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Posts from the ‘Beverages’ Category

Dec 20

Winter cocktail: Caramelized eggnog with dark rum

I’m back! I know it was just a few days ago that I was saying goodbye until after the holidays, feeling like I couldn’t see the light at the Tunnel of Kitchen Despair, but the clouds have parted and HERE I AM. Look at all that fuss I made! (Oh god, please let the Tunnel be behind me.)

And I didn’t want to wait for this any longer, because (for some reason that always escapes me) the nog window is open for only so much longer, and I don’t want it to pass you by.

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Nov 14

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Honey gimlets, and other objects of my obsessions

Fairly often, things wiggle their way into my life and hang around for a while. Sometimes it’s a craving that won’t quit, or an activity that becomes a routine, or an idea or flavor or experience I become a little fixated on.  I go through phases with foods I want to eat all the time, I get addicted to TV shows, I listen to albums non-stop,  I wear certain outfits whenever they’re clean, and there’s usually some cocktail or other that I’m ordering. These things stick around for a while until something – a change in the weather, a random craving, or a need for change – steers me elsewhere.

And right now, it’s this humble little honey gimlet.

Honey_gimlet_2

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Oct 8

Fall Cocktails: The apple picker

Cocktail_ingredients

Two months in and we’re settling into our new life here in the Midwest. After a while of time with things sort of up in the air, I have my situation fairly figured out (more on that in a bit) and Brett’s pretty entrenched in his first semester of his PhD program. We’re slowly meeting people and finding folks to share our time with, and we’re trying to bite off snippets of time to go explore our new town and the surroundings.

And, it’s fall. Even in the first few days of it, it’s the sort of fall I’ve been waiting for since I left Minnesota over a decade ago. That first fall away was a big swirl of college freshman activity and I didn’t have a chance to think much about it, but by sophomore year I would catch myself lingering over photos – photos of anything, from anywhere – that somehow reminded me of the falls I was used to. This continued and intensified for years, and one time just a couple of years ago I caught myself fawning wistfully over a photo of what amounted to a fairly barren park, all leafless and windswept and well into its waning pre-winter days. I couldn’t stop looking at it and feeling nostalgic, and I knew it was time to go back. Fall is one of the things I missed most about being in California, and one of the main reasons I’m happy to be back.

It also means I can add more to the Fall Cocktails category of this website, woefully neglected amongst the palms.

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Sep 13

Late summer cocktail: Aviation

Aviation

First: Welcome to all new readers who have found this site through the Capital Times article published yesterday! I’m excited to make contact with a new audience in Madison, and would love to hear about things you’re interested in, either for new classes or new site content. Stay in touch! I look forward to meeting many of you as I settle into this new part of the country. (Also, know that I don’t usually post recipes with such uncommon ingredients … this is a slight diversion from my normal sort of recipes. Stay tuned for a simple smoked salmon frittata recipe, coming soon!)

First Second: I can still post a “summer cocktail” recipe, right? I’ve started organizing my photos into a “Fall 2013” folder, as I usually do after my birthday, but here in Madison the intense heat of the end of summer is only now threatening to break, and I know Southern California is still feeling the heat.

Second Third: I generally do a pretty good job of picking recipes to post here that would be easy enough for most people to make at home, whether it’s a matter of finding the ingredients or of the complexity of the techniques involved. Today, however, I’m breaking that rule.

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Jul 27

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Trail cooking – sesame peanut noodles, a pair of cocktails, and two meal plans

Trail_cooking

We’ve camped a lot this year. A lot a lot. We realized, in fact, that we have probably spent more nights in our tent over this past year than in any other place. It’s been fantastic, in part because we’ve camped in some amazing, jaw-dropping places (like the Canadian Rockies, the Boundary Waters, and Yosemite), but also because we spent most of our years in Southern California wishing we had more time to head into the wilderness, pitch a tent, and spend days doing not much of anything but hiking.

So these days I have pretty good footing on matters of camp cooking. I get a lot of questions both on this site and from friends and family about how to plan for camp meals, and this page from last year has been by far my most popular this summer, so soon I’ll put together a new site feature all about planning camp meals and menus.

But first, I want to talk about trail cooking, an entirely different beast. Read more

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