Category: Drink

• A 2-inch chunk of cucumber – I like using the long, skinny English cucumbers; they seem to have a little more flavor. Go ahead and wash it, but don’t bother peeling it. The peel will add color and flavor to the finished drink.
• 2 ounces chili-lime rum – I’ve been using Captain Morgan’s for this. I do not regret it.
• 1 6-ounce can of pineapple juice

Muddle the cucumber thoroughly in the bottom of your cocktail shaker. This means smooshing it up with a stick. If you don’t have a muddler you can use a wooden spoon, or a beer bottle if it fits, or if you’re up for a project you can actually go outside and find a stick (wash it before using it). I’ve heard of a guy who cut off the handle of a child’s baseball bat, presumably not while his child was using it. The point is that you want to crush this chunk of cucumber, body and spirit, until it is the consistency of applesauce.

Add the rum, and shake your rum & cuke for 20 seconds or so. This is what is called a “dry shake,” meaning without ice. When you muddle herbs or fruits or vegetables, you do it for three reasons:

1. By smashing your cucumber up, you’ve given it a lot more surface area to interact with the alcohol.

2. You’ve broken up the cell walls inside the cucumber and released some of the flavor compounds from their tiny prisons. (If you are really committed to breaking up the cells of the cucumber, you can freeze it first. Ice crystals will poke holes in the cell walls before you even get to it with the muddler.)

3. So now you have all these flavor compounds floating around unattached. Some of them like water just fine and will dissolve into it without complaint. Others are pickier and are waiting around for some alcohol to bond with. By dry shaking your rum & cuke before diluting it with melting ice, you’re swooshing the flavor and color chemicals around in an alcohol solution. On a molecular level you’ve kick-started a party. As you shake it up you’ll hear a “slosh-slosh” sound, but the botanical molecules will hear Ozzy Osborne’s “Crazy Train.”

At this point go ahead and add a handful of ice to the shaker, as well as the contents of the miniature can of pineapple juice.

Shake the mixture for another 30 seconds or so, then strain it over fresh ice in a Collins glass. It will have a gratifyingly foamy head on it. This drink is best suited to drinking with a straw.

This is a mildly refreshing drink. The cucumber flavor team has spread throughout the pineapple juice, keeping it from being too sweet. There is a subtle citrussy spiciness from the flavored rum.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

You will need a pre-baked pie crust for this recipe. You can make yours from scratch, but let’s face it; that can be intimidating. The way people talk about making pie crust makes it sound like a harrowing experience. In point of fact, once you’ve figured out the process it’s pretty straightforward; it’s just difficult to describe. It’s one of those things you’ve got to dive into and get your hands covered with flour. If you know a grandmother, have her show you.

In the meantime, if you don’t have the confidence to tackle making a crust yourself, just buy a premade one, or a frozen crust that you just have to thaw out and roll into a pie pan. A store-bought pie crust will work perfectly well in this recipe. Just follow the directions on the package to “blind-bake” it — to bake it before adding the filling.

The filling may be one of the easiest pie fillings you’ll ever make. It makes an apple pie look like differential calculus.

• 4 eggs
• 1 cup (198 g) brown sugar
• ½ teaspoon kosher or coarse sea salt
• 6 Tablespoons (3/4 stick) butter, melted
• 3 Tablespoons cider vinegar

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Do what you have to do to have a pre-baked pie shell ready for you.

This pie is so easy that it really isn’t worth the hassle of getting out your electric mixer. Get out a mixing bowl and a whisk.

Whisk the eggs, brown sugar and salt together. Whisk in the melted butter. Whisk in the vinegar.

Boom! The filling is done. Pour it into your prepared pie crust and bake it on the middle rack of your oven for about 35 minutes. Take it out when it’s brown and not jiggly anymore. Set it aside to cool.

Like many egg-based pies — quiche, for instance — this will be puffy and domed when it comes out of the oven, then it will settle down as it cools.

