The Secret Exit

The first time I made my new commute, I used a GPS app to get to work and spent my time worrying about whether I was driving fast enough but not too fast and whether the guy in the truck with all the bumper stickers actually hunts that much big game or this is all some sort of elaborate role-playing for him.

The second time I drove there, I vaguely remembered that I needed to take Exit 9 off the highway. As I drove past Exit 10, I made a mental note to keep my eye out for signs for the next exit.

Somehow, I found myself at Exit 8.

That’s odd, I thought, I must have really lost myself in singing along to that Lionel Richie cover. I couldn’t be very far from where I wanted to get off the highway, so I decided to take the exit, then circle back if I needed to.

But it turned out to be the exit I actually wanted. Weird though, how I missed Exit 9. I decided to look for it on my way home that night.

I missed it again. This time I blamed Whitesnake and visions of Tawny Kitaen dancing on the hood of a Jaguar.

I didn’t see Exit 9 the next day. This time, I blamed the podcast I was listening to. Not to go into too many details, but it turns out that pigeons are fascinating.

As one week turned into the next, though, even I couldn’t be absent-minded enough to forget about Exit 9 every single time.

It turns out, there is no Exit 9, southbound or northbound. Just a suspiciously uninteresting stretch of highway. I wondered if this was one of those no-13th-floor-in-a-hotel things, but I had vague memories of other Exit 9s on other highways so that probably wasn’t it.

I started to research the missing exit, but I stopped short when I realized that any answer I found would be a dry, profoundly boring, bureaucratic answer that would strip away another layer of my rapidly diminishing sense of childlike joy and wonder. It would have something to do with zoning, or population density, or a ballot referendum or something.

In other words, exactly the sort of cover story the government would cook up to cover the secret entrance to a covert military base, or an academy for mutants, or the entrance to an underground facility where they train sexy kung fu accountants or something. In other words, something I’m probably better off not knowing about.

But, you might ask, would the government actually be dumb enough to go to all that work and still mess up on the exit’s numbering?

Have you met our government?

It’s enough to make a vigilant citizen need a cocktail.

The Secret Exit

This is a riff on a classic drink called a Missing Link. It’s extremely simple, but also suspiciously difficult to remember the details of.

What was I supposed to pick up at the liquor store?, you might ask yourself. I really like that new drink and I’ve used up all the … all the … you know, the stuff that’s like triple sec, but not triple sec?

Almost like an agent in a black suit had hypnotized you, or something.

Ingredients

2 ounces really good rum – the best you’ve got

¾ ounce freshly squeezed lemon juice

¾ ounce orange curaçao

5 drops rose water

Wet a martini glass and put it upside-down in the freezer to frost.

Add all ingredients, with ice, to a shaker. Shake, until unbearably cold.

Strain into your frosted glass.

This is one of those drinks that is at its best when you start with it blisteringly cold. At the first sip, it might seem the slightest bit too acidic. You might wonder if you should have added some simple syrup or something to mellow it out. Subsequent sips will taste more and more well-rounded, though, as it warms up and the rose esters start to hit your palate. You will make a mental note to make this drink more often.

Let’s see if you can remember to.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

Lady in Blue

When I was extremely young, my father was a big fan of easy listening music. His favorite song was called “I Want Some Red Roses for a Blue Lady.” I remember this song as being awful.

Yesterday I thought of it for some reason and looked it up. It turns out that Wayne Newton recorded it in 1965. As I called it up on YouTube, I knew that I would listen to it and realize that now, as I hobble into late middle age, it would actually be pretty good. I would find myself enjoying it and that a week from now it would be on the driving playlist I use to torture my teenager.

As it turns out, it’s even worse than I remembered from my childhood. The trauma from hearing this as a kid must have forced the worst of it from my memory. Even I wouldn’t inflict this on The Teen.

On the topic of questionable decisions from the 1960s, I was reading through 1969’s The Esquire Drink Book, looking for a new cocktail recipe. When it comes to Mad Men-era, charming-but-arrogant drink recipes, Esquire had a bit of a corner on the market.

