Pink and Fruity

Every cocktail sends a message.

A draft beer from a major brewery sends one message. Garnishing it with an orange wedge sends a slightly different one. Dropping a shot of whiskey into it for a Boiler Maker sends another one entirely.

Then there are the flamboyant cocktails, the ones that send out very different vibes than a Boiler Maker — though if you could find a cowboy bar that served both, it would be a super-precious discovery. I love the idea of an older guy with a weather-beaten face, calloused hands, and a thousand-yard stare delicately sipping a pink margarita.

So, for the open-minded cowboy in your life:

Pink Margarita

  • 2 ounces Tanteo jalapeño-infused blanco tequila
  • 1 ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
  • ¾ ounce amaretto
  • ¼ ounce grenadine
  • Brightly colored confectioner’s luster dust

Wet a finger in water or lemon juice, and dampen the outer surface of a cocktail glass.

Outside, or over a sink, spritz the damp outer surface of the glass with luster dust. Much like glitter from a child’s art project, luster dust has a half-life of about six months, and if you do your spritzing just standing casually at your kitchen counter, you will still be finding sparkly surprises at the holidays.

Combine the tequila, lemon juice, amaretto and grenadine over ice in a cocktail shaker. Ask your digital assistant to play “Freedom! ‘90” by George Michael. Cap the shaker, then shake until your hands get uncomfortably cold and you hear the ice starting to crack.

Strain into your lustery cocktail glass.

Even though it’s actually made from almonds, amaretto has a deeply satisfying, deeply fruity flavor. Tequila goes very well with fruit, of course, and just as well with almonds as it turns out. Grenadine is also fruity and fits in with this theme, but it is mostly here to provide color. It is deep red, but in such a small amount it gives the proceedings a gently pink color — not a flamingo chewing bubble gum shade of pink — just gently and reassuringly pink. The flavor of jalapeño in the background gives this drink a bit of a spine, and keeps it from being a three-swallow cocktail.

We all have some pink in us.

Featured photo: Pink and Fruity. Photo by John Fladd.

The Weekly Dish 25/05/08

News from the local food scene

Gutted by fire: As reported by WMUR in an April 24 online article, the historic Windham Restaurant in Windham has been forced to close its doors following a kitchen fire on April 23. “An online fundraiser has already collected thousands of dollars in donations,” the WMUR article read, “which [owners] the Lahers said will go to their employees while they focus on reconstruction.”

Taco Tour: The Taco Tour runs Thursday, May 8, from 4 to 8 p.m. on Elm Street in downtown Manchester. This year’s Taco Tour will feature tacos and taco-related dishes from more than 100 downtown restaurants and businesses, and local food trucks. See the story on page 18 of last week’s Hippo; find the issue in our digital library at hippopress.com. For more see tacotourmanchester.com.

Cookie decorating with Mom: Make some cookies for mom in advance of Mother’s Day at the Mother’s Day Cookie Decorating Workshop at Alan’s of Boscawen (133 N. Main St., Boscawen, alansrestaurant.com) tonight at 6 p.m. The cost is $45 per person and you get to take a decorated cookie set home.

The foods of Greater Nashua: The Taste of the Towns will run Thursday, May 8, from 6 to 9 p.m. at the Sheraton Nashua (11 Tara Blvd., Nashua) offering bites, sips and more in support of Nashua Center (nashuacenter.org). Tickets cost $75 per person. See nashuacenter.org/taste-of-the-towns.

So many rieslings: Learn more about a diverse family of wines on Thursday, May 8. WineNot Boutique (25 Main St., Nashua, 204-5569, winenotboutique.com) will host a blind tasting of rieslings with owner Svetlana Yanushkevich from 6 to 8 p.m. Svetlana will lead participants through eight different rieslings, from sparkling and bone-dry to richly sweet, offering something for everyone. Tickets are $40 through eventbrite.com.

Wine, brunch and a cuppa: Averill House Vineyard (21 Averill Road, Brookline, 244-3165, averillhousevineyard.com) will host a Mother’s Day High Tea Brunch and Wine Pairing on Sunday, May 11, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. It will include the following items per guest: a cup of hot tea, a pre-set four-course High Tea-inspired brunch, and a pre-selected flight of four wine samples (must be 21+). Non-alcoholic flight available upon request. There will be multiple seatings, beginning at 11 a.m. Tickets are $59 each through exploretock.com.

