July 25, 2003
Gimlet
"A fellow taught me to like them," he replies, before the bartender sets the drink in front of him. "With the lime juice it has a sort of pale greenish yellowish misty look. I tasted it. It was both sweet and sharp at the same time. The woman in black watched me. Then she lifted her own glass towards me. We both drank. Then I knew hers was the same drink."
"
Anyone know where this is from? I left out some overly-telling clues. Not that I want to turn this food blog literary (I already don't post any food articles, even though I mean to), but a lot of the allure of certain drinks comes from movies or books.
Update: guess before looking at the comments, the answer is there now.
Gimlet
3 parts gin
1 part roses lime juice
Some will put a dash of bitters in this. Many awful bartenders will put vodka in this by default which is just plain wrong (Casablanca, usually a fine bar here in Cambridge, once brought me a vodka gimlet and when I corrected him the bartender refused to correct the drink - I had to flag the other bartender to help me). A vodka gimlet is fine if that's what you want and order, but a gimlet is gin. An even better drink, if you don't like gin, is a tequila gimlet. Either of these is an excellent drink to order at a bar where the mixer's skill is questionable.
The roses is important. You can make excellent drinks with fresh lime juice and gin, but they're not really gimlets. The Rose's company, unfortunately, is not paying me to say this.
Enjoy!
July 14, 2003
Pickapeppa Chicken
Got the Monday blahs? Chicken Pickapeppa (and sidekick Mache Salad) to the rescue!
Pickapeppa is one of my favorite pepper sauces because it's easier on your stomach than Tabasco, sweeter, but still tangy and somewhat "hot". Although you'll only add the Pickapeppa at the end, as a dipping sauce, it totally makes an otherwise standard recipe more interesting.
Music to cook by: Gypsy Kings- Mosaico album
Pantry Raid
Two skinless and boneless chicken breasts
Dried basil
Olive oil
Goya's Adobo All-Purpose Seasoning with Pepper
Black pepper
Seasoned breadcrumbs (you can also add a little bit of your favorite finely shredded cheese here- Parmesan recommended)
Pickapeppa Sauce
Do the Chicken Dance:
Heat your oven to about 135 degrees. Take the chicken breasts and dab some olive oil on them. Next, shake some Adobo on both sides- watch it because the stuff is quite salty- you just want to give it a hint of flavor right now. Sprinkle on some pepper, and dried basil leaves. Stick in the oven and bake. The chicken's internal temp should reach 175 degrees before you can consider it ready.
But wait- there's more! When the chicken's internal temp reaches around 150 degrees, you should take the chicken out of the oven and shake the seasoned breadcrumbs over it. Next spray a little olive oil over the crumbs- this will keep the breadcrumbs from burning or getting too dry (I learned this the hard way, after serving what my husband "McGyva" thought was blackened chicken and a few times of chicken-a-la-sawdust...). Let bake until that 175 temp is reached. Rake off any excess crumbs, and you should be left with a lightly seasoned and slightly textured chicken. The chicken should be very moist when you cut it. You can put the Pickapeppa sauce on top or next to the chicken, depending on how much you like Pickapeppa. Either way, do try the Pickapeppa sauce.
As sides I recommend steamed veggies (yup...McGyva is on a diet): green beans and summer squash. If you'd like, you can add some whipped butter to the squash, or some squirts of lemon juice, salt and garlic to the green beans.
Enjoy in good company!
Gotta Eat Some Greens? No Problem!
This is a mache salad- mache is similar to watercress (which I LOVE), but it does not have the bitter flavor. Mache, in fact, does not have much flavor at all- it should, however, taste very fresh and have that great watercress texture. I get tired of regular lettuce- especially because the stuff in a bag tastes plastic-y and old. It's just hard to find tasty lettuce...mache is a great substitute for boring lettuce- and it's so pretty (awww...). I just added some tomatoes, mushrooms, hearts of palm and thinly sliced scallions. Add your favorite dressing (soy sauce is nice) and laugh at the FDAs recommended foods' amounts- you're eating salad and being good, very good...
July 11, 2003
Mozzarella di Bufala Appetizer
So we have the main course, an amazing dessert, and beverage to go with this dinner...So thought I'd throw in another course: an easy appetizer that is more a suggestion than a how-to.
Mozzarella di Bufala with Basil and Tomatoes
Pantry Raid:
Fresh mozzarella di Bufala- you can get the little ones or large ones to be sliced up.
Fresh vine tomatoes
Basil
Salt and pepper
Extra virgin olive oil
Avanti!-
This is so easy to do I am almost ashamed to be posting- it's like microwaving a box of Lean Cuisine and trying to pass it off as great artistry. But easy can be good too, especially if you're saving the talent for the other dishes, like the dessert and the beverage...