The recipe that grabbed my attention had a name so of its time that even after I read through it, said, “Nah!” and flipped past it, I kept returning to it: The Bosom Caresser. I mean, if you’re looking for a Swinging Sixties, Wayne Newton on the hi-fi, “My wife doesn’t understand me” type of drink, this seemed like a no-brainer.

Long story short: I ended up making it and it was OK. It was not spectacular and I don’t think I’ll make it again. The combination of brandy, marsala wine and raw egg yolk did not fill me with enthusiasm.

(That said, I did find out the hard way that if you do make a cocktail with a raw egg yolk in it, you should dry-shake it with the alcohol first, before adding the ice. Dropping a yolk into a shaker full of ice will make some of it freeze and you will end up with really unappetizing globs of it floating around in your drink that you will need to filter out before serving. We know that now.)

So where does that leave us?

In my case, invigorated from a long hot shower, to wash the sleaze off me and the memory of Wayne Newton out of my memory. As an antidote, here is the classiest drink I know:

Lady in Blue

Ingredients

1½ ounces very cold gin

¼ ounce créme de violette

¾ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice

½ ounce simple syrup

3 drops orange blossom water

A “slip” of blue curaçao

Combine all ingredients, except the blue curaçao, with ice in a cocktail shaker.

Shake until frost forms on the shaker and your hands become uncomfortably cold.

Strain into a martini glass. This is one occasion where you should not frost the glass first; you will want to show this cocktail off. The frosted glass would mess with that.

Pour a small slip of blue curaçao down one side of the glass. It is denser than the rest of the drink and will pool in the bottom of the glass.

While this is a delicious cocktail — crisp, gently sweet, subtly floral and just ginny enough to grab your attention — this is probably the prettiest drink you will ever make. If you find yourself needing to impress somebody, this is the drink to make. It’s gorgeous without making it seem like you’ve tried too hard.

Featured photo: Lady in Blue. Photo by John Fladd.

De-simplifying tomatoes

You kind of knew what you were letting yourself in for in February when you started all those tomato plants.

You knew you were supposed to get Darwinian by May and cull the weaker plants, but you let yourself get attached, and yes, in retrospect, it was probably a bad idea to let the kids name them, so instead of planting the five strongest tomatoes, you got guilty about killing off Trixie and Leon, and planted all of them.

And as the summer went by, you’d invested so much into each of the plants that you fell into a sunk-cost fallacy situation and you didn’t want all that work and worry to be for nothing, so here it is September, and the upshot of all this is that you are up to your eyebrows in tomatoes.

If you really wanted a simple solution to the Tomato Situation, you’d make a lot of bloody marys. They’re simple, elegant, you know you like them, and you can make them in bulk.

So clearly, simplicity is not what you’re after.

Let’s redefine what you’re really looking for: some sort of cocktail that is new and interesting. It has to use up some of these tomatoes, yes, but it also needs to be something that you can kick back with on the deck, day-drinking, but not feeling like you’re day-drinking. Remember, if you really wanted something simple you’d be bloody mary-ing it up, so realistically, you’re willing to put up with a bit of a project and some complications.

Fortunately, we’ve got you covered.

A tomato spritzer.

Yes, I know; it doesn’t sound that promising. I think you’ll be pleased with it, though. The good news is that each step gets easier.

Step 1 – Making cucumber-infused gin

Ingredients:

Cucumbers

Gin

Wash and weigh your cucumbers.

Place an equal amount, by weight, of cucumbers and gin in your blender. Don’t bother to peel the cucumbers.

Blend them on your lowest speed for a minute or two, until everything is chopped up and it looks like hot dog relish. You aren’t looking to puree it, just chop it up finely enough for the cucumbers to have a lot of surface area to interact with the gin.

Pour this slurry into a wide-mouthed jar and store it somewhere cool and dark for a week, shaking it once or twice per day. I like the laundry room in our basement, because I find myself there a couple of times per day and I can shake the jar and ask, “How ya doin’, buddy?”

After a week, strain and bottle the gin. If you’d like a very clear gin, you can run it through a coffee filter.