You often hear of old-fashioned pies like this described as “poverty” pies, or Depression Era pies. The explanation is that the vinegar is a stand-in for fruit that frugal housewives couldn’t afford. I’ve never bought that explanation. You can’t afford a couple of apples, but you have eggs, butter and (depending on the recipe) cream? Think instead of New England or the upper Midwest in the middle of winter 100 or more years ago. You’ve got access to chickens and a cow — or your neighbor does — but fruit is hard enough to come by that you’ll save it for a special occasion. If you’re baking a pie for your family, you’ll use vinegar as a flavoring agent that will give the filling an acidic tang.

Which is what you’ll find here. This is a sweet, super-buttery, rich pie with a background sourness that cuts through that richness and is extremely satisfying. It’s a good dessert pie, but even better with gossip over a couple cups of strong coffee.

Featured photo: Vinegar Pie. Photo by John Fladd.

Some drinks are worth devoting some time to.

Herbal Green Gin

• 2 cups (16 ounces) London dry gin
• 1 large handful (1 ounce)/30 g) fresh parsley

Blend the gin and parsley together in your blender, slowly at first, then working your way up to its highest setting. After 30 seconds or so cut the power and let the green gin sit for an hour or so. Pour it through a fine mesh strainer, then run it through a coffee filter.

Then, start your cucumber syrup.

Cucumber Syrup

• One large English cucumber
• An equal amount by weight of sugar

Wash but don’t peel the cucumber, then chop it into medium dice. Move it to your freezer and freeze it solid. Clearly this will take a few hours. If you check in on the gin you will see that it still has some time before it is completely filtered. We’ll get to the actual cocktail tomorrow.

Tomorrow

Cook the frozen cucumber pieces and the sugar in a saucepan over medium heat. By freezing the cucumber, you have poked holes in its cell walls with ice crystals. As it thaws, everything will collapse into a surprising amount of liquid mush. Bring it to a boil briefly (to make sure that the sugar has completely dissolved), then remove it from heat, and let it steep for about an hour. Strain the syrup through a fine-mesh strainer, and you can get started on your actual cocktail.

Your Actual Cocktail

• 2 ounces parsley-infused gin
• 1 ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
• 3/4 ounce cucumber syrup

Combine all three ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker, and shake thoroughly, then strain into a chilled, stemmed glass.

At this point you’ve put two days into making this drink. Is it worth it?

It really is. Like many utility cocktails, this is at its best when it is skull-shrinkingly cold. It is sweet but with a complex flavor. The herbiness is there, but so is the cucumberality. Interestingly, while you can find each of those flavors — both of which go really well with fresh lemon juice, by the way — if you look for them individually, a fusion of the two is elusive. Your palate flips back and forth between them but doesn’t settle on a combination flavor — a parscumber, if you will. Nevertheless, it is delicious.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

Most Americans don’t seem to appreciate bitter tastes. We’re fine with other strong flavors — we love sweets, many of us will go at a bag of salty snacks like it’s been away at war, there are certainly chili-heads who crave intensely spicy foods, and some children eat sour candies that would make the head of an adult collapse in on itself. But what about bitter foods?
I enjoy some bitterness from time to time, so on the off chance that you do, too, or are in the middle of a contentious break-up, here is a bitter but delicious cocktail, with a very bitter name:

Remember the Alimony

• 1 1/4 ounces Fino sherry – I’m not exactly sure what “fino” means in this context, but whatever full-bodied sherry you have on hand.
• 1 1/4 ounces Cynar or other bitter Italian liqueur. Cynar is the one with an artichoke on the label.
• 3/4 ounce medium-shelf, London dry gin — Because of the strong flavor of this drink, subtle flavors will be overwhelmed; this is not a job for your best top-shelf gin. I used Gordon’s, and I do not regret the decision.

We will not be using a cocktail shaker for this drink. Add several ice cubes to a mixing glass, then add the sherry, Cynar and gin, then stir gently but thoroughly.
Strain over fresh ice in a rocks glass.