Place some sliced mozzarella on top of some tomato slices.
Drizzle with a bit of olive oil, salt and a tad of pepper.
Garnish with fresh basil.
Put the soundtrack of Big Night on your stereo and relax.
It's a great summer appetizer that has an enticing aroma.
Enjoy in good company!
Mangia! Mangia!
Back to the classics
Back to what I was discussing in my first post here: 2,1,1 (and back to Friday posting)
The aviation.
The name evokes an era when flight was new, comfortable and fashionable (it's none of these things today), and the drink brings back this era perfectly. The key ingredient, maraschino liqueur, is kind of hard to come by in some parts, but most nice bars have it. You'll know it by its characteristic wrapping. If you see it at a bar definitely do order one of these (better yet, try and find some in your local liquor store; if so, this might be a good pre-dinner cocktail if you are making VikingZen's steak and Kelley's dessert this weekend).
2 parts gin
1 part maraschino liqueur
1 part fresh lemon juice
This maraschino has nothing in common with the cherries of the same name. It's made from the marasca cherry and has a hint of bitter almonds:
"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love."
(sorry, the mere phrase always reminds of of that: bonus points if you know what I'm blabbing about).
The bitter hint is due to the fact that they leave the seeds in. This is also what gives this drink such a subtle flavor... On this same vein, remind me to write about the nickey finn one day, more of a wintry drink though.
Enjoy!
Dessert, anyone?
Well, that steak dinner below is going to be a hard act to follow. It sounds amazing; I plan on trying that one at home this weekend. So, rather than put another huge meal on the table, let me suggest a little dessert.
Here are two recipes to choose from. Pots du Crème for two, or Chocolate Pan Soufflè.
Pots du Crème
1/2 package sweet baking chocolate (5oz), reserve an ounce or so
2 tbsp. egg substitute
2 tsp. sugar
1/4 cup whipping cream
1/4 tsp. vanilla extract
Whipped cream
Bring the water in a double boiler to a boil. Reduce heat to low and cook 4oz. of the chocolate until it melts. Combine the next three ingredients in a bowl, mixing well. Gradually add the mixture to the melted chocolate, stirring well. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, for five minutes. Remove from heat and add the vanilla. Stir again.
Put the mixture into serving containers (I like fancy stemware for this one), cover with a bit of plastic wrap or aluminium foil, and chill for 4 hours. Garnish with whipped cream, then gently shave bits of the chocolate you kept in reserve on top of the whipped cream. Easy, cheap, quick, and delicious!
Chocolate Pan Soufflè
2 tbsp unsalted butter
2 tbsp all-purpose flour
2/3 cup milk
1/8 tsp. salt
3 large eggs, separated
4 ounces semisweet chocolate, chopped coarsely
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 large egg whites
1/3 cup granulated sugar
confectioner's sugar for dusting
whipped cream for serving
Melt the butter over medium heat in a heavy saucepan. Stir in the flour and cook it, stirring ALL THE TIME for two minutes exactly. Turn up the heat to medium high, and stir in the milk gradually, blending well, and bring to a boil. Cook the mixture, stirring constantly, for another minute. Stir in the salt, then remove from heat.
Add the egg yolks one at a time, stirring well after each. Add the chocolate and stir until it melts and the mix becomes smooth and somewhat shiny. Add the vanilla and - you guessed it! - stir some more. Put the mixture in a medium-sized bowl and cool it for about 15 minutes.
Preheat your over to 425. Grease a 10-inch pie plate with butter, heavily. Put it in the freezer for 10 minutes. Take the pie plate out, and grease with butter again. Refreeze for 20 minutes. Remove and sprinkle the inside of the buttered pie plate with granulated sugar.
While your pan is in the freezer, beat the five egg whites in a medium bowl until soft peaks form. Add the granulated sugar and beat until the whites are shiny and the peaks stiffen.
Stir about a quarter of the egg white mixture into the chocolate mixture. Then, fold in the remaining part of the mix with a rubber spatula. No egg-white streaks should be visible when you finish. Scrape into your prepared pie plate.
Bake this in the center of your over for about 13 - 15 minutes, or until the souffle puffs up and the edges are firm. Remove from the oven, dust with confectioner's sugar, garnish with whipped cream, and serve.
July 09, 2003
A "Cazh" Steak Dinner
I hope to post more artful recipes in the future, but I wanted to post something right away since I received such a warm reception here at Deus ex Culina. This is a very simple and unpretentious recipe to be enjoyed by carnivores everywhere...
