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Posts tagged ‘cocktail’

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.

Cocktail_closeup Read more

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 2

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Summer cocktail: Herbed citrus radler (or shandy, should you prefer)

I hope I haven’t been holding out on you. I’ve talked about radlers before, right? I’m sure I have. I must have. In our house (I suppose I should say “house,” these days) it’s a pretty clear line from the first hints of warm weather to a glass filled with lemonade and beer.

Herb_radler_3

Herb_radler

You might know this as a shandy, which is acceptable, but in either case I don’t know how we’ve gotten this far without me talking about one of my all-time favorite go-to summer drinks, fizzy and cold and completely replenishing. Read more

May 18

Spring cocktail: Frühling’s 19

We’ve been in Vienna for over a week now, the longest we’ve been anywhere since we left Claremont last July. Being here for five weeks has meant an entirely different rhythm of travel, one that feels a lot more comfortable as we’ve gotten more and more exhausted over the last ten months. We keep saying that it’s 50% normal travel – venturing out into the city to see and do things – and 50% normal life – grocery shopping and cooking, slow mornings and early nights, and lots of time at our computers catching up on work and life and getting things done.

On our second night here we cooked dinner for ourselves, made a cocktail, and watched a DVD on the television in our apartment’s living room. It really set in, then, that we’d get to have a fairly domestic little experience while we’re here.

Fruhling_19 Read more

Apr 25

Spring cocktail: Honey Meyer lemon whiskey sour

spring_dinner

Oh boy. I have a lot catching up to do. I mean this mainly in terms of things to tell you, but I suppose it also applies to life in general, at the moment. We’ve been away from normal life for a long time, and that means we generally always have a lot of catching up to do.

First, the big news – we decided that we’re moving to Madison, Wisconsin at the end of the summer (!!!), where Brett will start his PhD program (at UW-Madison). We’re both really happy and very much looking forward to getting back to a sort of normal, stable, stationary life again (we’re not ready for it quite yet, but a few months from now sounds perfect). During our short visit to Madison earlier this month we found a cozy, homey flat to rent, and along with plenty of room for guests it has a huge screened-in front porch and a big colorful kitchen. I’m particularly excited about having the space and the stability to work on projects I’ve been wanting to do for a long time – like home-brewing, and canning, and making cheese, and setting up the smoker I got for my birthday this past fall. We always knew we’d be leaving Claremont at some point, so for the last two years or so we were there we avoided setting up some of these more labor- and time-intensive projects that would require new equipment and space. But now we have the perfect space to do it, and things like canning will make a lot more sense when we’re living somewhere with actual seasons, somewhere we won’t be able to access most produce throughout the year.

So – you can look forward to lots of posts about adapting to life in the Midwest and settling into our new home. Read more

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