drink

Orange Bourbon Toddy

Posted on by Will Cox

The girls made a pumpkin bundt cake the other day, which called for an orange syrup. I had some left over, and tonight made a hot toddy. Several others in the house are sick or getting sick. I’m not yet, but it seemed appropriate.

To make the orange syrup, mix 1/4 cup of orange juice with 1/2 cup of sugar over low heat, stirring until the sugar is dissolved. After the sugar has dissolved, boil for two minutes, then remove from the heat. Allow to coil before refrigerating.

Orange Bourbon Toddy

  • 3 tsp. orange syrup
  • 1 1/4 oz. bourbon
  • 8 oz. (1 c.) boiling water

Build in a mug. Stir to blend.

The mug I used holds 12 oz. Your mug may be smaller or larger. Adjust as necessary.

drink

The Wise Sage

Posted on by Will Cox

James Frederic Rose, of the Temple Bar, New York, has come up with a tasty way to drain one’s bottle of Harvest Spirits‘s Core Vodka. I have misplaced my camera, so you’ll have to do with the distiller’s picture. The recipe below serves two.

Wise Sage

Wise Sage Muddle 6 fresh sage leaves, 4 slices of fresh apple, 2 ounce lemon juice, and 3 teaspoons of fine sugar. Add 4 ounces of Core Vodka. Shake with ice and strain in a chilled martini glass. Garnish with slice of apple.

drink

Old Fashioned Variation

Posted on by Will Cox

Substitute applejack for the bourbon.

Old Fashioned Variation

In an old fashioned, or rocks, glass place a half cube of sugar. Soak the sugar with two to three dashes of Angostura bitters. Add a splash, if that, of water. Muddle until the sugar is completely dissolved in the bitters. Muddle a small piece of orange peel. Add two ounces of applejack, and some ice.

drink

Johnny Chapman

Posted on by Will Cox

It’s a real pleasure to have friends over for dinner and cocktails. Last night was just such an occasion. I prepared a short cocktail menu of seasonal drinks that I wanted to try. One used Harvest Spirits Core vodka, another was the Gin Basil Smash described previously, and the third used Harvest Spirits Cornelius applejack: the Johnny Chapman. This proved to be a popular selection.

Johnny Chapman

Build over ice in a Mason jar.

  • 2 oz. Cornelius Applejack
  • 4 oz. fresh apple cider
  • squeeze one lemon wedge
  • top with soda water
  • garnish with a wedge each of apple and lemon

Note: the recipe is from a product description card provided by the distillery.

food

Buffalo Trace Bourbon Marinade

Posted on by Will Cox
  • 1/4 c. Buffalo Trace Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey
  • 1/4 c. extra virgin olive oil
  • 1/4 c. apple cider vinegar
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 tsp. sea salt
  • 1 tsp. fresh ground pepper

Combine the ingredients, then let your meat soak in it for several hours before grilling, turning every now and again to ensure that the meat is covered. I just put the flank steak for tonight and the marinade in a Ziplock freezer bag. They’ll sit in the refrigerator for the next eight hours.

drink

Gin Basil Smash

Posted on by Will Cox

Back when I wrote about mixing my wife’s pesto with gin, the Internet didn’t offer up any suggestions of what do with the pesto. Shortly afterward, however, I ran across this video of a Gin Basil Smash, which provided an idea of what to do the next time I have some fresh basil.

I was reminded of this today when I saw someone had come calling after looking for “gin and pesto,” and, more amusingly, saw that my post was the first result in Google for that search, while a few below was Jörg Meyer’s original description of his Gin Basil Smash, which he called Gin Pesto. I can’t read the German, but Google Translate helps — some. One can watch Jörg Meyer make it, if you’d like, in this nice video by Jay Hepburn.

(And, since it’s just a shame that a borrowed item is the top search result for Gin Basil Smash, here’s a link to the Mixology magazine article that was — how shall we say? — borrowed: Gin Basil Smash.)

I have some basil. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll see what this is made of.

drink

A Spirit, Sugar, Water, and Bitters

Posted on by Will Cox

This week I have been concentrating on the Old Fashioned, varying which bourbon I use, which bitters, which garnish, and the balance of sugar and water. I should, however, stop saving this last cherry for the next Rob Roy. The drinks are very different, just by varying the bourbon.

the ingredients

Tuthilltown Hudson Baby Bourbon Whiskey, at 46% ABV and made entirely of New York corn, is very smooth, and obviously corn. There’s a sweetness to it that’s not unlike fresh grilled corn on the cob. Given one word to use, I would characterize this whiskey as simple.

Buffalo Trace Kentucky Straight Whiskey — 45% ABV and made from Kentucky and Indiana corn, rye, and malted barley — is more complicated. I’m not quite sure how to describe it.

