After making our Applejack Old Fashioned this fall, we decided to see how maple would play with bourbon. Of course it plays well. What did you think?
Greg is working on an article for The Valley Table magazine about maple syrup, so it was especially cool to be able to use a maple syrup from the Hudson Valley: Crown. Recipe after the jump. Click to continue »
I want to start off this post by saying that these “Shit that” whoever “says” videos flying around YouTube are hilarious. “Shit New Yorkers Say” is especially funny (“Where’s the train?” “All I had to eat today was a bagel.” “Queens?”).
“Shit Bartenders Say” is so good, I’ll embed it here. Please, take the time to watch. I’ll wait.
This is a long way of saying that when my friend Kara Newman posted a link to this video and decided to note the quote “I’m really into Amaro lately,” I was laughing — at myself, especially. I just got “into” Amaro — Kris and Irene have been talking about it lots lately — and this was the first cocktail I tried with it. Irene found this cocktail — the Criterium — in the current issue of La Cucina Italiana, where another friend, Mindy Fox, is food editor. (By the way, Mindy’s book, “A Bird in the Oven,” is excellent. We’ve made two recipes here at Sour Cherry Farm, and Irene has made tons more. They’re all amazing. But I digress.)
Back to the cocktail. It’s got the lovely bitter flavor of Amaro, along with some sweetness from the grapefruit and tart from the lemon. It tastes sort of like a grown-up Coca Cola, without the cloy. We loved it. And yes. I’m really into Amaro lately.
The recipe, after the jump.
On Wednesday, everyone went their separate ways. Sarah went out with her friends to Cafe Barcel, and we went to Irene’s for a ritual reading of “A Christmas Memory” with Kris and Tom. But first, Sarah had her friends over to the farm for cocktails and to “see the baby.”
Aviations all around!
Cheers, kids! Dan, Jen and Kara:
Sam in her Christmas dress, after the jump.
Our annual Christmas tradition: tamale supper.
This year, we started with margies, too.
As a toast to Christmas, we present the Perfect Parallel. The cocktail is a play on the Perfect Manhattan, which uses equal amounts of sweet and dry vermouth along with bourbon or rye. In this case, we substitute Laird’s Applejack. Delishy.
And so festive, isn’t it? The recipe is on a post from last fall: Perfect Parallel recipe.
Our shipment of grapefruit from Red Cooper in the Rio Grande Valley arrived on the porch this morning. So our cocktail of choice this evening? Salty Dogs of course!
We got the new PDT Cocktail Book, and shook up a batch of our first victims, the Brandy Crusta.
Mom and Leigh came over and we visited with Sam in the living room, enjoying our Turkey Carcass Soup for supper.
Turkey Carcass Soup recipe here. Brandy Crusta recipe here.
An old Jerry Thomas recipe we found in the brand new PDT Cocktail Book, which calls it “the grandaddy of the Sidecar.” Well, you know how we do love a Sidecar. We now also love a Brandy Crusta.
The recipe, after the jump.
Irene was a doll to bring dinner over on Friday night: pork shoulder, sweet potatoes, kale and a fried egg over brioche. All from Stone Barns and Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Wow. All we had to do was make cocktails. Sidecars, in fact.
We lit our first fire of the season, and opened a nice bottle of wine to celebrate. You’d think we’d open a red — it being chilly enough for a fire and all. But no. We went for a nice white from Bandol.
Out of the many, many cocktail recipes that Ed and I tried for our story on New York State spirits, our favorite was the Applejack Old Fashioned.
Photo by Xavier Mascareñas/The Journal News.
The recipe, after the jump.
My good friend and colleague Ed and I got together on a Saturday night to work on a story about New York State spirits. We researched and wrote about several local distilleries, and now we’re developing cocktail recipes that people could use with them!
Here’s a link to the story: New York State spirits.
On Saturday of Derby Day, we muddled some mint with bourbon and crushed some ice. Out came the pewter cups and over came the neighbors. A couple of mint juleps later — and they’re off!
Afterwards, we all sat down to a supper of cod over sauteed asparagus (from the garden) and roasted cherry tomatoes (from the grocery store), the dish a nod to our halibut at Barcel on the Thursday before.
Come Derby Day each year, we’re muddling, shaking and stirring. The mint in the garden has grown enough that it’s ripe for the picking, and there’s nothing no recipe we like better for showing it off.
The recipe, after the jump.
