November 24, 2010
Living here in Italy for my pre-tirement, time sometimes seems to slip away. Not in a bad way, but because there are lots of Italian trips to take, Italian liqueurs to sample, and Italian restaurants to visit. But sometimes it is a smidge sad, as the mind doesn’t focus with the same type of precision as when stateside. For example, I completely forgot that November 8th was Harvey Wallbanger day. Dang. I’m hoping everyone reading this wasn’t as addle-pated as me, and remembered to have their Harvey Wallbangers on the 8th? If you’re like me, you enjoy your Harvey Wallbangesr most in the bathtub, so your evening on the 8th was spent (I imagine) with you (and someone close to you, if you have a big tub) pouring both a drink and a hot bubble bath, and then indulging in a large amount of relaxation and bliss. If, by some mistaken chance, or perhaps through a case of short-term amnesia, or because you weren’t alerted by your local bartender (shame on them), you also missed Harvey Wallbanger day, don’t fret too much—you can pretend it’s today, and make one up (to have in the above-mentioned tub, naturally). Here’s my recipe (the one I’ll be following when I do my own celebrating, in about three hours):
Ice cubes
2 ounces vodka
5 ounces freshly squeezed orange juice
1/2 ounce Galliano
1. Fill a highball glass three-quarters full with ice cubes. Add the vodka and the orange juice, and stir briefly.
2. Float the Galliano on top of the vodka-juice mixture.
June 15, 2010
Betsy Karetnick is my favorite radio hostess (and host, for that matter). She currently hosts the “Morning Living” and “Everyday Food” shows for Martha Stewart Sirius Radio, and every time I’m in New York City I try and stop in to make a few drinks with her on the air and talk to callers about parties, cocktails, and anything else entertaining under the sun. She’s one of those hosts who really listens to callers, as well as having her own great ideas, and though she actually started as a finance journalist and a host of PBS’ “That Money Show,” shes’s now a full-on food and entertaining force. Best of all, it’s her birthday this Thursday, the 17th, and I’m going to be in New York, so I’m stopping by the studio to make her some birthday Bellinis during the “Everyday Food” show at 12:15 EST, using the delicious Perfect Puree white peach puree. If you have Sirius Radio, be sure to listen in (at noon), and hey, even call in if you feel like saying howdy. If you don’t have Sirius Radio, you can always sign up for a free trial and see what you think (and call in and say howdy). If you absolutely can’t get near a radio, then at least make a Bellini on Friday. Here’s the recipe (adapted a bit) from Good Spirits.
2 ounce Perfect Puree white peach puree
4 or 5 ounces Prosecco
White peach slice for garnish
1. Add two ounces of the peach puree to a Champagne flute. Slowly, while stirring, add the Prosecco. You must add the Prosecco slowly, integrating it into the somewhat removed peach puree throughout or a peach puree sludge might gather at the bottom of the glass.
2. Garnish with the white peach slice and a toast to birthdays and Betsy.
May 23, 2010
Okay, right up at the front of the stage, before the curtains go up, let me tell those readers who don’t know, what MxMo is (or at least give out what I know, which isn’t a whole barrelful of knowledge, since I’ve never had the pleasure of taking part before). Basically, it’s a bunch of bar-booze-drunken bloggers making up or bringing out a drink under a particular theme, on a Monday. So, mixology Monday I suppose. A different blog hosts every one (one a month, I believe), and they round up links to the posts about the theme on the day on their site, and send readers out and about and around the interweb to see those other posts about the theme. From what I’ve read when going boozing on the web on Mondays, the themes tend to be a particular spirit, liquor, or ingredient. However, when the really wacky bar blogger hosts, the theme may just be more, let’s say esoteric. Which is the case this month, as drink-slinger Andrew Bohrer who blogs at Cask Strength is hosting the MxMo, and he chose Tom Waits.
Which actually makes fantastically fantastic sense, as Andrew talks about in his top MxMo post (right here), in story fashion, which Waits himself would enjoy, I think. See, at heart, going around the rumbling voice and the at times otherworldly instrumentation and the harlots and hard heads, Waits is a storyteller, a boozy troubadour, a chronicler of the forgotten nights and the railroad yards, of trombone funerals and waking up wearing bruises and regret in a hotel next to the railroad tracks, of lost and long- elapsed love, and of gospel music sung under a blistering sun when all you want is a glass of whiskey and s single ice cube and the time to drink the world down.
Of course, as the above going on and on probably demonstrates, and since I’ve mentioned him in cocktail recipe intros in pretty much every book I’ve written, I’m a Tom Waits fan. I have most CDs, and listen to him on a regular basis, and have sat up singing Tom Waits with pals and bourbon and brandy until 4 am multiple times, have sat in a parked car half drunk singing Tom Waits while the thunder hit the hood like a million fists, and have put Tom Waits songs on jukeboxes with a glass of gin in one hand in more bars, lounges, dives, and hole-in-the-walls then I can remember. But as I haven’t gotten to my drink yet, I’m gonna put a leash on my Waitsean ramblings and start pouring.
