Category: Food

• 1 cup (198 g) sugar
• 1/3 cup (2/3 cube) butter
• 1 egg
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• ½ cup (114 g) milk
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• ¼ teaspoon baking soda
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 3½ cups (420 g) all-purpose flour
• 2 cups (285 g) frozen wild blueberries – Leave these in the freezer until you add them to the cookie dough; you want them to stay as hard and frozen as possible.

• 1 cup (114 g) powdered sugar
• juice and zest of 1 lemon
• 1 teaspoon dried lavender buds

Mix the dry ingredients — the baking powder, baking soda, salt, and flour — together, and set them aside.

Cream the butter and sugar together with an electric mixer until they have come together and are lighter in color and slightly fluffy. Beat in the egg and vanilla.

Reduce the speed of your mixer to its lowest setting, then mix the milk in. (Just pouring it in with the mixer going all-out will get splashy.) Spoon most of the dry mixture in; reserve a couple of tablespoons of it. Take the blueberries from the freezer and toss them in the flour mixture until they are coated. In theory, this should help keep them from exploding when you add them to the cookie dough.

If you have strong arms and are super-patient, stir the frozen, floury blueberries into the dough gently with a wooden spoon or a silicone spatula. If, like me, you have the gentle subtlety of an overheated porcupine, use the mixer to bring everything together. Unfortunately, this will cause many of the berries to explode and will turn your cookie dough purple.

Shriek, “You’re turning violet, Violet!” (if you know, you know) and put the bowl of purple cookie dough in the refrigerator.

Preheat your oven to 350°F. Leave the dough to chill and the oven to heat up. (Which seems like a bit of an extravagance. At this point in our technological development, shouldn’t we be able to suck the heat out of the dough and pump it into the oven somehow, instead of making the refrigerator and the oven work at cross purposes?)

Start making the glaze. Whisk the lemon juice, lemon zest, powdered sugar and lavender buds together, then set them aside. Go write a handwritten postcard to a friend you haven’t talked to in too long.

Lavender is one of those strong-flavored ingredients that will overpower this whole enterprise if you find yourself chewing on a piece of it. By leaving it to soak in the acidic lemon juice, you’re extracting some of the flavor.

When the cookie dough is cold and the oven is hot, scoop golf-ball-sized balls of dough onto a baking sheet covered with parchment paper or a silicone mat. Bake the cookies for 11 to 13 minutes, until they have browned slightly. Let them cool on the baking sheet.

Strain the glaze and pour it over the cooled cookies.

The cookies themselves are not very sweet, but the glaze is. Together, with the zing of lemon juice and the floral lavender in the background, these are very nice, maybe with a glass of lemonade.

Featured photo: Blueberries cookies. Photo by John Fladd.

Craft cocktails are their specialty

Michael Demicco is the owner of The Grey Dog in Manchester, a new addition to downtown’s growing craft cocktail scene. His mission is to present customers with the purest, most attention-grabbing flavors possible in his drinks, he said. Sometimes that involves stripping recipes down to basics.

“I’ve also learned through trial and error over the years,” he said, “how important it is to simplify drinks. I don’t mean dumbing them down, or even making them easier to make, but you shouldn’t over-complicate cocktails, just like you shouldn’t in life. Some of the best cocktails we’ve ever put out are the not basic but just simpler ones where we strip out the unnecessary steps.”

Other times Demicco’s recipes will involve an impressive number of familiar and unfamiliar ingredients to build the flavor he is looking for.

“My personal favorite of our drinks is based on a cocktail I had once in Colorado with my girlfriend at the time,” he said. “We could never figure out exactly how they did it. So we spent most of Covid trying to figure it out.” After months of experimentation, Demicco said, he was finally able to reverse-engineer a cocktail with the flavor profile he was looking for. “It’s called The Jade,” he said, partially because it is a jade-colored drink. It has cachaça (a Brazilian sugar-cane-base spirit like a musky rum), tequila, lychee, agave, lime, matcha and absinthe. “That sounds like a lot — and it’s true that it’s one of the more complicated drinks we make. However, when all blended together, it doesn’t taste like anything you’ve ever had. It doesn’t register as a margarita, despite there being tequila in there. It’s definitely not a caipirinha, even though there’s cachaça in there. The matcha doesn’t taste like green tea because we just use literally a pinch of it, just to get that color. The absinthe is more like two or three drops, kind of like a vanilla extract. It’s turned out to be the busiest cocktail on our menu. It doesn’t taste like anything you’ve ever had before.”