For each, I’ve used Gilway Demerara sugar cubes, picked up at my local grocer. The grocer also stocks Domino sugar cubes, but I usually prefer the taste of demerara or turbinado sugar. The cube was soaked with two to three dashes of either Angostura Orange Bitters or Angostura Aromatic Bitters. Careful with the dashes from the aromatic bitters bottle; the hole is larger than that on the orange bitters. The recipe as given previously calls for the aromatic bitters, which have a complex flavor and smell a bit like nutmeg. The orange bitters smell like fresh orange peel. Either pairs nicely with the slice of orange used as garnish. The orange bitters will obviously enhance the orangeness of the drink. Water sufficient to barely top the sugar cube was added, and then the sugar muddled until thoroughly dissolved.

Ice was added, then the chosen bourbon, and the glass garnished with a slice of orange.

One must test the results. Both bitters work well with both bourbons, but I prefer the orange bitters with the Hudson Baby Bourbon, and the aromatic with Buffalo Trace.

family/food

Grandmother’s Creamed Tomatoes

Posted on by Will Cox

From my younger sister, Grandmother Cox’s recipe for Creamed Tomatoes

  • 1 pint whole tomatoes
  • pinch of baking soda
  • 1/3 cup flour
  • 1/3 cup milk
  • salt
  • pepper
  • 3 Tbsp butter

Empty tomatoes into saucepan and crush them. Add pinch of baking soda (prevents milk from curdling) and stir. Put over medium heat. While tomatoes are heating, whisk together in a bowl, flour and milk (or shake in a jar). Add milk mixture to warm tomatoes. Heat until starting to bubble. Stir in butter, salt and pepper. Serve over buttered toast.

These measurements are estimates. My Grandmother didn’t measure and neither do I. In her words when she taught me how to make these, “Sometimes you get them too thick and you have to add milk and sometimes they’re too thin and you have to add flour.”

economics/sadness

Why I Cancelled My Newspaper Subscription

Posted on by Will Cox

I’ve maintained a subscription to the deadtree edition of my local newspapers since I was old enough to pay my own bills. I’ve continued to subscribe even though the newspaper has grown less and less interesting, because I have found some things of value in it. But those things have steadily grown fewer and fewer, until all that is left are the comics. Oh, and newsprint does still come in handy when starting a fire.

That’s not worth the subscription price.

I’ve always read the paper for local news, not national. I don’t expect the newspaper to be broad in scope, but to focus on those things that others do not cover. It might still do this, but the news needs to be current as well as local. I have no desire to read the day after about an event that I would have attended if I had known about it the day before. I have no desire to read election results two days after the election, when the on-line edition of the same newspaper published those results the night of the election. I certainly have no desire to read last week’s baseball scores. Perhaps the newspaper is no longer printed locally and the press deadline is too early to allow printing current news. If that’s so, perhaps that was a bad decision. Perhaps one needs to abandon currency entirely and become a weekly opinion piece. Or abandon the pretense of being a news paper.

It didn’t have to be this way. But the choices y’all are making are driving your business into the ground.

Now where will my children learn to love the comics?

drink

The Gimlet

Posted on by Will Cox

The Gimlet is one of those drinks, like the martini, where there’s a question of what the correct proportions are. CocktailDB uses a 2:1 ratio of gin to Rose’s lime juice. The recipes in the Wikipedia article on the gimlet use 2:1, 3:1, 3:2, 4:1, and 8:1. BULLDOG gin (our gin of the evening) suggests a ratio of gin to lime to sugar of 3:2:1. Like most things in life, it’s a matter of taste. However, an essential characteristic of a cocktail is balance, so neither the gin nor the lime should dominate.

The Rose’s lime juice one finds in the U.S. markets these days is a concoction of citric acid-flavored high-fructose corn syrup. This is a shame. But don’t worry: I have limes and sugar. Tonight we’ll be trying the 2:1 and 8:1 ratios.