Step 2 – Tomato shrub

Ingredients:

128 g. roughly chopped cherry tomatoes

125 g. sugar

3½ ounces white wine vinegar

¾ ounce raspberry vinegar

1½ ounces dry vermouth

1½ ounces sweet vermouth

Over low heat, simmer the tomatoes, sugar and vinegars until the sugar is dissolved and the tomatoes have softened, about 10 minutes.

Remove from heat. Blend with a regular blender or an immersion blender.

Add the vermouths, and chill the mixture.

Strain and jar the mixture.

Step 3 – Juicing your tomatoes

Wash as many tomatoes as you want to get rid of use up.

Cut out the stem and any suspicious-looking cracks or welts. (It should be pointed out here that the objectively uglier the tomato, the juicier it is likely to be. Just sayin’.)

Throw the tomatoes into the blender. Actually throw them, if it makes you feel better.

Blitz them at any speed you like. You’ll get more juice out of them if you really go to town, but if you use a lower speed, your final juice won’t be as thick.

Strain your tomato glop.

The glop will turn into beautiful juice.

The actual cocktail – Tomato Spritzer

Ingredients:

1 ounce cucumber gin

2 ounce dry vermouth

1½ ounces fresh tomato juice

½ ounce tomato shrub

2 ounces cold prosecco

2 ounces cold, extra bubbly club soda — I like Topo Chico

Stir all ingredients over ice in a mixing glass.

Pour into tall glasses.

This cocktail has a surprising complexity. A lot of spritzers have a watered-down sweetness to them. This one is very light, but it has a savoriness that will make you raise an eyebrow as you drink it. The key to it is the cucumber gin; the background flavor of cucumbers highlights the tomato/vinegar acidity. This drink starts out a delicate pink color but after a few minutes will separate into two layers, with the tomato layer rising to the top. It is complex and a little hard to wrap your head around, and very nice to spend time with.

Much like you.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

Espresso martini

Editor’s note: Sometimes the essence of a drink can be summed up in short story. ‘Tis thus with this week’s cocktail.

Elizabeth closed her eyes and took several deep breaths, before opening them again and walking to the bar.

Friggin’ Sheila O’Brien

Elizabeth had spent the better part of a week making arrangements to get one evening to herself, to spend a couple of hours alone, drinking a glass of wine and reading. She’d grabbed a book from the middle of the pile on her nightstand. She’d even remembered an umbrella.

And then Sheila had been standing by the door inside the bar.

They’d gone to high school together; Sheila had always been able to smile and cut Elizabeth down with a sentence, to crush her effortlessly. From how easily she’d done it again tonight, it was almost like she’d been practicing.

But, Elizabeth thought as she settled herself at the bar, that was over for the moment. She caught the bartender’s eye. Raven, was that her name?

She started to order a glass of the house white, but Raven was a step ahead of her and deposited an espresso martini in front of her. This is absolutely not what Elizabeth would have remotely considered ordering, but it did look good…

It was dark and deep, and skull-shrinkingly cold. The coffee was rich and a little bitter, but there was a sweetness in the background that rounded it out.

Elizabeth looked up at Raven and started to speak, to thank her for reading her situation so well, but the bartender beat her to the punch.

“You have kind eyes, but I wouldn’t mess with you.” Then she walked away.

This was not what Elizabeth was expecting, but the more she thought about it, and the more of her martini she drank, the more she liked the sound of it.

She almost hoped Sheila was still by the door when she left.

Espresso martini

Ingredients:

2 ounces coffee-infused vodka (see below). Could you make this with regular, run-of-the-mill vodka? Yes, of course, but it wouldn’t contribute to the depth of the overall flavor. Using the infused vodka will deepen the finished drink.

½ ounce Kahlua

½ ounce simple syrup

1 ounce cold-brew coffee concentrate

Combine all ingredients over ice in a mixing glass and stir gently but thoroughly with a bar spoon.

Strain into a chilled martini glass.

If you are drinking this at a bar, make direct eye contact with yourself in the mirror.

There is a lot of reverse nostalgic snobbery associated with an espresso martini. It is often too sweet, or creamy, and it doesn’t tend to get a lot of respect. Made very strong, very black, and only a tiny bit sweet, it is a force to be reckoned with.

