Hummingbird Down

Jon’s gotten into making honey syrup-based cocktails, something that seemed difficult until he actually tried it. Now he just whips up a little when he needs it by whisking honey and water together. Simple.

My favorite honey-based drink so far has been the Gold Rush, really just a whiskey sour with honey instead of sugar, and it was the best thing ever when I had a sore throat a few weeks ago. Jon wanted to do a bit of experimentation with other drinks, of course, and I was quite happy when he presented me with a Hummingbird Down last weekend. Bright and tart, the honey is just a lurking warmth in the drink, which is mostly a vehicle for the unusual flavor of green Chartreuse (which I happen to love). It was a hit.

happy Thanksgiving

It’s Thanksgiving Day here in the States, time to roast vegetables and cream spinach and carve turkeys and yell at football on television. Hope you all have a good one!

homemade stock

I’m not sure I could survive without homemade chicken stock. For my entire cooking life I’ve had a regular routine of roasting chickens or turkeys, picking the meat off them, then boiling the carcass and freezing the resulting stock in containers. For quite a while I only used stock for Chinese noodles, but then I discovered how much better all my soups were when I used stock instead of water. Then I discovered using stock to cook couscous, make pan sauces, and simmer greens (and don’t forget gravy). I go through stock at an amazing rate, and I can’t emphasize enough how much it helps my cooking. On the few occasions where I’ve had to use storebought, it just has not been the same.

The important thing to keep in mind about making chicken or turkey stock at home is, it’s really hard to mess it up. I know you’ve seen recipes in cookbooks that have you use a particular mix of vegetables, or roast the bones first, or double-boil the whole damn batch, or make little possets of herbs. You know what? You don’t have to do any of that. Dump your leftover bones or carcass in a pot. Cover it with water. Have some tired old celery or carrot tips? Throw ’em in if you want, but don’t feel obliged.

sloppy joe

This wasn’t an unqualified success, but it was fun. I had never, ever made sloppy joes before, so it was a total experiment. Both of us being products of the public school system, we were each traumatized by the high school cafeteria version of this dish (there’s a reason I ate peanut butter sandwiches all through school). As I recall, it’s basically a cheap hamburger bun topped with bad spaghetti sauce – anyone else remember more details? Anyway, we had some sweet potato rolls left over and I thought it would be fun to top them with a sort of piquant ground beef sauce and let them get all soggy. And it was!

For the sauce, I sauteed an onion, mixed in a pound of ground beef from our previous cow (the new cow is in the freezer, but there’s still a bit left of the old one) and added a bit of Pendleton’s barbecue sauce. That tasted a little odd to me, so I added half a can of diced tomatoes, some fresh garlic and quite a bit of salt, and it came together pretty well (I think the garlic really did the trick). I cut the rolls in half, toasted them lightly, and dumped the sauce all over, with a bit of fresh sauteed spinach on the side. We opened a rich toasty Zinfandel. It was not at all like high school.

blintz

When it comes to festive breakfasts, it’s hard to beat a blintz. A soft white crepe wrapped around a cheesy filling, fried golden and drizzled with syrup…I’m making myself hungry just writing about it. Blintzes were one of the foods my husband wooed me with (along with breakfast burritos, chocolate pudding and curry (no, not all at once)) and I’d say they worked quite well.

There are a lot of directions you can go with blintzes. Sometimes we put fruit in, or you could make a different flavor of crepe to wrap around (buckwheat, perhaps?), but they’re really great made plain, so everyone can put whatever topping on they want. You could even do them savory: mushrooms seem like an obvious thing to try.

what will they think of next

toothpastefordinner.com

I was going to say something witty about this one, but I’m actually speechless.

snug in a rug

A couple of days ago I was feeling cruddy, so I stayed home and turned on the fireplace. Mickey immediately climbed into the big armchair, curled up in the wool blanket, and stayed there for something like ten hours. Oh, the life of a housecat.

I had to sit on the couch. I know my place in this household.

Jack Rose

So last week I told you about the Deep Blue Sea, which is a drink that I really like but my husband doesn’t really care for. It only seems fair that this week I should tell you about a drink that he loves, the Jack Rose. Popular during Prohibition, its fame has dwindled but it remains a classic.

What I find kind of funny is that he first saw this drink in Danny Meyer’s book Mix Shake Stir, which I brought home from the library, and he got a bee in his bonnet that he wanted to make it. He actually went out and bought a bottle of Laird’s Applejack just so he could make this (well, and a few other recipes that called for it. He’d never actually tasted it, though.) Once he had rounded up the ingredients and tried it, it was an instant hit. The sweet-tart of the grenadine and lime (sometimes lemon), combined with the applejack, produces the effect of a ripe tart apple, something Jon is very fond of when it’s just at the right point.

The paper-thin apple slice on top of the drink was inspired by a photo in the Meyer book. It’s showy, but makes the cocktail awfully hard to drink. I might recommend a thin wedge stuck on the edge of a glass, unless you’re trying to impress people.

Jack Rose Cocktail

• 1 ½ oz Laird’s applejack or apple brandy
• ½ oz lime juice
• 1 tsp grenadine

Shake with ice, strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with an apple slice.

wine tasting: some good stuff

We can always count on Tom Saunderson, Young’s Columbia rep, to bring good stuff when he does a wine tasting at Gretchen’s, and he definitely didn’t disappoint this time. And the food wasn’t too bad, either.

We started off with a bang, with flutes of sparkling Riesling from Pacific Rim Winery, and an assorted plate of goodies including scallops, shrimp, green onion gougères, green salad and blue-cheese-wrapped grapes rolled in pecans. The following wine, a 2007 Willakenzie Pinot Gris, went beautifully with the food but almost everyone had cleaned their plates already.

mushroom lasagna

This is an awesome lasagna. I’m not kidding, it’s really, really good. Unless you don’t like mushrooms, of course, in which case I can’t help you. This is all about the mushrooms. And the cheese.

I got the idea for this lasagna from a recipe in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, but I embellished it a bit with extra cheese and a generous amount of sausage, because I tend to feel that sausage makes everything better. One technique of hers that I think is really key here is adding the porcini soaking liquid to the bechamel. It gives the creamy sauce an earthy perfume that I find irresistible.