• “Drink me”: There will be a Mother’s Day Mad Hatter Tea Party Sunday, May 11, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Local Street Eats (112 W. Pearl St., Nashua, 402-4435, local-streeteats.com). Step into a world of charm, elegance, and delicious surprises with the extraordinary women in your life with a one-of-a-kind experience you won’t forget. Visit local-streeteats.com/events/mothers-day-mad-hatter-tea-party.

In the kitchen with Carolyn Trepanier

Bar Manager at Spice Restaurant & Bar (300 Main St., Nashua. 417-7972, thespicenashua.com). “I got into bartending in 2004. I was a server and … the owner … said, “…Carolyn, get on the bar.” I got thrown to the wolves, but I made it work,” Trepanier said.

“For me, a craft cocktail means pairing the … stand-out ingredients of the restaurant you’re working for with a drink that complements them. For instance, a couple of weeks ago, I was looking at our peanut sauce and the crushed peanuts that we use for our summer rolls and the pad thai. I just brought some peanut butter whiskey in. I’ve made peanut butter cup martinis before. This time I elevated it. I took a glass, I did a chocolate drizzle, I whipped peanut butter in it with a spoon to make an additional drizzle. I rimmed it with the peanut sauce and then I rimmed that with crushed peanuts. And I used two chocolate liqueurs and peanut butter whiskey. And it’s amazing.”

What is your must-have item behind the bar?

A cocktail shaker. As a mixologist, you need it to properly mix the ingredients in there. I don’t like it when someone just does a transfer [and pours a drink back and forth between two glasses]. I like it shaken. That makes sure everything’s infused in together.

What would you have for your last meal?

A rib-eye, medium rare, with scalloped potatoes au gratin, creamed spinach and a blueberry cobbler.

Aside from Spice, where do you like to eat?

I like Surf [207 Main St, Nashua, 595-9293, surfseafood.com]. There’s a salad there that I really like. As a matter of fact, I like it so much that we’ve started making a version of it here. Aside from that, I like Italian food. I like a place that’s cozy and quiet and a little dim that serves authentic Italian.

Who is a celebrity you would like to see drinking one of your cocktails?

Gordon Ramsay, though I don’t know if he drinks. Howard Stern if he still drank but he doesn’t drink anymore. I like people who are feisty and confident.

What’s your favorite drink on your menu?

My mai tai. I’m very proud of it. It’s a recipe I came up with. I altered another popular recipe, with one ingredient being omitted and made it my own and it’s been very popular.

What’s the biggest cocktail trend you’ve seen recently?

Fruit wheels — dehydrated fruit wheels. At first I was not a fan of it, I didn’t think they looked very appealing. However, I looked into the purpose of it and it definitely serves its purpose. It offers an essence of that ingredient throughout the whole beverage as opposed to squeezing a citrus fruit in where you get the pulp, which people may not want … that may be textural.

What do you drink when you’re at home?

A margarita or a white wine — a pinot grigio. In the summertime, though, I do keep the fixings for an Aperol spritz, or a raspberry white Russian.

Lychee Martini from Carolyn Trepanier
This is very popular — very light.

3 ounces vodka — you could use a gin, but it might fight with the lychee.
1½ ounces lychee juice or puree — we have the puree here, which to me makes a visually more pleasing drink; it’s more cloudy, it’s got something to it.
A dash of dry vermouth, which is a very surprising ingredient.

Stir together with ice in a mixing glass, and strain into a martini glass. Garnish with a whole lychee.

Featured Image: Carolyn Trepanier. Photo by John Fladd.

Drops of bubble gum

A bartender explains how bitters & tinctures add flavor

When a bartender is developing a new cocktail, a constant challenge is being able to add subtle or sophisticated flavors to the drink in a way that doesn’t throw off the ratios of other ingredients. Maybe she’s spent a week calculating the exact balance of alcohol and mixers, for instance, and introducing a new element might throw that off or make the drink cloudy. Maybe the flavor of the new ingredient is inconsistent from week to week, and it’s hard to reliably get the right flavor in the finished product.

One of Marissa Chick’s favorite ways to address these issues is to use highly concentrated flavors in the form of bitters and tinctures in her cocktails.

Chick is the bar manager at The Birch on Elm in Manchester, and she uses commercial bitters but also makes a lot of her own.

