Category: Drink

New Year’s Eve is supposed to be a romantic holiday. In my experience, it’s a little over-hyped. The best New Year’s Eve I ever had was when I was 8 years old. I was being babysat by an older cousin. At midnight we went outside and honked the horn of my uncle’s car, then went back inside and ate buttered noodles.

I might be jaded about New Year’s, because I’ve never been invited to a swanky party.

Be that as it may, when it comes to romance, nothing holds a candle to NASA.

The Mars rover Opportunity was launched in June 1993 and landed on the surface of Mars seven months later. It was one of a pair of rovers sent on that mission; its twin, Spirit, was sent to the opposite side of the planet. The two rovers took geological samples and surveys, made measurements and took photographs.

The mission was supposed to last 90 days, but through a combination of superb engineering and mind-bogglingly good luck the two probes kept working long past the point anyone had dreamed they could. After five years Spirit got mired in dust and couldn’t move anymore, but Opportunity kept going month after month, for a staggering 14 years.

Eventually, after operating for 57 times its designed lifespan, Opportunity wound down. Before the ground team at NASA ended its mission in 2018, they broadcast one final message to Opportunity.

They played Billie Holiday’s 1944 recording of “I’ll Be Seeing You”.

It’s the most romantic damn thing I’ve ever heard of. I get teary-eyed just thinking about it.

Does this have anything to do with New Year’s Eve?

Not particularly, except that much like Opportunity, most of us have lasted much longer than we’ve had any right to expect. And as we look back over the past year and wonder if we’ve accomplished anything or not, the mere fact that we are still here is a little miracle, and if we’re very lucky, some of us have someone to play Billie Holiday for us.

And whether we’re at a swanky party or eating buttered noodles, it’s a good occasion for a fancy New Year’s cocktail.

West 75th Cocktail

• 1 ounce apple brandy – I like Laird’s Applejack
• ½ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
• ½ ounce Chambord raspberry liqueur
• 2 dashes orange bitters
• 3 ounces Lambrusco, chilled – Lambrusco is a sparkling Italian red or blush wine. It’s a little sweet, so many wine enthusiasts can be a bit sniffy about it, but I like it, and it was made for this cocktail

Combine the brandy, Chambord, lemon juice and bitters with ice in a cocktail shaker. Swirl and shake to chill.

Strain into a Champagne flute.

Top with Lambrusco.

If you are alone, sip, while listening to “I’ll Be Seeing You.” It’s OK to cry. If you are at a party, sip, while playing “Tiny Bubbles” by Don Ho. The other guests will be confused but incredibly impressed when you sing the chorus in Hawaiian.

Lambrusco leans toward the fruity side of sparkling wine, which pairs well with the apple brandy. The apple brandy might make this drink a little too boozy-tasting, but the Chambord pulls it back to berry notes. That might make it a tiny bit too sweet, but the lemon juice and bitters pull everything back into line. This cocktail is a balancing act that succeeds like a pretty girl on a tightrope juggling knives.\

It’s a very small miracle, like Billie Holiday, buttered noodles, or a happy, sleeping space robot.

Featured photo: West 75th. Photo by John Fladd.

It’s a pretty good party.

There is good jazz playing in the background — Louis Armstrong, and Tony Bennet, and Nina Simone, with a sprinkling of Sinatra. Good stuff, but not distracting, nothing that anyone will have a deep attachment to from high school. Nobody’s going to shout, “Hey! Crank that up!” and derail the vibe.

There’s a nice blend of guests — obligatory family members, and actual friends you want to spend time with. Interestingly, your college roommate has struck up a friendship with your Uncle Charley with the conspiracy theories. They’re both smiling and gesturing wildly, so they seem to have found some common ground.

You don’t have a fireplace, but there’s a Yule log burning on the TV screen, which also keeps your cousin from switching on the game.

Everyone has brought something for the Yankee swap. You’ve got a good feeling about this year. You spent all year combing flea markets and yard sales and finally scored a brass sculpture of an exotic dancer with a clock in her belly. She’s wrapped inconspicuously in plain brown paper with a tag that says, “Open me. Or not. It’s no skin off my nose either way.”

Dinner went well — tacos, so everybody got a little bit of what they wanted. There’s tres leches cake for dessert. It took a couple of years to convince the family to try it, but now it’s become a tradition. A couple of years ago a slightly inebriated cousin spent 15 minutes enthusiastically explaining tres leches to your friend Maria, who grew up in Chiapas.