The Gimlet, 2:1

  • 3/4 oz. lime juice
  • 3/4 oz. finely granulated sugar
  • 1.5 oz. gin

The Gimlet, 8:1

  • 1/4 oz. lime
  • 1/4 tsp. finely granulated sugar
  • 2 oz. gin

Shake the lime juice, sugar, and gin with ice, and strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

The 2:1 ratio is preferred over the 8:1. Surprisingly, the lime was harsher in the 8:1 ratio than it was in the 2:1, possibly because there wasn’t enough sugar to mellow the lime and gin. Unless the 4:1 or 3:2 ratios have something to recommend them, I’ll continue to assert that a gimlet is 2 of gin to 1 of lime.

drink

Moderation, in This as in All Things

Posted on by Will Cox

http://www.cdc.gov/alcohol/faqs.htm
http://www.standarddrinks.com/tool.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_alcohol_content
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_by_volume

http://www.marininstitute.org/
http://www.marininstitute.org/site/campaigns/stop-alcopops.html

http://www.alcoholscreening.org/Home.aspx
http://www.alcoholscreening.org/Learn-More.aspx

http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/
http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/Publications/AlcoholResearch/
http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/Practitioner/pocketguide/pocket_guide.htm
http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/Practitioner/pocketguide/pocket_guide2.htm (standard drinks)
http://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/Practitioner/pocketguide/pocket_guide3.htm (drinking patterns) how was 2 drinks/day not more than 14/week determined to be OK?
http://www.spectrum.niaaa.nih.gov/

http://www.alcoholpolicymd.com/press_room/Press_releases/girlie_drinks_release.htm
http://www.alcoholpolicymd.com/alcohol_and_health/health_effects.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_movement still in existence as MADD etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperance_%28virtue%29
http://www.wctu.org/

drink

Pink Gin

Posted on by Will Cox

Browsing through videos from Robert Hess‘s show The Cocktail Spirit (on the Small Screen Network), I was reminded of the Pink Gin, a cocktail I made back at the beginning of this adventure, before I started writing down what I was making. It is dead simple to make, with only two ingredients: gin and Angostura bitters.

There are two results for Pink Gin in CocktailDB. I’ve made both. They differ slightly, in that the first washes the glass with bitters in addition to mixing bitters with the gin, whereas the second does not. The proportions of gin to bitters are basically the same, and can be varied to taste.

Pink Gin

  • 1 1/2 oz. gin
  • a dash or four of Angostura bitters

Add the gin and bitters to a mixing glass. Add ice, then stir briskly to chill. Strain into a cocktail glass.

economics/politics

Frak That

Posted on by Will Cox

There’s some discussion up in Albany of permitting the use of hydraulic fracturing to remove natural gas from the Marcellus shale formation upstate. In the industry this is colloquially called “fracking” because afterward you’re pretty much fucked.

The problem with fracking, as with other environmental issues, is one of negative externalities. That is, the company extracting the resource does not bear the full costs of its operations, and certainly not the full costs of its failures. This creates a moral hazard, both at the extraction company, which cares nothing for the people who can no longer drink their water, and in the government, which aligns itself with the corporation rather than the citizens, as in Pennsylvania.

Beyond that, I fail to understand why an industry that burns off natural gas from oil wells as waste would be granted the privilege to extract natural gas in a manner that most likely has adverse effects.

drink

A Highland Fling

Posted on by Will Cox

Suppose you’ve become infatuated with Rob Roy

Rob Roy

Stir in mixing glass with ice & strain

  • 1 3/4 oz Scotch (5 cl, 7/16 gills)
  • 3/4 oz sweet vermouth (2 cl, 3/16 gills)
  • 1 dash orange bitters or Angostura bitters

Add cherry

Serve in a cocktail glass

and decide to have a Highland fling

Highland Fling

Stir in mixing glass with ice & strain

  • 1 3/4 oz Scotch (5 cl, 7/16 gills)
  • 3/4 oz sweet vermouth (2 cl, 3/16 gills)
  • 2 dashes orange bitters

Add olive

Serve in a cocktail glass

What comes after a Highland fling with Rob Roy? The bairn o’ course.

The Bairn

Stir in mixing glass with ice & strain

  • 2 oz Scotch (6 cl, 1/2 gills)
  • 1/2 oz Cointreau (1.5 cl, 1/8 gills)
  • 1 dash orange bitters

    • Serve in a cocktail glass

drink

Not a Malibu® St. Lawrence Lemonade

Posted on by Will Cox

Some friends of ours had us over for dinner last night, and, having heard of my hobby, asked me to come up with something to drink. The guideline was simple — “We like Malibu” — so I spent some time among the recipes on the Malibu Rum website. The Malibu Limbo Lady looked interesting, but I have none of the ingredients. I do have what it takes to mix this Malibu St. Lawrence Lemonade, but I didn’t want to use Sprite.

Malibu® St. Lawrence Lemonade

The Malibu® St. Lawrence Lemonade is a fresh and sweet mix of mint, lemon, and coconut.

DRINK INGREDIENTS:

  • ½ part Malibu®
  • ½ part Absolut® Vodka
  • 3 parts Lemon-Lime Soda
  • 2 sprigs of mint

HOW TO MIX THE DRINK:

Fill a tall glass with fresh cubed ice. Smack 2 sprigs of mint between fingers to bruise them and place them in the glass. Pour in Malibu®, Absolut® and lemon-lime soda. Stir vigorously to infuse the mint.