As expected, this is a bitter drink — not bitter to the extent that you’ll have to smash your fists against the table to force it down or anything, but there’s no getting around its bitterness. When you take your first sip of it, your immediate impression will be a bit of raisinyness from the sherry, quickly followed by bitter notes from the Cynar. It actually has a smooth finish and goes down easily, but there is a tail of bitterness in the aftertaste.
This is a very grown-up drink, for sitting by a window and watching the snow or rain come down and thinking about the turns your life has taken.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

This is an excellent all-day project for when weather has you stuck in the house. No one part of this recipe is difficult or takes very long to complete, but there are several stages where you need to walk away and leave it so the magic can happen.

• 6 1/2 ounces (185 g) small pretzel sticks
• 2 1/4 cups (446 g) sugar – You’ll be using small amounts of this during different steps of this recipe, so measure the two and a quarter cups into a small mixing bowl.
• 12 Tablespoons (a stick and a half) butter, melted
• An 8-ounce package of cream cheese
• 1 cup (227 g) heavy cream
• A 3-pound bag of frozen strawberries – If you can find 3 pounds of frozen sliced strawberries, so much the better.
• 1/4 teaspoon salt

Preheat your oven to 400°F. Set the bag of strawberries out to thaw.

Spray a 9×13-inch baking pan with non-stick baking spray, or oil it liberally with vegetable oil.

Pulverize the pretzels. You can do this in a food processor, a blender, or a combination of a rolling pin and anger issues. Combine the pretzel dust, the melted butter and 1/4 cup of sugar thoroughly, then transfer the mixture to the greased baking pan. Tamp the pretzel mixture down with the flat bottom of a measuring cup or a rocks glass.

Bake for 10 minutes or until the edges of the pretzel base start to brown slightly. Remove from the oven, and set aside to cool for half an hour.

With a hand mixer or stand mixer, beat the cream cheese and 1/2 cup of sugar for a few minutes, until it is fluffy and friendly-looking, then slowly drizzle in the cream, and beat the mixture until it has soft peaks. With a large spoon or a spatula, transfer the cream cheese mixture to the pretzel substrate, and smooth it out. Move the baking pan to your refrigerator, and let it chill for at least half an hour.

Put 2 pounds (2/3 of the bag) of strawberries in your blender or food processor, and puree them thoroughly, then strain the liquid into a large saucepan through a fine-mesh strainer. Add the salt and the remaining 2 cups of sugar, then cook the strawberry mixture over medium heat until it just starts to come to a slow simmer. You don’t want to cook the flavor out of the strawberries; you just want to get the sugar completely dissolved. If you bought frozen whole berries, slice the remaining ones. Mix the remaining berries into the puree.

Using a sturdy spatula, cut servings of the pretzel-and-cream mixture, and top generously with strawberry sauce. This can be served warm or chilled, and goes extremely well with plain seltzer.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

Here is my take on this classic.

1½ ounces light rum — On this occasion I’ve used Captain Morgan’s Sweet Chili Lime, because I’m wacky that way.

1 ounce cognac

½ ounce London Dry Gin — We want some of that juniperish astringency in this drink to offset so many fruit flavors, so I’m going with a solid standby, Gordon’s.

2 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice

1 ounce fresh squeezed ruby red grapefruit juice

½ ounce orgeat — This is a sweet almond syrup that punches up the fruitiness of a tropical drink

½ ounce dry sherry to float

Add ice to a cocktail shaker, then add the rum, cognac, gin, lime and grapefruit juices, and orgeat. Shake thoroughly while listening to a song about making bad decisions on the beach. I recommend “Una Más Cerveza” by Tommy Alverson. Or anything by Jimmy Buffet.

Strain over crushed ice in a Collins glass. As it happens, I don’t have an ice maker in the door of my refrigerator, so I am forced to crush it myself, like a savage. I wrap a handful of ice cubes in a tea towel and smash it with something heavy.

Pour a float of sherry on the top of the drink with a straw and a paper umbrella.

This is fruity and refreshing, but at the same time boozy enough to get your attention. It goes down easily, but not so easily that it raises any suspicions. One will lead to a second. When you start to make a third Fog Cutter, a responsible person might remind you that you have a big day tomorrow.

The key phrase to remember here is, “Tomorrow’s not the boss of me!”

Featured photo: Cornmeal crepes. Photo by John Fladd.