I forgot about an old project I played with in grad school. I dug up old images from a repository of ephemera on the Library of Congress website, and repurposed them into whimsical little things with no relevance to their original intentions. This photograph of a munitions storage area from the Civil War seemed dreary, so I livened it up a little.
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TrackbackI’m preparing myself for Tales of the Cocktail by ramping up my tolerance through daily “exercise” and a little light reading. My drinks of choice for reading in this unseasonably warm SF summer are a Tom Collins with cucumber infused gin or a variation on the Lynchburg Lemonade made with smoked lemons.
Now follow along in your test booklets as I read aloud:
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Last night’s cheese plate (starting top left and spiraling clockwise): clover honey, sheep’s milk mozzarella, Cabot Hunter’s Cheddar, bing cherries reconstituted in port, Semifreddi baguette, mango chutney, feta, bruder basil, pecans, goat Gouda, crackers, and red grapes. I think I met most of the specifications listed in “A Proper Cheese Plate“
Some surprisingly delightful combinations:
Goat gouda with honey and a pecan
A cracker with feta and mango chutney
Cheddar on a cracker with grapes
Bruder basil on a baguette with port-soaked cherries
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I am thrilled to announce that I secured media credentials to Tales of the Cocktail, the annual festival/conference of cocktails, cuisine and New Orleans culture, July 8-12, and I managed to get a room at the (supposedly sold out) Hotel Monteleone.
This will be my first trip to the Big Easy, I know nobody there, and I will likely be going alone unless my sister manages to get the Ice Man to send her along. If you have any thoughts on what I need to see while I am there, please chime in with suggestions in the comments section at the bottom of this page.
Brief overview for those unfamiliar with TotC:
“The event brings together the best and brightest of the cocktail community—award-winning mixologists, authors, bartenders and chefs—for a five-day celebration of the history and the craft of the cocktail. This year, the most spirited event of the summer invites everyone to “Stir Your Soul” with a spirited series of dinners, cocktail demos, tastings, competitions, seminars, book signings, tours and special events all perfectly paired with some of the best cocktails ever made.
To put the event in quantifiable terms you can taste, Tales of the Cocktail 2008 used 85 pounds of mint leaves, 40 pounds of super-fine sugar, 280 liters of lime juice, 350 liters of lemon juice, 1815 lime wedges, 2115 lemon twists, 2340 jalapeño slices, 50 pounds of ginger root, 12 pounds of cherries and satisfied the taste buds of thousands of cocktail lovers from across the world.”
I am looking forward to learning for personal enlightenment/intoxication and of course I will be sharing my experience with all of you (Hi Mom!) If you will be there and want to meet up, or just want to be jealous of all the fun I will be having, here is my itinerary:
Let me know if you have any burning questions for the cocktail elite. What have you been wondering?
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For years I’ve been making cocktail ingredients at home. I’ve mentioned some favorite infusions and liqueurs, including roasted ginger vodka, chipotle tequila, firewater, pumpkin pie spiced rum and kumquatcello, but I have also been making sweeteners, including grenadine, flavored syrups and marmalades, and novelties like dried bing cherries reconstituted in port. I’ve been wanting to make aromatic and potable bitters, but I haven’t gotten around to procuring the obscure ingredients.
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Most recently, I remembered an experiment from my college days, dissolving a bag of gummy peaches in cheap peach schnapps, making a sweet, peachy goo that dissolved well in other things. A month ago, I bought 5-ounce bags of Haribo Peach Rings and Fizzy Cola and dissolved each in a cup of vodka. After a couple weeks, both batches had reached an oozy equilibrium, but I haven’t concocted any good uses for them yet.
The latest trend according to GQ is Liquid Smoke, which is simple to make, but a slow, involved process. As far as I am concerned, liquid smoke is already a common cocktail component called BOURBON.
