was clammy and cold outside and the warmth from the grill was very welcome. With the waitress’ assistance, we ordered a barbecue set meal with black pig, beef rib and squid, plus an order of fatty brisket with mushrooms. We sat and drank warm tea and cold beer for a little while, then the food began to arrive.
…you may as well take a photograph of them. And then make cocktails.
The greenhouse window behind our kitchen sink used to have shelves in it. I’d start seedlings and transplants there, and left the space under the shelf free for the cats to sun themselves. Then I needed to move my jade plant to a new location, as it had completely outgrown its prior space, so we took out the shelves to make room. The cats still sun themselves in the space, but now they can pretend to be fierce jungle panthers peering through the foliage. I think they like it.
A bar in Seattle was recently reinvented (and by “recently” I probably mean, like, three years ago – I can’t keep track of these things). Once simply known as The Triangle, due to the shape of the building on its odd lot between diagonal streets, it now rejoices in the name 9 Million in Unmarked Bills. For ages I have tried to remember this name and have totally failed, falling back on “that place that used to be The Triangle”. But I know where the bar is, which is the important thing. They have a totally excellent “Prescriptions” sign over the bar, big round booths, fun happy hour food, and a really interesting cocktail list (except for the John Dillinger, which is just stupid – a shot of Bulleit and a cigarette).
The last time we stopped in I got something with tequila and cucumber – I don’t remember what it was called but it was very nice – and Jon, after much debating, chose a drink called a Brooklyn. It arrived in an ice-choked glass topped with a cherry, which didn’t seem promising, but he enjoyed the drink very much. When we got home he immediately looked it up and found it in Mr. Boston’s – apparently it’s a classic drink that we had simply never heard of or tried. We started making it at home, and it has at least temporarily pushed back the Brevity as the household whiskey drink. It’s like a Manhattan, but better.
The drink is really supposed to be made with a bitter liqueur called Amer Picon, which is more or less totally unavailable in this country. Since there’s only a dash of it in the cocktail we thought we’d just substitute an amaro such as Amaro Nonino. Turns out we’re not the first people to try this. Also, a lot of other recipes I’ve seen use dry vermouth, but Mr. Boston calls for sweet and that’s how we’ve been making it. I’m sure you could experiment.
This recipe makes a modest 2 ounce drink. You can scale up the recipe, or just make yourself another one when you’ve finished.
The Brooklyn
Combine all ingredients in a glass or shaker with ice. Stir and strain into either a cocktail glass or a rocks glass. Garnish with a cherry or an orange twist.
Food on the Brain 