A classy drink, a trashy cake

When I started this blog I was what you'd call an “enthusiastic” drinker. These days I’m an occasional drinker, which is only a problem when I’ve got my hands on a book as full of seductive cocktails as Donald Link’s Down South. I want to taste them all. I feel blue and headachey just thinking about it. 

But Easter, hosted by my sister, needed a drink and I went straight to Donald Link. I was most tempted by his deer stand old-fashioned, which Link describes as a "wintry cocktail made with local ingredients like Louisiana honey, coffee bitters, and pecans. This drink ends up a tan milky color (like swamp water form the Atchafalaya Basin), and it’s rich and strong. . . “

Wonderfully strange and enticing, but all wrong for April

I went with the St. Edwards No. 1 and it was an excellent, pale, Eastery choice. The recipe: Into a shaker pour 2 ounces gin, 1 ounce St. Germain, 1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice, and 2 dashes grapefruit bitters. Shake with ice, strain into a martini glass, and garnish with an edible flower. Beautiful, as you can see.

What you can't see is how delicious it was. Donald Link describes this as a “cold, austere” cocktail, which to me sounds like a martini. But where martinis are steely, the St. Edwards No. 1 is delicate, crisp, and floral. These drinks were such a hit that my brother-in-law made a second round. Two drinks on Sunday and all I could think about on Monday was how tired, depressed, and grimy I felt, and how ready to go back to coconut water. 

I also contributed this Food52 s’mores cake to the Easter meal. It was kind of trashy looking and I wasn't bursting with pride when I put the 9x13 pan down on the dining table and struggled to slice through the sticky top layer of bottled marshmallow fluff. It was a big slab of goo, sort of like a s’more, sort of like a deconstructed marshmallow egg, and I wasn’t all that keen on it at first. I might even have apologized. Only the next day did my kids and I start to really fixate on that big slab of leftover goo, as the marshmallow, chocolate pudding, and graham crackers started to melt together. It got better with age. Monday, we all picked at it. Yesterday morning I decided to throw away the last scraps for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who isn't built like a pipe cleaner.

Owen came home and said, “Where’s the leftover marshmallow cake?” 

I know that kid. If I admitted to throwing it away he would wail and accuse me of violating Earth Day. I said, “I ate it.”

He replied waspishly, “Well, I guess it’s time for you to start a diet, now."

I would have been pissed off too. It was one of those desserts you can't get out of your mind. If you do decide to make this cake, the recipe's a little funky. I don't know why you have to put the chopped chocolate in a heat-proof bowl if you're not going to melt it in that bowl. Also, I ran out of pudding before I'd coated all the layers. I just quit layering at that point and all was well.  

A post for my mother: A beautiful baby and a Christmas tree lane

Well, maybe not beautiful in this particular photo, but, in person, my sister's son Ben is a little Mark Ruffalo. There's no Hollywood star as chic and lovely as my grandmother.

 

As for the "Christmas tree lane". . .

How many glasses of sparkling citrus champagne punch had I imbibed when I tottered down that "Christmas tree lane?" Apparently so many that I couldn't keep my eyes open. The photographer must have had a few pops himself, given the blurriness of the shot. I like it! If someone would just take becomingly blurry photos of me looking merry I would probably post nothing but pictures of myself on this blog. 

My cousin Gardner lives on the so-called "Christmas tree lane," a.k.a. Eucalyptus Avenue in the town of San Carlos, California and it is a truly magical place, one of those streets where everyone seems to go simultaneously insane on December 1. When people buy houses here, the holiday thing is a required disclosure. Gardner and his wife, Jen, hosted us on Christmas Eve and produced this crazy good Emeril Lagasse sparkling citrus champagne punch made with limoncello, vodka, champagne and lemon juice, which we stood in the driveway drinking as people paraded past. I can't recommend this punch more ardently. They served other delicious things, like a blue cheese sauce that was poured over the beef tenderloin, proof that you really can successfully gild a lily.

 

In other news, this was the end result of our frenzied holiday baking:

Isabel and I had many thoughts on individual cookies that I wanted to share, but we were so busy baking that I couldn't get around to posting and now it is all a distant memory. 

Owen did not contribute. He  was invited to help, but instead lay on the floor by the heater reading monster books. We were all fine with that. 

Meanwhile, our savagely wounded hen survives, though she is by no means healed. I used a whole tube of Bacitracin on her yesterday and am going to buy another one today, as well as a raccoon trap. The humane kid. It's either a trap, or a Great Pyrenees livestock dog, which would be my preference, but I would also like to stay married. 

I was kind of thirsty when I woke up

That is a chicken quesadilla made by a drunk person. I almost never drink at home anymore, but to alleviate stress from controversial article, hauled the vodka bottle from the freezer last night and mixed a cocktail with lime juice and pomegranate syrup given to us by a friend. Then I made another. I think there was a third, but don't actually remember.

 

After that, I fired up the stove and tackled Todd Wilbur's recipe for Taco Bell Chicken Quesadillas out of Top Secret Recipes Unlocked. Here's what he writes "Taco Bell takes the fast food quesadilla into new territory with three different cheeses and a creamy jalapeno sauce, all of which you can now cheerfully recreate in the comfort of your warm kitchen."