Oh, wait, give me another sec, to give a drink backstory. Though I enjoy all the Waits CDs I have (including those Andrew mentions, Closing Time, Small Change, and the rollicking live Nighthawks at the Diner), the one I go back to the most is Rain Dogs. From the opening “We sail tonight for Singapore” to the New Orleans horns playing the funeral out at the record’s end, Rain Dogs matches more moods and moodiness and must-have-a-drink-while-listening-to tracks to me than any other. And while I don’t have a “favorite” song on Rain Dogs (this makes a type of sense, since they go together like egg drinks and mornings), “Tango Till They’re Sore” is the song (don’t take this morbidly, by the way) I want played at my funeral. I just want folks there to have good music, to drink well, and to toast me relentlessly, and this song, which starts “Well ya play that Tarantela and the hounds they start to roar” does just that. Not to mention that the chorus goes:
Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I’ll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past
So send me off to bed forever more.
Rain Dogs also has a dandy song called “Jockey Full of Bourbon” (which has the classic line, a line I can sympathize with, “I’m full of bourbon, I can’t stand up”), so I wanted my drink to have a bourbon base, and bourbon is also mentioned multiple times within the record. The only other spirit dropped in the album is brandy (in “Union Square”), so I decided to double up on base spirits a bit, and then I wanted to bring in some bitters, in honor of the line in “9th & Hennepin” that says “till you’re full of rag water, bitters, and blue ruin.” So, that got me to three, a magic number, but because Tom Waits is also an original, I wanted to bring another ingredient into the drink that isn’t mentioned in one of his songs (four can be a magic number too y’all), but that has at least a tangential connection, and so I went with St. Elizabeth’s Allspice Dram. For one, it tastes great. For two, St. Elizabeth’s could be an insane asylum. For three, it’s based on an older ingredient called “Pimento Dram” which I could see Waits-style sailors drinking on a leaking dingy. When mixed in the following way, these ingredients in honor of Tom Waits and Andrew Bohrer make The Hounds They Start to Roar:
2 ounces bourbon (I used Blanton’s)
¾ ounce St. Elizabeth’s Allspice Dram
½ ounce brandy (I used Grand Duke d’Alba cause I’m walking Spanish down the hall)
2 dashes Peychaud’s Bitters
1. Fill a cocktail shaker, mixing glass, dented top hat, or ladies leather boot halfway full with cracked ice. Add the whole bunch of ingredients. Stir well.
2. Strain into a cocktail glass or goblet. Garnish with a sad song.
PS: Feel this needs a garnish? I suggest an ice pick, a dented fender from a ’54 Ford, or a tattooed tear.
Tags: Andrew Bohrer, bourbon, Brandy, Cask Strength, cocktail recipe, Cocktail Recipes, MxMo, Peychaud's bitters, Rain Dogs, St. Elizabeth's Allspice Dram, The Hounds They Start to Roar, Tom Waits
Posted in: Almost Drinkable Photo, Brandy, Recipes, Whiskey
February 12, 2010
Aw, the good life. I like the idea of the good life (though I have to imagine that it’s slightly different for everyone, but have to hope that for at least 95.47% of the people it involves having a drink with friends at least once in a while). And it seems others, even with their varied and various definitions like the idea of the good life, too. So much so that there is now a very handy, attractive, and fun website out there called The Good Life Report, that talks about dining, drinks, travel, wellness, and more items one might associate with living goodly, usually focused around a particular city or place or event or situation. Good things. Things I like. Which is why I was tickled when they wanted to use my Sazerac recipe for the most recent report (and pal Melissa Punch’s fantastic photo of said Sazerac), the one from Dark Spirits. Go check it out. And, if you like the good life, too (and really, who likes the bad life? Outside of Doctor Doom?), sign up for their newsletter, and get the good life delivered to your inbox.
PS: Bonus points (meaning, a drink on me next time we’re together) for anyone who can pick out the extra sentence or two that are in the Good Life Report Sazerac intro paragraphs but not in Dark Spirits. That’s a challenge people.
January 8, 2010
It’s winter (at least within the latitudes I reside within), and I’m dreaming a bit of summer, of sitting outside with a cold, tall, delish beverage, far away from today’s actual chilliness. And when I dream of summer, I always like to wonder: what would androids in the future drink, if they had a head full of LSD and had been swimming? You, I’m guessing, wonder the same thing. Luckily, there’s a little pamphlet that was put out in 1976 called Summer Comfort that tells us: they drink Southern Comfort. If you don’t believe me, take a gander at the cover of said pamphlet below. Have you ever seen a better representation of drugged-up soaking wet androids? I didn’t think so.
PS: Because androids and their robot brethren and sisterthren bleed out milk, I’m guessing the actual drink from the pamphlet they’re most fond of is the “New! Cow Shot.” Which is 1-1/2 ounces Southern Comfort, 1/2 ounce crème de cacao, and 3 ounces cold milk over ice. It’s “superb, no bull!”
It’s a Valentine’s Special (though not just to be imbibed on that particular day, or watched) here on the Cocktail to Cocktail Hour, as wife Nat drops by the studios for a bit of charming banter as she teaches you how to make the Princess, a tall, delicious, limeoncello-backed number that’s ideal both for serving to that someone closest to you and for having every day when the heat’s risen. It’s a romantically bubbly episode of the new season of the show about cocktails and drinking and good times, the Good Spirits Cocktail to Cocktail Hour. 