But that’s not what I mixed.

Sometimes one simply needs an idea of what tastes might go well together. I’m not familiar with Malibu, except to know that it’s a coconut-flavored rum. Here’s what I prepared, for two. For this I used a thick, somewhat stubby glass; I’m not sure of its name.

St. Lawrence Lemonade?

  • 4 sprigs of mint
  • 2 oz. fresh lemon juice (one lemon)
  • 1 oz. fresh lime juice (one lime)
  • 2 teaspoons of sugar
  • 1 oz. Malibu Rum
  • 1 oz. Tanqueray London Dry Gin
  • 6 oz. Apollinaris mineral water

Place one sprig of mint in each glass and fill with ice. In a mixing glass, combine the lemon, lime, sugar, rum, and gin. Shake with ice, and strain half into each glass. Top with mineral water, and stir. Smack the remaining mint springs and garnish.

Why is it called a St. Lawrence Lemonade?

food

A Pinch of Mustard

Posted on by Will Cox

On the shelf is a bottle of mustard. Or, to be more precise, “You Could Win $25,000 see back for details French’s since 1904 Made with Real Honey Honey Mustard.” Mustard is the smallest word on the label. Let’s check what’s in this, shall we? The ingredients, listed in order of quantity, are “distilled vinegar, water, high fructose corn syrup, #1 grade mustard seed, sugar, corn syrup, carrot oleoresin (color), honey, spices and garlic powder.”

Not much honey in that “honey” mustard.

So what we’ve got here is honey- and mustard-flavored corn syrup in a vinegar solution. Compare that to French’s yellow mustard,

Distilled Vinegar, Water, No.1 Grade Mustard Seed, Salt, Turmeric, Paprika, Spice, Natural Flavors and Garlic Powder.

or to another Reckitt-Benkiser product: Colman’s mustard.

Water, Mustard Flour, Sugar, Salt, Wheat Flour, Turmeric, Citric Acid.

or a competitor, Plochman’s,

White Distilled Vinegar and Water, #1 Grade Mustard Seed, Salt, Turmeric, Onion Powder, Spices, Natural Flavoring

though none of these are honey mustard. What does Kraft‘s Grey Poupon Savory Honey Mustard contain?

MUSTARD SEED, WATER, APPLE CIDER VINEGAR, VINEGAR, BROWN SUGAR, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, HONEY, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF SALT, FRUIT PECTIN, CITRIC ACID, SPICE, TURMERIC, SUGAR, CARAMEL COLOR, PAPRIKA.

That’s better.

Instead, try this recipe from Alton Brown, which consists of honey, mustard, and vinegar.

What is it about honey in the mind of product development that says it means sickly sweet?

drink

Old Fashioned

Posted on by Will Cox

The Old Fashioned is probably not a drink you want to order where you can’t see them fix it, and thus are unable to correct mistakes made in the preparation. I had a sickly sweet one on Mother’s Day, and wouldn’t recommend the experience to anyone. Don Draper, in an episode from season three of Mad Men, “My Old Kentucky Home,” builds his in a more old fashioned way, but he’s not tending my bar; I am, and I do the same.

Old Fashioned

In an old fashioned, or rocks, glass place a half cube of sugar. Soak the sugar with two to three dashes of Angostura bitters. Add a splash, if that, of water. Muddle until the sugar is completely dissolved in the bitters. Add two ounces of bourbon, and some ice. Garnish with any or all of a cherry, an orange slice, and a lemon wedge.

Amusingly enough, YouTube has Rachel Maddow building hers similarly. (Maybe if I make a video I can get a great gig on MSNBC too!) If you prefer your bartender in a vest, here’s Chris McMillian, of the Library Lounge at the Ritz-Carlton in New Orleans.

drink

Moscow Mule

Posted on by Will Cox

In an attempt to branch out beyond gin, I made a Moscow Mule. The spirit in this drink is vodka, but unless one wants the effects of the alcohol, there’s really no reason to add it. I have two vodkas on my shelf: Core, which is made from apples, and Exclusiv, made from wheat. I used the Exclusiv. The bulk of the flavor comes from ginger beer, and would overwhelm the subtle apple in Core.

The recipe is a variation on that from the CocktailDB. The drink is traditionally, since 1941, served in a copper mug. I do not have a copper mug, and so used a tumbler. An old fashioned glass is recommended by the makers of the ginger beer I used.

Moscow Mule

Build the drink in your glass.

  • The juice squeezed from one lime, about 1 oz
  • A jigger of vodka, 1 1/2 oz.
  • One half of the lime shell
  • Fill with ginger beer and ice