Demicco said one of The Grey Dog’s goals is to provide something any customer will be able to enjoy, regardless of their personal tastes.

“We have everything from Bud Light to some bottles up on the top shelf of the bar that run you $50, $60 a pour and everything in between. I try to keep prices as fair as possible, but the top shelf is called ‘top shelf’ for a reason.”

The food menu at The Grey Dog is fairly streamlined, Demicco said, with a small number of dishes that have been developed for the maximum amount of flavor.

“It’s a tapas-style [menu],” he said, “not actual tapas. I call it ‘tapas light.’ I try to subvert some expectations. Our crispy Thai chili pork belly tacos are made with house-made flour tortillas are absolutely phenomenal. They’re served with a kale/kimchi slaw, fermented vegetables, and a cilantro avocado lime crema. We sell out almost every other day. People just, if we have them in house, they don’t stop ordering them. That is what we served at Taco Tour. We’re going to make them for Taco Tour again next year. We sold out really quickly this year, but we’re going to triple the amount we do next year.”

“My purpose and goal and philosophy behind the things we make,” Demicco said, “is to help people create memories and stories that they will remember. I remember, throughout almost my entire life, memories and cocktails and places I’ve been. I think of some of the things I’ve eaten or drunk during my life, and there’s always a story about where I was and what I was doing at the time. It’s more of an emotional thing for me, I think, when it comes to creating — whether it’s in cooking or cocktails.”

The Grey Dog
657 Elm St., Manchester, 540 -7970, thegreydognh.com
Open Wednesday through Sunday, 4 p.m. to midnight.

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

• Telling fine whiskeys apart: Tuscan Market (Tuscan Village, 9 Via Toscana, Salem, 912-5467, tuscanbrands.com) will host a Whiskey Appreciation class Friday, Aug. 7, from 5 to 7 p.m. Explore a selection of whiskeys, each with its own unique story. Featured pours include Angel’s Envy Triple Barrel, Woodford Reserve Double Double, and Basil Hayden Golden Rye. The cost is $65 through the Tuscan Brands website.

• Historic night: The Town of Lee’s Nation’s 250th Committee “Lee the People” will hold a costumed gala Friday, Aug. 7, starting at 5:30 p.m. at Flag Hill Winery (297 N. River Road, Lee, 659-2949, flaghill.com). The evening will include a buffet dinner, live entertainment, dancing and a cash bar. There will be a costume contest as well as other activities during the evening with prizes. The cost is $55 through Flag Hill’s website.

• More sunflowers: Brookford Farm (250 West Road, Canterbury, 742-4084, brookfordfarm.com) will hold its annual Sunflower Soiree Aug. 8 through Aug. 16, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. There will be many, many sunflowers, as well as sunflower viewing platforms, farm-to-table food, live music, hay rides, a daily cow parade and more. General admission tickets are $10 in advance ($14 at the gate) and children’s tickets are $7 ($9 at the gate). Children 4 and under get in free.

• Lake County Wines: NH Liquor & Wine Outlet,Store #69 (25 Coliseum Ave, Nashua, 882-4670, liquorandwineoutlets.com) will host “Lake County Wine Tour: An Evening with Angie Shannon and Chef Ed Aloise” Thursday, Aug. 6, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. “Guests will enjoy a guided lineup of dishes and wines with pairing tips as well as learning the geography of Lake County [California] and Shannon Family Wines’ commitment to sustainability,” according to liquorandwineoutlets.com/events, where you can purchase tickets for $25.