I was cheerful in my warm kitchen and the recipe was easy, which was a blessing. Creamy jalapeno sauce: mayonnaise stirred together with spices and bottled jalapenos. Chicken: breast meat, grilled or cooked in hot skillet. The three cheeses: cheddar, jack, American. The American cheese really did make the quesadilla taste like something crassly satisfying that you might get at a fast food restaurant. These were great quesadillas.

I was going to drive down the hill and buy a quesadilla from our local Taco Bell to compare, but thought better of it. 

Food styling by a drunk person.

In other news, I can't believe I didn't know about the Tournament of Cookbooks. Now I want that Argentinian cookbook, even though Nora Ephron makes it sound absurd. Plus, we have a wheelbarrow.

Lemons & cherries

Limoncello on the left, cherry bounce on the right. I started the limoncello (using this recipe) a few months ago, letting the lemon peel -- stripped of all pith -- macerate in vodka. The other day I added sugar syrup and more vodka, and now it has to stew for another month or two. I must say, the tiny taste I took was vile. I've given it my best over the years, but I just don't love vodka. 

I do love bourbon, and the cherry bounce is equal parts unpitted cherries and Jim Beam. It sits for a few months, then gets mixed with sugar syrup and bottled. Sounds like it might taste like cough syrup, but the name is so great I had to give it a shot.

Forget Fraulein Maria, I'll take the Baroness

A few years ago I thought I'd discovered the perfect drink. My wicked friend Lisa made me a brandy sidecar and overnight I went from wine-loving innocence to drinking exactly two brandy sidecars every night. Here's how you make a brandy sidecar: 1/3 cup brandy, half as much Cointreau, the juice of a lemon. After you've juiced the lemon, run it around the rim of a martini glass and dip the glass in sugar. Shake the cocktail in ice until very cold. Strain into glass. You'll definitely want another, but must absolutely stop at two or you will behave foolishly, awake with a hangover, and get really fat.

After a year, I decided: enough with this nonsense. I stopped buying brandy so I couldn't make sidecars.

I quickly learned one could make an even better sidecar -- one with a more voluptuous, smoky flavor -- using the bourbon I had in the cupboard. See recipe above, but substitute Maker's Mark. 

Another year passed, during which I drank exactly two bourbon sidecars every night. I even got my mother hooked -- she called them "those drinks of yours" -- though she's the kind of person who can have a sidecar at my house and never import the bad habit into her own orderly home.  

After a year: enough with this nonsense. I stopped buying Cointreau so I couldn't make any sidecars whatsoever.

I quickly learned one could make another marvelous drink with bourbon, sweet vermouth, and a maraschino cherry. The manhattan isn't as flirty and approachable as the sidecar, but it's a lot more interesting. It turned out that the sweet-tart sidecars were just training so I could appreciate this serious, world-beating cocktail.

Manhattans lasted about six months and then, enough of this nonsense, etc. but this time it actually worked. Until I recently got into the "joke" Old Crow which, I have to say, is vile. So I think the story really does end here. I don't want to be fat and get cancer and everything else rotten or just mediocre that goes with hard liquor.

These days, I almost never drink cocktails at home, but having a manhattan out is another story. I met my friend Melanie last night and she just had a beer which made me feel grimy and hardcore when I ordered my second manhattan (I believe in sets) but I'm too old to bend to peer pressure. 

I started thinking about the evolution in my taste in cocktails, which reminded me of my The Sound of Music odyssey. When I first saw it, like all kids, I hated the Baroness and thought Fraulein Maria was the prettiest woman in the world. Her twinkling eyes, her peachy skin, her clear, angelic voice. And her hair -- hair the color of apricots, though so badly cut. Even an 8-year-old can recognize a stupid cut. But still: beautiful.

Years passed, I bore children, they acquired a Sound of Music video which they watched several hundred times, as did I. But it was a completely different movie. Maria? What a simp. Clearly, it's the Baroness who has a soul, who knows life and suffering. She gets one eyeful of Maria and the Captain dancing that Austrian folk dance and realizes there's even more suffering in store for her, even if she does successfully scare off the ninny governess. She's wise enough to know to try, and, later, when to give up. 

Who would I rather have a drink with? Obviously, Christopher Plummer, but if he weren't available, the Baroness. Of course! She is the manhattan. Maria isn't even a sidecar, she's a Shirley Temple. Though to be fair, that was the character. If you read Julie A's memoir you'll never think of her in quite the same way. In life, definitely a sidecar, perhaps even a manhattan with a few extra cherries.

Anyway, today I have a mammogram which always makes me regret all of it, every single lousy drink.

Artisanal Cocktails

In search of one of those gushed-over, super-trendy artisanal cocktails made with homemade eucalyptus bitters, organic huckleberry syrup, yuzu juice, and the rarest bourbon, we went to Nopa last night. The drinks were very, very nice.

But you know what? In the end all they really do is get you drunk.