“They’re really fun to work with,” she said. “What I end up making at the Birch on Elm is more of like a tincture but essentially it’s a really concentrated burst of flavors. So you can have your simple cocktails — like for example a dirty martini — something that I like to add to that is a black pepper tincture that I make. It adds just a little bit of something and you usually only need a few drops, but it’ll just bring out a burst of flavor that you didn’t already have or you might have been missing.”

Chick uses alcohol to strip flavors from ingredients she wants to incorporate into a new drink recipe.

“The way that I make them, honestly, is usually with a super high-proof alcohol,” she explained. “I usually use Everclear [an extremely potent brand of grain alcohol that can run as high as 95% Alcohol By Volume, or 190 proof] and then I will just add my ingredients to it and let it sit in the dark for anywhere from five days to a few weeks, depending on how strong I want it to be.”

These tinctures often use fresh herbs or whole spices but can also use more unusual flavoring agents. Chick recently won a daiquiri-making competition that used a house-made bubblegum tincture. She said coming up with a recipe she was happy with involved a process of gradually increasing the amount of bubblegum she used.

“I grabbed Dubble Bubble, because that’s the one I like the best,” she said. “I tried a couple different ways, but I ended up needing way more bubble gum than I thought I would. In the end, it was practically an entire jar of bubble gum and just filled to the top with Everclear, but I ended up having to redo it a few times because it turns out that surprisingly it didn’t produce as strong a scent as I thought it would. You learn a lot through experimentation and trying again and having fun with it, which is exactly how that one came about. In the cocktail itself, I used a lot of ingredients that bubblegum is made with, like mint, pineapple, cranberry and cherry. Then I added that tincture to it to add a pure bubblegum flavor on it so that it tasted a lot like bubblegum, without making it too sweet.”

Chick said that as she was working up the bubblegum tincture, she decided not to cut the actual bubblegum into smaller pieces. “I just put them in whole,” she said, “and then I shook it up multiple times a day. I took a lot more care with it than other ones, I suppose.”

One of her favorite concentrates is one she makes from Fresno chilies. “It just tastes like the real pepper,” she said, “and you get such a good heat from it. It takes on the same orange-red color as the pepper. I’ve used other [chilies] like jalapeño, and it’s slightly green. Habañero is a brighter, almost neon-orange color. So that is a fun part of it too. Sometimes tinctures can add color sometimes as well instead of just flavor.”

And it doesn’t take much of a tincture to have an effect.

“It’s a lot of flavor,” Chick said. “Just a couple drops does a lot. If it’s something that you really want a lot of, you could use a whole pipette, but that’s the biggest measurement I would use for that.”

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

Marshmallow variety

Small batch marshmallows play with flavor

Krista Melina has a day job, but she spends a lot of her time thinking about marshmallows. Molina is the owner and head marshmallow-maker of Twisted Mallow, a Merrimack company that produces handcrafted marshmallows in small batches.

“Mallow is sort of a shortened version of marshmallow,” Melina said. “Back in high school, in ninth grade, I was starting at a new school, and my biology teacher was taking roll call. My maiden name is Malowin and he couldn’t pronounce it, so he said, you’re now Miss Malow. It kind of stuck, so I thought that was kind of a cute little link. And then Twisted — I was just trying to play with words a little bit and I thought, ‘Well, I have 30 flavors of marshmallows and I have potentially up to 50 more ideas for new ones.’ I just thought it’s sort of a twist on an old classic but using new flavors and making it different.”

Melina said creating a marshmallow company began as a joke.

“I was sitting with a friend and we were having martinis. I just sort of blurted out, ‘I think I’m going to start a food truck, and it’s going to sell s’mores.’ We were laughing, and she had a really funny comeback. She said, ‘Oh! You can park it in front of funeral homes and call it S’Morbid!” And it was just really hilarious but then on my way home I began wondering how hard it is to make a marshmallow. After a few days, I made one. I started to bring them into work. And then I started to play with the flavors and everyone was giving me really great feedback. I think it was my mom who said, ‘You should start at a farmers market.’ So that’s what I did. So that’s how it sort of launched. I mean, it literally was a joke. I’m a great believer that humor actually reflects our personality and our soul.”

The first batch of marshmallows was fairly traditional, Melina said.

“When I went home for that first time to make marshmallows, I found a really simple vanilla marshmallow online recipe. And that’s what I started with. But what I’ve done since is I will tweak it to add the flavors. And so with my strawberry chocolate, I make a strawberry puree out of fresh strawberries. And I had to fine tune that because if the temperatures aren’t right the gelatin won’t gel and it won’t firm up. And so it’s just interesting. It’s sort of been a science project for me.”

