Category: Food

News from the local food scene

• Agave dinner: Unwined Wine Boutique (1 Nashua St., Milford, 213-6703, unwinednh.com) will host an Agave Dinner on Tuesday, July 15, beginning at 6 p.m. This will be a five-course dinner crafted to complement Unwined’s favorite tequila and mezcal picks. Weather permitting, dinner will be served on the deck. Tickets are $125 each through eventbrite.com.

• Make pasta: There will be a hands-on cooking lesson at Tuscan Market (Tuscan Village, 9 Via Toscana, Salem, 912-5467, tuscanbrands.com) Wednesday, July 16, from 6 to 8 p.m. Learn to make Pasta ala Bolognese. A server will be available so attendees can order food and beverages during the class, which will be added to the final bill. This class is open to pasta enthusiasts age 14+. Tickets are $71.21 and are available through eventbrite.com.

• Picnic with bees: The New Hampshire Beekeepers Association will hold its Muster Field Picnic at Muster Field Farm Museum in North Sutton on Saturday, July 26, from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., featuring guest speakers and a smoker contest. Thanks to a donation from the Pemi-Baker Beekeepers Association, the picnic is free to all regardless of club membership. Bring a veil, a chair, and a side dish or dessert. RSVP is required; register for the picnic at nhbeekeepers.org.

• Wine ice cream: Averill House Vineyard (21 Averill Road, Brookline, 244-3165, averillhousevineyard.com) is now serving WineCream, which its website describes as “your new favorite frozen indulgence … perfect for sunny days, girls’ nights, or a romantic treat under the vineyard lights.” Flavors include Strawberry Zinfandel wine swirled with vanilla cream and cheesecake bites, Mango Maple Moscato wine swirled with mango chunks and vanilla cream, and Peach Chardonnay wine with almond cream & peach slices.

Allegedly, this cocktail is named after a famous rock in the Galapagos Islands. Who knew that there were any famous rocks anywhere?

It’s delicious and adventurous and should be drunk very, very cold

• 1½ ounces cachaça – this is a musky sugarcane spirit from Brazil; alternatively, you could use a flavorful rum
• 1½ ounces pineapple juice
• 1 ounces simple syrup
• ½ ounces Campari
• ½ ounces fresh squeezed lemon juice
• ½ teaspoon jalapeño hot sauce
• chili-lime seasoning powder – Tajin, or Trader Joe’s makes a good one
• garnish – sprig of rosemary

Squeeze your lemon juice. Reserve one of the spent lemon halves; it still has more to give.

Sprinkle a tablespoon or so of the chili-lime powder on a small plate. Rub the rim of a rocks glass with the spent lemon carcass. Turn the glass upside-down, and press the rim into the chili-lime powder to rim the glass. Feel free to swirl the glass around to make sure that the entire rim gets coated with the powder.

Fill a cocktail shaker halfway with ice. While you’re at it, carefully drop five or six ice cubes into the rocks glass, making sure not to mess up that handsome rim you’ve just coated.

Add all your remaining ingredients except the rosemary to the cocktail shaker. Seal it and shake it enthusiastically, until your hands start to get uncomfortably cold.

Carefully strain it into your rocks glass — again, avoiding the rim.

Bruise the rosemary sprig by rolling it briefly between your hands, then poke it into the cocktail.

The first time you make this cocktail, you will be tempted to sip it tentatively. Resist that impulse. Take a healthy pull on it, washing some of the powder from the rim, and filling your mouth with cold, spicy, fruitiness.

Is it spicy? Yeah, a little — not enough to be off-putting, but between the jalapeño and the rim, there’s no denying that there is a little bit of a kick. A tiny kick. Let’s call it a microkick. But more importantly, there is a push and pull between the musky sweetness of the pineapple — which, not for nothin’, pairs beautifully with the muskiness of the cachaça — and the acidity of the lemon juice. So you’ve got a sweet-and-sour situation going on, but then there’s a kiss of bitterness from the Campari.