“It’s like CAKE, but it’s uh, um —,” he said for the third time.

“Wet?” Maria suggested, with a small smile on her face.

“YES! It’s CAKE but it’s WET!” he half-shouted enthusiastically.

“And cold?” Maria suggested again.

“AND COLD!!!” he agreed, beaming at Maria, filled with goodwill and Budweiser, then staggered off to find a couch.

You have three or four children at the party this year and they are so full of tacos and cake that if it weren’t for the promise of presents they’d have fallen asleep by now.

Your mother and her sister are getting along tonight. It’s always a toss-up whether they will get along, or end up looking at old family photos, which will remind them of some half-forgotten grudge from the 1970s, and releasing the Drama Kraken.

All in all, it’s a pretty good evening, as long as you keep topping off everyone’s glass. That’s why it’s a good idea to make batches of drinks ahead of time.

For instance:

• Raspberry-Rose Rickey
• 1 12-ounce package frozen raspberries
• 1 cup floral gin – I used Uncle Van’s and was very pleased
• ½ cup sugar
• ½ cup fresh squeezed lime juice – about 4 limes
• ¼ teaspoon rose water
• plain seltzer

Combine all ingredients in a large bowl. Stir to combine, and leave, covered, for an hour at room temperature.

Mash the contents with a potato masher, re-cover, and leave for another hour.

Stir, then strain with a fine-mesh strainer. You will not believe how many seeds raspberries have in them.

In a rocks glass with ice or crushed ice, fill with the raspberry-gin mixture, then top with seltzer. Stir.

Roses and berries have a natural affinity for each other. In this case, the background flavor of roses should add a woody/floral note that will meld with the floral gin. In turn, gin and lime are a classic combination, as are lime and raspberries. The four main ingredients chase each other around and around, tickling your palate.

This is a fairly low-octane, not-too-sweet drink that even your most suspicious relatives will accept. Your actual friends will probably love it.

It’s like RASPBERRIES, but WET, with ROSES dunked in it!

It’s time to find somewhere to sit.

Featured photo: Raspberry-Rose Rickey. Photo by John Fladd.

I’m not certain what’s been going on with my dreams lately.

I’m generally a heavy dreamer — most nights will have two or three — but I tend to have a particular menu:

• The one where I’m late for something and it takes me a distressingly long time to pack my suitcase. The longer I look, the more laundry is spread across the floor, most of it mismatched socks.

• The one where I break into the house of somebody I used to know 20 years ago and look for someplace to take a nap.

• The restaurant with a dishwashing area the size of a warehouse, and they start turning the lights off before I’m done with the dishes.

• The one in the world’s largest hotel, with a fantastic view of the ocean.

But for the past week or so, I’ve been having a whopper at some point during the night that is unusually crisp and to the point. It’s almost like one of those TV shows where people accidentally have each other’s dreams.

Last Wednesday, apparently Dream Me got blackout drunk and behaved very badly. The whole dream was different friends and acquaintances filling me in on how much I had disgraced myself. Interestingly, my Dream Friends were not much more responsible than I was:

“You let me DRIVE!!?”

“Well, we weren’t going to miss this!”

Normally I would probably be bothered by this and wonder what was going on with my subconscious, but the night before, I had led a revolution in Polynesia against a supernatural regime, armed with a bar of soap. Soap might not seem like a very effective tool for social change, but my followers were very inspired by it.

Last night, I was involved in a competition between superhero colleges. Students from competing schools kept asking what my superpower was. I’d tell them to slap me as hard as they could, and they’d start to, but something huge and distracting would happen. Finally, one of the other students put together that my superpower was Dodging Fate.

Which is to say, the more I try to figure out what message my brain is trying to send me, the more I need a drink.

Here is a seasonal one that is delicious and fairly straightforward. I wrote a story a few years ago about a girl who was trying to scam her way into a Cranberry Queen beauty pageant. It is called:

The Character Reference

As we all know, character references are, by their nature, deceptive. So is this drink.

• 2 ounces vodka – this is a good job for Tito’s
• 1½ ounces triple sec
• 3 ounces unsweetened cranberry juice
• seltzer to top, ~3 ounces

Shake the vodka, triple sec and cranberry juice with ice, and strain into a tall glass.

Top with seltzer, and stir gently.

Garnish with an orange wedge and a straw.

This is a lovely, light-tasting highball that, like most character references, neglects to tell you its whole story. Cranberry and orange are another classic combination. The vodka plays its part behind the scenes and will look over its shoulder saying, “Who? Me?” if you go looking for it. Keep in mind, though, that this has three and a half ounces of alcohol in it.