On a final note, instructions on infusing your own spirits are easy to come by online, but here are a few tips and tricks I’ve learned from experience and haven’t seen elsewhere:
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Old Ernie was a man after my own heart: a man of great passion, bad habits, a love of good food and heavy drinking and careless gun cleaning habits. To honor the start of summer, the following is an excerpt from Hemingway’s essay “Camping Out,” originally published in the Toronto Daily Star on June 26, 1920.
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Outside of insects and bum sleeping the rock that wrecks most camping trips is cooking. The average tyro’s idea of cooking is to fry everything and fry it good and plenty. Now, a frying pan is a most necessary thing to any trip, but you also need the old stew kettle and the folding reflector baker.
A pan of fried trout can’t be bettered and they don’t cost any more than ever. But there is a good and bad way of frying them.
The beginner puts his trout and his bacon in and over a brightly burning fire; the bacon curls up and dries into a dry tasteless cinder and the trout is burned outside while it is still raw inside. He eats them and it is all right if he is only out for the day and going home to a good meal at night. But if he is going to face more trout and bacon the next morning and other equally well-cooked dishes for the remainder of two weeks he is on the pathway to nervous dyspepsia.
The proper way is to cook over coals. Have several cans of Crisco or Cotosuet or one of the vegetable shortenings along that are as good as lard and excellent for all kinds of shortening. Put the bacon in and when it is about half cooked lay the trout in the hot grease, dipping them in corn meal first. Then put the bacon on top of the trout and it will baste them as it slowly cooks.
The coffee can be boiling at the same time and in a smaller skillet pancakes being made that are satisfying the other campers while they are waiting for the trout.
With the prepared pancake flours you take a cupful of pancake flour and add a cup of water. Mix the water and flour and as soon as the lumps are out it is ready for cooking. Have the skillet hot and keep it well greased. Drop the batter in and as soon as it is done on one side loosen it in the skillet and flip it over. Apple butter, syrup or cinnamon and sugar go well with the cakes.
While the crowd have taken the edge from their appetites with flapjacks the trout have been cooked and they and the bacon are ready to serve. The trout are crisp outside and firm and pink inside and the bacon is well done—but not too done. If there is anything better than that combination the writer has yet to taste it in a lifetime devoted largely and studiously to eating.
The stew kettle will cook your dried apricots when they have resumed their pre-dried plumpness after a night of soaking, it will serve to concoct a mulligan in, and it will cook macaroni. When you are not using it, it should be boiling water for the dishes.
In the baker, mere man comes into his own, for he can make a pie that to his bush appetite will have it all over the product that mother used to make, like a tent. Men have always believed that there was something mysterious and difficult about making a pie. Here is a great secret. There is nothing to it. We’ve been kidded for years. Any man of average office intelligence can make at least as good a pie as his wife.
All there is to a pie is a cup and a half of flour, one-half teaspoonful of salt, one-half cup of lard and cold water. That will make pie crust that will bring tears of joy into your camping partner’s eyes.
Mix the salt with the flour, work the lard into the flour, make it up into a good workmanlike dough with cold water. Spread some flour on the back of a box or something flat, and pat the dough around a while. Then roll it out with whatever kind of round bottle you prefer. Put a little more lard on the surface of the sheet of dough and then slosh a little flour on and roll it up and then roll it out again with the bottle.
Cut out a piece of the rolled out dough big enough to line a pie tin. I like the kind with holes in the bottom. Then put in your dried apples that have soaked all night and been sweetened, or your apricots, or your blueberries, and then take another sheet of the dough and drape it gracefully over the top, soldering it down at the edges with your fingers. Cut a couple of slits in the top dough sheet and prick it a few times with a fork in an artistic manner.
Put it in the baker with a good slow fire for forty-five minutes and then take it out and if your pals are Frenchmen they will kiss you. The penalty for knowing how to cook is that the others will make you do all the cooking.
It is all right to talk about roughing it in the woods. But the real woodsman is the man who can be really comfortable in the bush.
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