(“Kiss of Bitterness” would be a great title for a noir detective story. Humphrey Bogart would be blindsided and almost killed by thugs while kissing Myrna Loy, who, it would turn out, had hired them. He would catch a flash of a thug’s bright red necktie in the mirror, drop to the floor, and roll away, pulling his revolver from his shoulder holster, and shoot the thugs in the knees, but not before they accidentally riddle Myrna Loy with the gunfire meant for him. He would leave a large tip for the cleaning lady.)

All things considered, this is a nice, adult cocktail — sophisticated and not too boozy. It will take at least two of these to wrap your head around the experience, but in the end this might become your pitcher drink for the summer.

Featured photo: Kicker Rock. Photo by John Fladd.

News from the local food scene

• Community pancakes: The Merrimack Rotary Club (portal.clubrunner. ca/2943) will hold its annual pancake breakfast featuring pancakes, sausage, juice and coffee on Friday, July 4, from 8 to 11 a.m. at Merrimack High School (38 McElwain St., Merrimack). The cost is $12 for adults, $10 for children and seniors, and free for children 3 and younger.

• Picking lavender: The lavender fields at Pumpkin Blossom Farm (393 Pumpkin Hill Road, Warner, 456-2443, pumpkinblossomfarm.com) will open for pick-your-own harvesting on Saturday, July 5, and will continue through Sunday, July 20, 10 a.m. through 6 p.m. daily, rain or shine. Call the farm or check its website for daily picking conditions.

• Open for the summer: The Nashua and New Boston farmers markets have opened for the season. The New Boston market takes place every Saturday on the Town Common from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.; all products are made or grown in New Hampshire by local farmers and artisans, and there is always live music. The Nashua market takes place every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. with local food, art, music and community; the market will run through late October.

• The future of wine: Wine on Main’s (9 N. Main St., Concord, 897-5828, wineonmainnh.com) July wine class is “The Future of Wine” on Tuesday, July 8, or Wednesday, July 9, from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Learn about the latest innovations taking the wine world by storm. The cost is $35 per person, which includes six wines, light snacks and fun education. Limited to 20 people. Sign up on Wine on Main’s website.

• Martini and cupcake: The theme for July’s martini-and-cupcake pairing at the Copper Door restaurants (15 Leavy Drive, Bedford, 488-2677, and 41 S Broadway, Salem, 458-2033, copperdoor.com) is “Life’s a Beach.” The Life’s a Beach Martini, $14, features whipped vodka, Sobieski Raspberry Vodka, limoncello, Monin Raspberry, and lemonade, and is garnished with Swedish Fish candies. The Life’s a Beach Cupcake, $11, is a funfetti cupcake with raspberry cream funfetti filling, topped with vanilla buttercream, a white chocolate cup, and garnished with Swedish Fish candies.

These are a sweet take on crab rangoons, only not crabby, and a little Polynesian.

• 1 8-ounce package of cream cheese
• 1 teaspoon fresh-ground black pepper
• ¼ cup (55 g) sugar
• Zest of 1 lemon (about 8 g)
• 3 ounces (85 g) drained, crushed pineapple – depending on how well you’ve drained it, the whims of the kitchen gods, and the phases of the moon, this will be about 1/3 cup
• 3 ounces (85 g) drained, canned, chopped mango – same
• 1 teaspoon dehydrated lemon juice powder (optional) – this will add a little extra zing to the wonton filling without watering it out and making it Gloopy (the eighth dwarf who the others rarely talk about)
• 30 or so wonton wrappers – you can usually find these with egg roll wrappers in the produce section of your supermarket, next to the tofu
• Vegetable oil for frying

Open the canned fruit and strain it with a fine-mesh strainer. Save the juice for a cocktail later, maybe something with dark rum and crushed ice.

With an electric mixer, beat the cream cheese, sugar, lemon zest and black pepper until it is fluffy — two or three minutes. Using a spoon or a silicone spatula, stir the fruit into the mix gently, by hand. Put the bowl into your refrigerator to chill for half an hour or so — long enough to do the dishes and clean up the kitchen a little.