This is an excellent holiday party drink — it looks so lovely that other party guests are likely to ask for a sip, then ask for one of their own. After several people have had several of these, the conversations will get significantly more interesting.

As will your dreams

Featured photo: Character reference. Photo by John Fladd.

This is a classic tequila drink.

This time, I’ve substituted mezcal for tequila, because I have a really nice bottle of Siete Misterios that is making me very happy. Mezcal is in the same family as tequila and works nicely in this particular cocktail. In place of the traditional crème de cassis, I’ve used sloe gin. All of this is slightly beside the point, because the star player here, the lynchpin that holds everything together and keeps it from dissolving into a puddle of entropy, is the ginger beer.

If you are new to the world of ginger beer, you could be forgiven for supposing that it is more or less the same as ginger ale. “Beer/ale,” you might say to yourself, “Tomato/tomahto.”

This would be a mistake.

Ginger ale is what your mom brought you when you were sick, to help calm your stomach. It’s what you drink when you want a soda that doesn’t make any demands on you. It might be lovely, but it will always be mild and unassuming. That’s sort of its whole point.

A good ginger beer, on the other hand, is anything but mild. If you ever popped open a bottle of ginger beer thinking it was ginger ale and took a big gulp of it to cure your hiccups, you’d definitely get rid of them, and maybe make your heart seize up for a second.

Ginger beer is all about the ginger.

“OK,” I hear you say, “I like ginger snaps and gingerbread; I really don’t think this is a big deal.”

All right, the next time you go to a juice bar, ask the juice barista (or whatever the technical name for a juice jockey is) to give you a straight shot of ginger juice. She will raise her eyebrow but will do her thing behind the counter and hand you a shot glass with a milky, beige liquid in it. Don’t sip it. Throw that baby down your throat.

It will change your point of view so profoundly that you might quit your job and become a matador. (It’s delicious and very spicy.)

Really good Caribbean ginger beers will often add a little cayenne to intensify the experience a little bit. Do yourself a favor and go to a bodega and pick up a couple bottles of the good stuff for this drink. You’ll be glad you did.

1½ ounces good tequila or mezcal – right now I’m really enjoying Siete Misterios

½ ounce sloe gin

½ ounce fresh squeezed lime juice

3 to 4 ounces excellent ginger beer

Mix the mezcal, lime juice and sloe gin in a cocktail shaker with ice.

Shake for about 30 seconds, then strain into a Collins glass, over fresh ice.

Top off with excellent, just opened ginger beer. Stir with a chopstick.

The ginger beer really is the star of this show, with the mezcal or tequila playing a strong supporting role. The spiciness of the ginger stands up to the smokiness and bite of the tequila. The lime juice brings the acidity that this combination needs. The sloe gin adds color and the faintest hint of fruitiness.

This is the drink that you would be drinking all the time, if you had made some different life choices at a couple of critical times in your youth.

John Fladd is a veteran Hippo writer, a father, writer and cocktail enthusiast, living in New Hampshire.

Featured photo: El Diablo. Photo by John Fladd.

A year or so ago, I splurged on some fancy party-wear — a burgundy velvet smoking jacket, a silk ascot and a fez. I couldn’t tell you why. I just wanted something fancy to wear if I ever got invited to a fancy party, or threw a fancy party.

There would be jazz music and cocktails and elegant women, who smelled like roses, in caftans, and I would be ready for it in a smoking jacket, ascot and fez. A woman in pearls and elbow-length gloves would make excuses to talk to me and ask for tips about how to start a houseplant from an avocado pit.

A British man with a pipe, and patches on the elbows of his jacket, would raise his eyebrows and mutter, “Well, played, old man.”

A bow-tied waitress would bring me an amuse bouche on a silver tray and say, “A little something from the chef, sir.”

There would be antique rugs on the floor, and goldfish in the fountain, and a bookcase full of 100-year-old travel guides with old, yellowing photographs for bookmarks.

I wouldn’t be better dressed than the other Very Fancy People, but I would fit right in.

I haven’t been to this party yet, and my smoking jacket remains securely in the back of my closet, but I live in hope. No matter how casual and down-to-earth any of us are, every once in a while we all feel the call of fanciness.

A Fancy Cocktail – The November Sunset

This is a fancy cocktail that requires a bit of preparation, but it is the time of the year when we start to make our peace with fanciness. In this case we need to caramelize some oranges.