This fancy lemon tart with a surprise layer of chocolate hiding beneath its sheen has become somewhat of a tradition at Easter dinner. It’s just so darn festive, isn’t it? The original recipe, from Suzanne Goin’s Sunday Suppers at Lucques, calls for Meyer lemon juice, but since we so rarely have Meyer lemons here, I’ve always made it with regular, and it comes out just great. It really is stunningly beautiful, but it’s also a perfect ending for a heavy meal: a luscious lemon curd that doesn’t really fill you up but is rich enough to satisfy. The chocolate is just the gild on the lily.
Everything but the kitchen sink in the first pot, rice in the second. The makings of dinner.
Karen, back in the U.S. for a work trip, came up from NYC on her crutches to have a Friday night dinner with us at Cafe Barcel. But first, cocktails! We shook up some Aviations at the Farm.
After an enormous meal at M. Wells for dinner, we decided to go for a light supper of sips and snacks back at the farm. We shook up a shaker of The Bone, and made some Rancho Gordo popcorn.
Irene first served this cocktail at the book club’s discussion of “On the Road.” We’ve since requested it at bars and made at home. Several times. It’s adapted from David Wondrich, cocktail historian and writer extraordinaire. According to Esquire, for which Wondrich is a cocktail correspondent (how do you like that title?), the drink was originally created for The Chickenbone Cafe in Williamsburg, but revived for a Halloween article, mostly because of its name. I think it’s tasty any time of year.
The recipe, after the jump.
We enjoyed Aviations by the fire on Friday night, and then went upstairs for dinner in front of the TV.
Dinner was breakfast: fried eggs, bacon and Eggo waffles. Really. No photos.
We have revised our old recipe for the Aviation cocktail. We now include both creme de violette and maraschino liqueur in our ingredients.
We like to call this cocktail the Carjack. It’s little twist on a Sidecar, but it’s made with applejack brandy rather than cognac. Clever, huh?
Greg likes to call this drink “my old friend Jack Rose.” This night, however, he wasn’t as friendly as usual. (Jack Rose, not Greg.) We used an organic, natural grenadine, and my theory is that some of the syrupy sweetness associated with the old-style chemical types was missing. The lime took over and left us a little wanting. So we took the drink back to the shaker and added a little more grenadine. Voila, our old friend was back.
SCF fans may remember a really fun dinner with Boo where we served a terrific dish we made last year from Michael Symon’s book, “Live to Cook.” It’s a delicious combination of lamb sausage with heady spices mixed in with white beans with vegetables, then topped with scallops, which are dusted with orange zest and mint. Ever since then, we’ve had some of the leftover sausage in the freezer. So when Greg came home with some scallops from the Pleasantville Farmers Market, we decided to recreate the meal.
I discovered this forgotten classic cocktail in one of my favorite bar books, “Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century.” The authors say there are two ways to make Satan’s Whiskers, straight or curled. The “straight” Whiskers uses Grand Marnier; the “curled” Whiskers uses Cointreau. I did mine straight. And straight up.
The recipe, after the jump.
After taking in the matinee performance of The Scottsboro Boys, we headed over to the swanky new — but very old looking — Lambs Club. It’s like the Art Deco lounge of your dreams. You’re living in a 1930s movie. WPA-style murals. Glass and shiny chrome. Sleek, hopeful, elegant. Yeah, and the drinks are great, too.
When you’re done with dinner at 8, there’s really nothing wrong with stopping in the local cocktail club for a post, is there? We thought not.
With a touch of fall in the air, we settled in by the fire with a warming apple brandy drink called the Perfect Parallel. It’s like a perfect Manhattan — which uses half sweet and half dry Vermouth — except you substitute apple jack brandy for bourbon or rye. We first came across it back at the Pegu Club many years back. We’ve been making it ever since.
Is it ever really a good idea to have a nightcap at your hotel bar? I question the intelligence of this, but the fact is, we went ahead, and we ended up with some good material.
So here we are, enjoying our bourbon. The band is playing.
Yes, that’s a woman singing and playing drums. Her only other accompaniment was a keyboard player. When we walked into the hotel lobby, we thought, Oh boy. This is the stuff that Saturday Night Live skits are made out of.
And then we were enjoying our drinks for a while, and you know what? We realized the band was pretty good. (Or was that the bourbon talking?) Anyway, you can judge for yourself, in this little clip I like to call “Greg Gets a Scolding.”
