The Hungry Tiger

A drink for summer

My cold is almost gone, which means I am back to my old dissipated ways. But tonight, I suddenly realized that I was going to be stymied, drink-wise. Of alcohols, there was only vodka, and of mixers, nothing! Dire fate! But in the eleventh hour I looked to the old but still best Wired cocktail page and found the classic proportions of a fizz. Armed with that powerful knowledge (though without carbonation), I managed to make a nice summer cocktail out of seemingly nothing. Magically, as it were, a cocktail is concocted. It is, amazingly enough, actually very tasty, and also refreshing. If you want to follow in my trail-blazing footsteps, here is the recipe:

1 part elderflower syrup (in everyone's cupboard, no?)
2 parts freshly squeezed lemon juice
2-3 parts vodka
4 parts water
ice
bruised mint leaves


We shall call it Summer Drink. As God is my witness, I'll never go thirsty again.

Spicy hot chocolate

While I was in Berkeley, A's resident German houseguest made us some hot cocoa that had the unexpected (though traditional) property of including hot peppers. When you first take a sip, it tastes quite ordinary, but as you swallow the spiciness comes through -- I couldn't even quite identify the sensation at first, which was fascinating. It also keeps me from drinking it at the usual top speed at which I cannot help but consume hot beverages, and is nice for colds, too.

2 cups milk
splash water
2 T. cocoa
2 T. sugar
pinch salt
1/2 t red pepper flakes or 1/4 t cayenne

Whisk cocoa and sugar together with a bit of the milk and a splash of water at the bottom of your pan until you have a smooth paste. Add the rest of the milk, the salt, and the hot pepper and heat over a medium flame, stirring, until it begins to steam. If you have used the hot pepper flakes, you'll want to strain it into your waiting mugs, or an intermediate vessel. If you've used powdered chile, go ahead and pour it right into the mugs. Serves 2.

Mamie

This week, it's all about maintaining the delicate balance between caffeination and intoxication while I pound through an appalling amount of work. In honor of this state and a somewhat depleted liquor cabinet, I submit the following variation on the Mamie Gilroy, which we're calling the Mamie Eisenhower for no good reason aside from the fact that it sounds entertaining.

1 shot bourbon
6 oz. ginger beer (preferably Reed's)
juice of 1/2 lime
ice, if you like (I don't)

Tasty and sustaining, oh yes, tonight appearing beside a bowl of Annie's mac and cheese from a box.

Report from Providence

Once upon a time, a nice little girl and boy went to the wonderful state of Rhode Island, where they ate like FIENDS.

Thanksgiving was of course a blowout food extravaganza. My contributions were a loaf of bread and a triple batch of super-duper creamed spinach (made with garlic, onions, evaporated milk, and plenty of pepper jack cheese). Snark made a tasty batch of cheesy pureed squash, and there was also mushroom dressing, twice-baked potatoes, and thymey buttered corn as well as the meat-eaters' main attraction. Our friend Kim went dessert crazy, with apple pie and pumpkin pie and espresso cheesecake and a bread pudding made with croissants (!).

Providence is foodtown, so Thanksgiving hardly marked the end of our gluttony. The dearly beloved Ocean Coffee Roasters provided great coffee and better lentil soup. We got a chance to splurge at the always fantastic Al Forno, though we were tragically unable to visit our other favorite, the dowdy-but-dazzling Apsara. I was certain I'd have no room for dessert, and indeed, I really didn't, but the gingerbread baby cake I shared with S. and Beth was so fabulous I could hardly stand it. I have had many a fine gingerbread in my day, but this was absurd. I surely do hope I will be able to find the recipe somewhere--I'm pretty certain it is not in the Al Forno Cookbook, which was published several years ago.

And finally, now that we are home again, we will be sure to revisit Kim's brilliant cold-weather cocktail: hot spiced cider + Maker's Mark. We'd always felt that there should be some good way to spike hot cider, but rum, the most obvious choice, doesn't actually go down as well as it ought to. But bourbon... oh yes indeedy. Good stuff.

Tea for one

Kushmichoff is my favorite tea company. Not only do they supply genuinely delicious full-leaf tea to slovenly sorts like me, they have the hoplessly romantic cachet of being the one-time tea purveyors to the czars, post-revolutionarily blending their wares in Paris. Oh, to be a lovely Russian exile skating on the Seine!

I can drink pots and pots of Anastasia, a sort of apotheosis of Earl Grey. And the text on the luxe gold label is so lovely I must share it with you in its entirety:

Created in 1867 at St-Pétersbourg by Pavel Michailovitch KOUSMICHOFF, we were one of the GREATEST ANCIENT RUSSIAN TEA FIRM, purveyor by special appointement to the Tzars until the revolution in 1917.

Established in FRANCE since 1920, we remain THE ONLY GENUINE RUSSIAN TEA FIRM and we carry on as in former times, under the label KUSMI, to offer to fine lovers our different RUSSIAN BLENDS, aromatic and tasty, so considered through the world under the name of RUSSIAN TEAS.

Don't you want a cup just as soon as humanly possible?

Hot chocolate is not hot cocoa

Malika's enticing recipe at Nobody's Fool, in combination with the wet, wet, cold, wet weather, has inspired me to make some delicious hot chocolate. Don't neglect that tiny pinch of salt, it's crucial for the fullness of pleasure!

Elderflowers and Marxists

Today I uttered the most plaintive sentence in all the world: I am too tired to clean the kitchen and I have to read piles of Marxist theory.

So out to dinner it was! Unfortunately, the Thai place we found in Silver Spring was considerably less than thrilling. Fortunately, as we were driving away, we spied an Ethopian place just around the corner. We will explore further soon.