Caramelized Oranges

• 2 large ripe oranges, cut into ¼-inch slices
• 1 Tablespoon olive oil
• 2 Tablespoons hot honey
• ½ teaspoon coarse sea salt
• fresh rosemary

Preheat your oven to 500º, with the top rack 6 inches from the top of the oven.

In a large bowl, toss the orange slices with the olive oil and honey.

Lay the orange slices out on a piece of parchment paper or a silicon baking sheet, and sprinkle with salt.

Caramelize the oranges in the oven, until they turn dark and moody-looking. This might take 20 minutes or so, but keep a sharp eye on them after 15, to make sure they don’t burn.

Sprinkle the orange slices with rosemary, then roast for another 2 to 3 minutes.

Remove from the oven and cool.

The Fancy Cocktail

• 3 caramelized orange slices
• 2 ounces dry gin
• 2 ounces unsweetened cranberry juice
• 5 to 6 ounces tonic water
• sprig of rosemary
• ice

Muddle three slices of the caramelized orange in the bottom of a Collins glass.

Add ice, then gin and cranberry juice. Stir to combine.

Top with tonic water, almost to the top of the glass.

Stir again. Make sure you bring the orange slices up to the side of the glass, where they can be seen, so everyone knows that this is a fancy drink.

Garnish with the rosemary sprig.

Sip while listening to Cole Porter and — as my grandfather often expressed — wonder aloud what the poor people are doing tonight.

This is one of those drinks where if you concentrate hard enough you can taste each individual element. The roasted orange tastes a little smoky and bitter but also very fruity and floral. The gin hides very discreetly in the background but is there if you look hard enough for it. The cranberry juice plays beautifully with the bitterness of the tonic water.

All in all, it tastes a lot like a fancy party.

John Fladd is a veteran Hippo writer, a father, writer and cocktail enthusiast, living in New Hampshire.

Featured photo: The November Sunset. Photo by John Fladd.

In the 1920s there seems to have been a vibrant analog online community of housewives in the Boston Globe’s cooking section. At first glance, it seems as if it was a simple exchange of recipes, but there was clearly a lot more than that going on under the surface. In this column, Winding Trails starts by thanking her virtual friend for a recipe, then offers one of her own. It seems straightforward enough. The last line is somewhat arresting, though; she doesn’t so much close out her small letter politely as plead for some form of human contact.

This was the 1920s. It had not been so many years since politicians and ministers had blasted an evil new invention, the bicycle. Without a (male) chaperone, they ranted, who knew what sorts of deviant mischief women could get up to, traveling all over the countryside? It’s easy to imagine Mrs. Trails almost trapped in an apartment in Southie or a triple-decker in Nashua, surrounded by crying children and dirty dishes, desperate for some form of adult companionship.

Some more research reveals that Skin Hincks (and wow, do I want to know the story behind her name) was a frequent, almost obsessive correspondent to the Globe’s cooking pages. It’s very easy to see her modern counterpart having a very active social media presence. There might be a very credible master’s or Ph.D. thesis comparing the two communities.

But for now, let’s look at Mrs. Trail’s Carrot Pie:

Carrot Pie

• The purée of two large carrots – about 1½ cups, or 300 grams
• ½ teaspoon ground ginger
• ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon kosher salt
• ½ cup (99 grams) sugar
• 2 whole eggs
• 1½ cups (1 can) evaporated milk
• zest of 1 large orange
• 1 pie crust

Preheat the oven to 450º F.

Whisk all ingredients together in a medium-sized bowl.

Pour into the pie crust. Much as with a pumpkin pie, the crust does not need to be blind-baked.

Bake at 450º for 15 minutes, then lower the temperature to 325º and bake for a further 50 to 55 minutes, or until the blade of a knife comes out more or less clean.

At first glance, this seems like a bright orange pumpkin pie, and the taste is not completely dissimilar, but the sweetness of the carrot and the brightness of the orange zest lift the flavor to something different. The spices are more subdued than in a pumpkin pie, and the custard is not so much sweeter as fruitier. Carrots and ginger are a classic pairing, and the orange zest adds a zing that makes this more of a “Yes, please, another slice would be delightful” experience.

This is a good pie to eat with a cup of tea, while hand-writing a letter to an old friend.

John Fladd is a veteran Hippo writer, a father, writer and cocktail enthusiast, living in New Hampshire.

Featured photo: Carrot Pie. Photo by John Fladd.