Speaking of snobbery — there are a lot of cocktail purists who, given the opportunity, will lecture you at great length about how you should never shake a martini. It “bruises the gin” apparently. It is incredibly galling to admit that they are right. This drink will taste noticeably different if it is made in a cocktail shaker than if it is stirred. It’s got something to do with science. It’s worth the extra minute or so to mix this gently.

Coffee-infused vodka

Ingredients

10 grams whole French-roast coffee beans

6 ounces 80-proof vodka, probably not your best vodka, but not the bottom-shelf stuff, either

Using a mortar and pestle, or cereal bowl and the bottom of a drinking glass, crush the coffee beans. You’re not trying to grind them into a powder, but break them up quite a bit.

Combine the vodka and crushed coffee beans in a small jar. Shake them together, then store somewhere cool and dark for 24 hours, shaking periodically.

Strain and label the coffee vodka.

Featured photo: Espresso martini. Photo by John Fladd.

A drink for your imaginary yacht

I understand that you’ve got a lot going on right now — a pandemic, work headaches, psychotic squirrels terrorizing your birdfeeder, etc. So it’s understandable if you’ve lost track of things and forgotten that it is Yachting Season. We’ve only got so much emotional bandwidth, and some things drop through the cracks.

Fortunately, Esquire has your back. Or at least they did in 1969.

The Esquire Drink Book from that year strikes a very particular tone. Hidden amongst the recipes for Brandy Daiseys, Black Roses and racially-insensitively-named drinks that were probably pretty good but have been ruined for us now are the cryptic instructions for an innocuous-sounding cocktail called the Connecticut Bullfrog:

“This cocktail must never be served on shore but always on a boat, provided that the boat is not over 45 feet long, and the owner is the skipper (no hired hand). The ingredients are awful but the result does have something. Here they are and you must have them on board:

4 parts gin

1 part New England rum

1 part lemon juice

1 part maple syrup

Shake these ingredients together until your arms ache. Then have someone else do the same thing with about 10 times the usual amount of ice.”

Esquire Drink Book, Frederic A. Birmingham, 1969, E.P. Dutton & Co., p. 216.

Having all these ingredients on hand, and being emotionally and intellectually at sea, I felt the need to field test the Bullfrog. I am the sole owner of my entirely imaginary yacht — which, being imaginary, is infinitely less than 45 feet long.

Not surprisingly, the Bullfrog was problematic from the get-go. I filled the large half of my cocktail shaker with ice — about 11 ounces — and added the seven ounces of liquid ingredients, at which point the smaller half of the shaker would no longer contain all the components.

(This cocktail deserves a poster: “The Connecticut Bullfrog cannot be contained.”)

So, I switched — as you will have to, if you decide to dance with the Bullfrog — to a large, one-quart jar.

I told my digital assistant to start a stopwatch, and started shaking.

The jar got uncomfortably cold very quickly — cold, as in frosty enough to bond my hands to the glass. Once I was able to pry them loose, this was solved by wrapping the jar in a tea towel.

The next problem was an unexpected one. I was pretty sure that my arms would start aching fairly quickly. I am not terribly fit in a general sense, but a regular regimen of martial arts and cocktail shaking have apparently toned me in unexpected ways. I lasted nine minutes. I know this because I asked my digital assistant how long I’d been shaking this jar.

“Over an extended period, possibly;” she told me, “then again, maybe not.” This sounds philosophically important, but was not as useful in a practical sense as I was looking for in the moment.

It took another full minute of shaking to stumble on an acceptably worded command to find out how long this exercise had been going on.

As instructed, I handed the jar off to my teenager in the next room, who lasted two minutes, five seconds before losing interest and handing it back to me.

At this point, a reasonable shaker (in a cocktail sense; I’m reasonably sure a Shaker, as in the 19th-century furniture-making religious community, would not have found themselves in this situation) could be forgiven for thinking that this project’s glitches were more or less over. Unfortunately, physics had other plans.

Air — particularly moist air — expands when it is heated and shrinks when it cools. Home canners use this fact to hermetically seal jars of compote and … stuff. Apparently, the same effect occurs when you shake an icy alcohol solution in a wide-mouthed jar for 11 minutes. It took a rubber jar-gripper and a lot of swearing to open the Bullfrog jar.