In other news, I have been partaking heartily of some elderflower saft (Scandinavian juice syrup intended to be diluted with water) we bought at Ikea (!). I am currently wishing I'd bought seven or eight bottles. It was the only really good thing we bought that day. Because I am defective, I generally find water a fairly unthirstquenching drink, and am always in search of drinks that are basically water, but more interesting. So I was happy to find that even in much more dilute proportions than recommended on the bottle, this stuff is very satisfying. The elderflower flavor is subtle and quite delicious and reminds me intensely of somethingorother, I have no idea what. Supposedly it is good for your immune system, too.

And now I want to try some of this organic Elder Flower Drink. "This is the one that started it all. A pleasant surprise is what could best describe the first taste of elder flower. That cool, light and fresh taste with the full summer bouquet. Nearly everyone who tastes Søbogaard for the first time asks where they can get more." You tell 'em!

Not all dinners are so fascinating

(1) Leek, potato, and sorrel soup. Used up the last of some extraordinarily boring potatoes. You might not think that it is possible for potatoes to be extraordinarily boring, but I assure you, it is.

(2) Toasted bread rubbed with garlic. Despite what this may sound like, it was not remotely bruschetta. It was toast, and nothing else. Interestingly, the feeble, bendy-crusted bakery loaf that was turned into this toast had itself been labeled, quite, quite unconvincingly, "BRUSCHETTA." Whatever it was meant to be, it was vastly improved by toasting and garlicifying, and the soup was improved by its presence. So that was all right.

(3) Hot chocolate with knockoff Bailey's Irish Cream.

Ting Ting Tereu

I love Ting.

Even the bottle is superlative, made of much thicker glass than you would expect. And, as the label tells us: "Ting is the ultimate thirst-quencher. Lightly carbonated, natural citrus refreshment. Made from real Jamaican graperfuit with no preservatives. Ting - it's a little island sunshine in a bottle." The ingredients are, for the record: carbonated water, sugar (not corn syrup of any stripe, thank you!), grapefruit juice (6%), citric acid, and sodium citrate. I wouldn't call sodium citrate entirely natural, but it's so darn good and is so much more made out of real food than, say, Coke, that I say, hey, Ting, you'll always be all natural to me.

PS. Snark is entirely responsible for my introduction to Ting, and I wish to give him the very fullest credit for this kindly act. Thank you.

Products we don't have around here, part 1

Now that it is picnic season, I will soon have the opportunity to make use of some funny little items that I dragged home with me from Italy. The Acciaris introduced us to the existence of wine in little individual-serving boxes. These look just like our juice boxes, and I was so charmed that I bought quite a bunch to bring home. While I was dragging my bags through the airport and in and out of trains across the Eastern seaboard, I was pretty sure I was completely insane to have made them so heavy with something so far from gourmet.

Now, however, I am feeling just as clever as I had hoped: The wine inside is perfectly drinkable (though not, of course, in any way excellent). They cost me only €1.25 for a pack of three. Best of all, for the very reason that we are not supposed to drink alcohol in public places here, no one would ever bother to make juice boxes filled with wine, which means that I can drink them in public, because no one who would care would recognize them for what they are! It will all be very exciting and illicit, in the tamest possible way.

Herbed rice with fava beans and peas

Tonight's dinner was a Madhur Jaffrey recipe, an Iranian baked rice dish. As printed, the recipe calls for (frozen) baby limas, but I substituted (fresh) fava beans and peas since no limas were handy. It came out quite well, although since I'm not a big fan of dill, I should have thought ahead and cut back on the dill and added more fresh mint. Mint's a weed, and since I'm out of rum to make mojitos with (and, frankly, I'm too lazy to make mojitos just for myself), I should take every opportunity to use the mint growing outside our door before it takes over all of the metro DC area. (I also didn't use any Chinese parsley. Is that another name for cilantro?) I was going to fry up some sweet potato rounds, but I felt that I was dirtying enough dishes as it was and skipped it. This was a good recipe -- not quick, but with fairly little active cooking time -- that I'll use again.

Aqua naturale

As the mineral water is so varied and ubiquitous here, I have started a program of paying particular attention to how each one tasted and even recording the mineral content listed on the label. Perhaps (though not necessarily) this project will help me to select water decisively and deliberately at home. Alternately, I may just buy the bottle of Dasani because it is what is available. We'll see. In any case, for kicks I have also been photographing each bottle as part of my travel journal records. I certainly do not feel normal and inconspicuous when I take a picture of our water before we drink it, but it is an entertaining eccentricity to cultivate.

We had a particularly tasty bottle on Sunday, in the otherwise somewhat awful (but interesting) wine country town of Castellina in Chianti. It is just too small for the number of visitors, and the visitors are of a particularly noxious quality for some reason, perhaps because the kind of people who travel the world to stock their wine cellars are not shown to their best advantage when they are gathered together in quantity. The water was called "Surgiva," and it was particularly crisp and flavorful, even a bit sweet. I will spare you the mineral content, but you can expect to see it all compiled together here at some point after my return.

Wild wombats

A Wild Wombat is a lot like a Moscow Mule, but with a couple of slight variations that help to make it the drink of choice at our place on a cranky work night. It's easy to make, hard to mess up, tasty, and soothing.

For two Wild Wombats, you will need:

2 fingers vodka in each short glass
1 tablespoon of Rose's lime per drink
1 bottle chilled Reed's Extra Ginger Brew, divided over the two glasses
No ice.


For a Super Wild Wombat, add a splash of Triple Sec.