Upon returning to your kitchen, open up the package of wonton wrappers and remove about half of them. They will be small, pale squares of dough, 2 or 3 inches on each side. Lay one flat on the counter in front of you. Dip a finger in a bowl of water, and run it along two adjacent edges of the wrapper to make the edges a little sticky. Spoon about 2 teaspoons of the now-cool cream cheese mixture into the center of the wrapper. Fold the non-sticky corner over the mixture, onto its sticky counterpart, to make a triangle. Seal the edges and set it aside on a plate.

Now, do that 25 more times. As you finish six or seven triangles, move them to a plate in the refrigerator until you are ready to fry them — again, trying to avoid gloopiness. You will get faster and neater at this as you go along.

Put 2 or 3 inches of vegetable oil into a medium-sized saucepan, and heat it over low heat to 350°F.

Fry two or three triangles at a time, flipping them over with a slotted spoon when the first side has cooked to a golden-brown color, about a minute and a half, and finish them off on the other side. When both sides are brown and a little blistered, use the slotted spoon to transfer them to paper towels or newspaper to drain, then wait for the oil to come back up to 350°F, and fry the next batch.

These are best hot out of the fryer, but if it’s very humid and you have to wait a few minutes to serve them, they might lose their crunch. Don’t panic. Your air-fryer has been waiting for this Moment Of Destiny.

Serve these, hot and crispy, with rainbow sherbet. A glass of prosecco would not go amiss, either.

Featured photo: Pineapple Rangoons. Photo by John Fladd.

Big flavor to go with your crunchy eats

According to Dawn Aurora Hunt, the owner and product developer of Cucina Aurora Kitchen Witchery in Salem, choosing or making a dip is a bit of a balancing act. She is proud of the dip mixes her company makes, and for her, good dips come from balancing the qualities of the ingredients.

“The flavors,” she said, “the balance of texture and flavor, the salt, the crunch, a little sweetness, all of that to me plays into a good dip. And if I’m going to serve a dip, it can be hot, it can be cold, but it’s always about the balance.”

“My connection to dip is like everybody’s connection,” she said. Who doesn’t love chips and dip? We all grew up on chips and dip and and for me party food is intrinsic to the connection between people. When we sit down at a party or we’re at a gathering or going into the summer, it’s a barbecue or it’s a cookout and there’s always a bowl of chips and either there’s guacamole or onion dip — you know, something fun. It’s something everybody looks forward to.”

So how do you get there?

“For me,” Hunt said after a moment’s thought, “what makes a good dip is the flavor profile and what it’s going to be mixed with. I’m a big texture person. If I’ve got a salty chip, then I want some kind of a sweetness to my dip. If I have a plain cracker, then I want a really bold flavor in my dip. If I’ve got a veggie, I want something really fresh that’s going to complement that, right? Because nobody’s eating dip with a spoon. I mean you could for sure — you absolutely could — but the dip is one half of a great combination. So when choosing a dip, you want to always think about what you’re going to serve it with. And sometimes you might do the opposite and go, ‘Gee, I have this bag of chips or I have all these baby carrots in my fridge that nobody ate. What would go well with that? How can we turn that into something more than it is?’ You can make a dip and now you have a fun, healthy snack instead of just a carrot.”

There are familiar, comfortable dips, Hunt said — sour cream-based ones, or guacamole — but there are whole families of dips that don’t always spring to mind as quickly.

“I love Middle Eastern types of bean dips,” she said. “I also think that we can’t discount things that wouldn’t be, that we wouldn’t think of as traditional dip, like a pico de gallo salsa, which is not cooked down. It’s almost more of a chunky salad. Or cowboy caviar — it’s made with beans and corn and chopped up peppers and you can eat it with corn chips or you could put it on top of something, or you can eat it with a spoon. I would consider that a dip as well.”

Then, Hunt pointed out, there are dip-adjacent sauces that are not actual dips but could be. “You could use chimichurri or pesto or something like that,” she said, “and put it in a dip. If you mixed that chimichurri with refried beans or something like that, and made a bean dip out of it, that could be really good.”

Featured photo: Veggie Dill Dip & Seasoning. Courtesy photo.