Pouring the contents into a tall glass was easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy in contrast.

So, is the Connecticut Bullfrog worth all the effort? Is it actually any good?

Almost disappointingly: yeah, it is. I really wanted to sneer at a cocktail designed to be drunk by investment analysts named Scooter and Bunny, but this is one of the most refreshing drinks I’ve had in a long time. The combination of gin and dark rum — I went with Myers’s — gives an almost whiskey-like background flavor, which plays well with the acid of the lemon juice. There isn’t enough maple syrup to make this too sweet, but enough that there is some body and depth.

I do feel that more experimentation is called for — specifically, subbing out juice and syrup for other, less 1 percent-y ingredients –— and, as a friend observed to me, given the sheer amount of shaking required by this recipe, the drink really ought to be called the Kinetic Bullfrog.

Featured photo: Connecticut Bullfrog. Photo by John Fladd.

The Firecracker

I deeply distrust economics.

Yes, I acknowledge that economics provides some convenient answers, but I don’t really trust it. It’s like the character in a movie — always shot with shadowy lighting — who supplies the hero with important information. Everything seems on the up-and-up, but something about the whole exchange makes you realize that she really isn’t on the hero’s side. When things fall apart badly in the third act, you nod your head and tell your eye-rolling date, “Yup, thought so.”

Economics pretends to explain a great deal about human nature, but once you make peace with the concept that money is imaginary and economics is arbitrary, everything sort of falls apart.

“Why is such-and-such worth so much money?”

Because that’s what people agree it’s worth.

“Janitors and farm workers do work way more important than CEOs; why don’t we pay them more?”

Because we don’t want to.

Totally. Arbitrary.

And yet — OK, have you ever made an impulsive purchase or invested a lot of time and money in something that ultimately hasn’t worked out? Hobby supplies or a disappointing vacation or a boyfriend — that you kept around or stuck with long after they ceased to be rewarding?

You or I might call that Poor Judgment, but economists have a name for it (because of course they do): the Sunk Cost Fallacy. The idea is that we don’t want to “waste” all the money and heartache that we’ve put into something unproductive, which makes sense on an emotional level but isn’t actually terribly logical. That money and effort are gone, no matter how you feel about it. Investing more time in Bradley or shelf space on scrapbooking materials doesn’t make much sense if they aren’t going to fulfill you.

Which brings us to triple sec.

It is a sweet, low-octane, vaguely citrusy liquor that 99 percent of us have around because of that time we were going to make a pitcher of margaritas, but we forgot to buy limes, and then we had a series of hard weeks at work and ended up drinking all the tequila one slug at a time, directly from the bottle, in lieu of sending ill-advised texts.

Anyway, an economist would tell us to throw away the triple sec; it’s just taking up shelf space. Marie Kondo would ask you if it was bringing you joy, which — let’s face it — it isn’t at the moment. It’s really hard to envision a scenario where you are lying on a polar bear rug in front of a fire and purring, “Hey baby, let’s drink some triple sec.”

Let’s give Marie — and the polar bear — a break, and stare the economist in the eye and let him know that yes, in point of fact, we are using that triple sec.

The Firecracker

3 1-inch cubes (~45 grams) of fresh watermelon
1½ ounces golden rum
1 ounce triple sec
½ ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper

Muddle the watermelon thoroughly in the bottom of a cocktail shaker. It will surprise you how easily it dissolves, like it’s been waiting for an excuse to completely fall apart. Better it than you.
Add ice and the other ingredients. Shake until very cold.
Strain into a coupé glass.

Drink several of these while watching Wall Street Week in Review and shouting “YOU DON’T KNOW ME!” at the TV.

Surprisingly, it is the watermelon that takes a back seat in this cocktail, providing color and a vague fruitiness. The rum is great — rum is everybody’s friend — but is there mostly to bridge the different varieties of sweetness. The stars of the drink are — again, unexpectedly — the triple sec and cayenne. Citrusy sweetness and in-your-face spiciness don’t seem like they would work together, but they do. That’s yet another mystery that economics can’t solve.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

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