The Twisted Mallow flavors quickly spread beyond vanilla, chocolate and strawberry.

ceramic mug sitting on counter filled with hot drink and melting marshmallow
Photo courtesy of Twisted Mallow.

“I have some pretty classic ones,” Melina said, “but I do a dulce de leche, which is fun. I make the caramel and fold that in. I make a mango chili lime, which is probably one of my favorites. I make a lemon-lime, which is really popular. I’ve been working up a lavender [marshmallow]. What I do is I make a lemon marshmallow and then I fold in lavender buds.”

Melina’s rose and cardamom marshmallows were originally supposed to be in rotation for just a week or two. “It was a surprise for me,” she said. “That was only going to be a Valentine’s Day flavor. I was just using it because it’s special for that, but I’ve added it to my website because so many people were asking for it afterward. I use rose water in the formula and then I crush rose petals that are meant for tea and sprinkle that in. So it’s just, I don’t know, it’s fun being creative and coming up with these wacky kinds of twisted flavors.”

Twisted Mallow
Twisted Mallow marshmallows are available online at twistedmallowcompany.com and at the Concord Farmers Market (Capitol Street, No. 65, Concord, concordfarmersmarket.com) on Saturday mornings.

Featured photo: Photo courtesy of Twisted Mallow.

Mint Julep Cookies

Cookies

  • Large handful (20 g) fresh mint leaves
  • 1½ cups (320 g) white sugar
  • ½ cup (1 stick) butter
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup (227 g) sour cream
  • 1 Tablespoon bourbon
  • 2¾ cups (330 g) all-purpose flour
  • ½ teaspoon baking soda
  • ½ teaspoon baking powder
  • ½ teaspoon salt

Frosting

  • ¾ cup (1½ sticks) butter
  • Small handful (10-15 g) fresh mint – stems are OK
  • 3 cups (342 g) powdered sugar
  • 3 Tablespoons bourbon

Cookies:

Combine the large handful of mint and the white sugar in your blender and grind together. In a mixer, cream the minty sugar and the butter together. Add the eggs, one at a time, scraping down the sides of the bowl. Mix in the sour cream and 1 Tablespoon of bourbon.

Add the dry ingredients, a little at a time, at low speed to avoid poofing yourself with flour.

Chill the cookie dough for at least one hour. Preheat your oven to 425°F.

Scoop 1- to 2-teaspoon blobs of dough onto a baking sheet lined with parchment paper or a silicone mat about 2 inches apart. Tell the blobs how pretty they are; they might feel insecure. (Not for nothin’, but this is some of the most delicious unbaked cookie dough you are likely to run across anywhere legal.)

Bake one sheet at a time for about 8 minutes, then swap out for a new tray. Let each batch of cookies cool on the baking sheet. If you run out of baking sheets, gently pull the parchment paper or silicone mat from the baking sheet, then blob out the next batch of cookie dough.

When the cookies have cooled, remove them to a large plate or baking sheet, then frost them.

Frosting:

Melt the remaining 1½ sticks of butter in a small saucepan. Stir in the rest of the fresh mint, and spread it out so that it makes as much contact as possible with the melted butter. Remove the pan from heat, and set it aside for 30 to 45 minutes. Go work on a crossword puzzle.

While you are out of the room, the mint will be infusing into the butter. Fats and alcohol both do a really good job of stripping flavor compounds from herbs and spices. In this case, the butter is taking on the flavors of fresh mint — not a candy caney minty flavor but the taste of actual fresh mint. After the mint and the melted butter have had an opportunity to really get to know each other, strain the butter into the bowl of your mixer and add the powdered sugar and bourbon to it. Starting on the mixer’s slowest speed, beat the frosting ingredients together faster and faster, until they are fluffy.

If the frosting seems a little too soft, refrigerate it for 10 to 15 minutes.

Use a small spatula or the back of a spoon to frost the cookies. If you are taking them somewhere — a Kentucky Derby party — let the frosting firm up for about half an hour before loading them in a single layer in a pizza box. Otherwise eat them with an actual mint julep and wonder what the poor people are doing this afternoon.

By themselves, these cookies are nice but surprisingly standoffish — gently minty, with a very faint background flavor of bourbon. The frosting, on the other hand, is very in-your-face and emphatic and pairs beautifully with its more subtle partner.

Featured photo: Mint Julep Cookies. Photo by John Fladd.

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