A Cazh (as in Casual) Dinner
Pantry Raid:
2 Tenderloin steaks
Olive oil
The best mustard you can afford- or - your favorite mustard
Worcestershire sauce (optional)
A combination or all of the following:
oregano
rosemary (important)
fresh garlic
sesame seeds (optional)
hot red pepper (or if you're muy macho, chili pepper)
salt- or- lemon salt mix
Hot to Trot: How to cook it-
Set your oven to "bake" at 350 degrees. On a cooking tray slather the mustard over the steaks on both sides. You can add a little Worcestershire sauce if you'd like, but it's not necessary. Next sprinkle on the spices on top. Then just pop the tray into the oven and let bake for about ten minutes. After ten minutes, drizzle a little bit of olive oil on the steaks to moisten the spices a bit- you don't want them to dry out too much. I like the olive oil spray Trader Joe's sells- it's easy to control how much goes where. Let the steaks bake until the center reaches 160 degrees.
The steaks should have a nice herbed crust with insides that are tender and moist. The mustard should give it a flavor that is complimentary rather than overpowering.
As side dishes I recommend steamed asparagus (steamed for a couple minutes- you want them kind of crunchy still) and baked sweet potatoes.
Enjoy: Bom Apetite!
Dark and Stormy
Not my favorite, solely because they are a little sweet for my tastes... they are a sublime drink, perfect for the summer. After making quite a few for some of the guests this past week... I figured out another absolute... one I have yet to quantify, but can explain.
"It was a dark and stormy night in Maine. Rob, busy cooking, couldn't get his drink just right..."
Sorry.
First, the recipe:
Dark and Stormy:
Gosling's dark rum
Ginger beer
1/8th lime wedge
Fill a glass with ice, pour in "some" rum. Squeeze the lime wedge and drop it in. Top with the ginger beer. Ginger beer may be hard to come by in some parts, there is no substitute, unfortunately.
As I said, I am not a fan, but Rob made one for himself and was unsatisfied, our usual dark-n-stormy bartender not accompanying us... so I tried to step up to the plate. I made the assumption that, basically, this is a gin and tonic in ratio - which undergoes a magical transformation at *just* the right amounts. I have yet to genuinely quantify my gin/tonic ratios, but I know the look. Basically, in any glass which is wider at the top, fill with ice. The base liquor is filled about a third of the way, linearly up the glass, which means ever so slightly less than one third. Top with the tonic or beer. You have to play with the ratio a little for each glass, but you'll know when you get it right. And it seems to be the same for g&t's, d&s's and almost any drink with one base liquor, topped with a carbonated beverage.
Enjoy!
(also check out my update to the mojitos, another discovery this past week - I know, I know, eventually I will cook some food)
New England Clam Bake Reality
Ok, so as you probably know, my friends and I did a clam bake on Yoho Beach in Maine during our vacation. I had considered it an embarrassment that as a New Englander, I had never attempted such a thing. But then again I come from Massachusetts, and you can bet that the minute we started lighting a campfire on a Massachusetts beach the cops and fire department would be there handing out fines and making us put the fire out. But in Maine, well, we had no problems whatsoever.
Except perhaps for the cooking...
We began by getting all the food we'd need. Since there were seven of us, we assembled the following:
7 lobsters (a little over 1lb each)
4 lbs mussels
2 lbs clams (the people we were with liked clams over mussels)
1 bag of Russet potatos (this was an error as we shall later see)
7 ears of corn
1 bag of yellow onions
2 bags of match light charcoal
We began by digging the pit. It was about 2'x3' and almost 2' deep. We lined the bottom of the pit with grapefruit sized dry rocks (wet ones could explode), and lit the first bag of charcoal on top of teh rocks. Once those coals had become white, we dumped on top the second bag of charcoal.
In the meantime, the other three men in the group went and scavanged the beach for driftwood. And they found a remarkable amount (we were in a remote area, so if you're by a clean beach, you may want to bring your own wood with you). Over the next hour and a half, we burned the wood down to charcoal, being careful never to load too much wood into the pit as to let the fire escape. After an hour and a half, we thought that the pit must be hot enough, and so we began to assemble the bake.
Wet seaweed was collected, and we covered the charcoal covered rocks with a healthy helping of the weed. On top of that went the potatos, followed by the lobsters, onions, clams, mussels and corn. Wet seaweed was again used to cover the top, and a wet towel was placed over the entire bake. Finally the towel was covered with sand, and we waited.
We waited about an hour before people started getting impatient wanting to see how it was going. I should point out to you that lobster, steamed in a steamer, only takes 20 minutes or so. But this wasn't a steamer with an active flame. It was a clam bake on top of hot but cooling rocks. Nevertheless, we opened it up and surprise, it was only half cooked. So we covered it back up again and tewnty minutes later it had hardly changed. Having examined the situation, we concluded that the rocks were no longer hot enough to finish the job. So we packed everything up in a king sized steamer pot that we had, and headed home to complete the job in a steamer over open flame.
It's difficult to say precisely what went wrong. Some recipes we'd seen said to keep the fire going for a full three hours or until the rocks are "red hot" which seemed a bit much to us, but maybe that was what we needed, particularly in the cold, wet, sand beaches of Maine. I think we also laid too much seaweed down such that it started acting like an insulator at points, instead of being steamed into the seafood. The potatos were clearly wrong, as most recipes call for the little red potatos, not big ones - I don't know what I was thinking buying those. And I still think that we opened the damned thing up too early, letting all the accumulated heat and steam out that had yet to finish their work. Regardless, the effort was not a complete failure.
After returning to our beach houuse and completing the cooking job, we proceeded to eat. And I have to say, the results were delicious. The lobster was unlike any I'd ever had before, with a smokey/herby flavor that could only come from the combination of driftwood and seaweed that we'd used in the bake. The other foods had this taste as well, except for the potatos, which seemed oddly unaffected.
Overall, it was a great meal and a world of fun, even if we had to finish the meal in a conventional manner. I am anxious to try it again. I think that a real New England clam bake is a little like southern slow smoked bbq, which just takes time and patience to get right. Maybe next time there'll be no mistakes...
VikingZen
I'd like to introduce everybody to VikingZen. She's originally form Brazil, and has lived in France, Italy, and now lives here. She'll get me a short bio soon enough, but in the meantime join me in welcoming her to the blog. Hopefully we'll soon be enjoying her recipes from south of the equator...
Welcome aboard Vikingzen!
July 06, 2003
Southern Beer Can Chicken in Maine
As readers of the samaBlog may be aware, I just returned from a week's vacation in Maine with a group of friends. Not surprisingly, I became a sort of resident chef in the house we rented, and had the opportunity to do a lot of good cooking for the group of seven that stayed for the week.
While most of what we did was traditional New England fare, including clam chowder and a clam bake (which I'll save for later in the week), one night we made a decidedly Southern recipe: Beer Can Chicken.
Now it may come as a shock to you that someone who has done as much slow smoke bbq as I have had never attempted this style of chicken before now, but in fact, I'd never even heard of it until just a few weeks ago. At a friend's wedding, I was seated next to a southern relative of the groom, who told me about the technique. And then around Father's Day, I was in the bookstore looking for something for a gift when I saw a book on beer can chicken, which I briefly thumbed through. I was intrigued enough by that to attempt the technique with friends up in Maine.
What follows is the recipe as I made it. I don't have pictures as of yet, but a friend brought his camera, and when I get the pictures I'll post them here. In the meantime, let me just tell you that the chicken was nothing short of a triumph (if I must say so myself) and I would make it regularly if I didn't live in an apartment with no outdoor space. I wonder how well it would work on rabbit...
Ingredients:
One 4.5 lb fryer (that's a chicken)
Two bottles of Bass Ale
One empty soda can (sorry, Bass doesn't come in cans)
One package of Lipton onion soup mix
Butter
Salt
Fresh cracked pepper (I used mixed colored peppercorns)
Thyme
Chili Powder
Liquid Smoke
Clean the chicken and wash it inside and out thoroughly. Pat it dry with paper towels and set aside. Pour one Bass ale into a large bowl, and place chicken in bowl for marinating, 2 to 3 hours, turning once.
When marinade is done, take empty soda can and fill halfway with 2nd Bass Ale. Drink remainder of the beer. Add to the soda can about 2 teaspoons of Liquid Smoke. The beer may foam up a bit from this, don't worry about that. Add more or less smoke depending on how smokey you want your chicken.
Take chicken, dry it a bit, and thoroughly rub the inside cavity with salt and pepper. Rub outside of the bird with salt, pepper, and a light dusting of thyme and chili powder. Rub butter over the outside of chicken. This will be messy, but don't worry about that. Finally, coat on top of the butter the entire package of Lipton onion soup mix.
Go light the grill. Make one side medium high, and the other side as low as you can go. If you have the patience, you can keep the low side entirely unlit. Then, place the chicken on top of the soda can, such that the can is inserted into the bird's cavity and the bird is sitting upright, with the can and two legs acting as sort of a tripod. Place the bird and can over the low lit side of the grill, and close the grill top (you may need to remove the upper tray of your grill before lighting to do this).
I forget precisely how long this took, as I was drinking and socializing while watching the bird. But my recollection is that it took about an hour and a half. You can check on the bird periodically. It will look done because the skin will be a nice golden brown and the juice will run clear.
I can't tell you just how good this was. The chicken was steamed by the beer and had a nice onion-smokey flavor to it. I will most definitely make this again, and may even experiment with a rabbit. Enjoy.