• Old versus New World: Join WineNot Experiences (winenotexperiences.com) at the Hunt Memorial Library Building (6 Main St, Nashua) Wednesday, Aug. 12, from 6 to 8 p.m. for a guided tasting, comparing six different Old and New World wines from the Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and beyond, with food pairings and expert insights. Tickets are $65 through the WineNot website.

• Local competitor: DeadProof Pizza Co., which has a food truck and a location in Derry, is also on your TV. It is one of the eight teams competing in this season of Food Network’s The Great Food Truck Race, which airs new episodes on Sundays at 9 p.m. The teams are “set to hit the road through the Great Smoky Mountains for a chance at $50,000,” according to foodnetwork.com/shows/the-great-food-truck-race.

I don’t think it’s possible to buy a bottle of grapefruit juice with bad intentions.

You walk up the juice aisle at the supermarket, thinking about important things, like what kind of animal you could beat in a fist fight. A poll a few years ago revealed that seven percent of American men believed they could defeat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat. (Shockingly, five percent of American women thought they could beat one up.) You aren’t part of that six percent, but you’re reasonably certain that you’re tougher than something — a koala bear, maybe, although that might involve more tree-climbing than you’re comfortable with.

At any rate, you’re walking up the juice aisle and you hear a bottle of grapefruit juice calling to you (in a metaphorical sense). So you buy the grapefruit juice, take it home with you, make one very good cocktail with it, then forget about it. Six months later you find it hiding in the very back of the refrigerator, and you spend the next 20 minutes doing internet searches to find out how acidic grapefruit juice is (It has a pH of roughly 3, for what it’s worth) and the odds of its having gone bad. In the end you pour it down the drain, apologizing to it, saying, “Sorry Buddy, it didn’t have to end this way.”

The point here is that unless you’re super-enthusiastic about grapefruit juice, you’re probably better off just buying an actual grapefruit and squeezing it for that drink.

• 1¼ ounces Cointreau or other orange liqueur – Grand Marnier would work well, or a dry triple sec.
• ¾ ounce cachaça, or flavorful rum
• ½ ounce fresh-squeezed lemon juice
• ½ ounce fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice (see above)
• 1 teaspoon dehydrated grapefruit juice powder (optional) – available online, this bumps up the grapefruitiness of the recipe without throwing off any of your liquid ratios, if that’s the sort of thing you invest emotional energy into.
• 1 dash Angostura bitters

If you actually have dehydrated grapefruit juice powder and are using it in this recipe, mix it with the cachaça at the bottom of a cocktail shaker with a long-handled spoon, until it is completely dissolved. Add some ice, and the rest of the ingredients, and shake thoroughly.

Ask your digital assistant to play “Tie Me Kangaroo Down”; not for any particular reason — it’s just a fun song, and this is a good excuse to break it out.

Strain the cocktail into a coupe glass.

Featured photo: Upper Cut. Photo by John Fladd.

Southern NH Food Truck Festival offers culinary variety

The first weekend of August has become the traditional date for the Southern New Hampshire Food Truck Festival at the Hampshire Dome in Milford. Jody Donohue’s company, Great New England Events, organizes the Festival.

“We’re excited to have some new additions this year,” Donohue said. “There will be a couple of new food trucks joining us. We always mix it up. We never want to hold the exact same event twice. We have an ABCbowls truck that uses a variety of fresh ingredients and makes different types of bowls. We have an Asian truck joining us this year. We have a new truck for us, an Indian truck. And we also have lots of sweets. We have A Slice of Heaven Cheesecake joining us from New York this year. They make fresh cheesecake; you can buy a whole cheesecake or you can just have a slice. We have our Uncle Joey’s Cannoli truck back again this year. And we’ll also have bubble tea, of course, that’s always popular with people, as well as fresh squeezed lemonade. We have baked goods, and beef jerky, jams and jellies for some specialty foods that will be part of our lineup. We have 15 food trucks this year.”

And there will be 40 vendors inside the Dome, Donohue said, “offering handmade products. leggings, apparel, jewelry, pottery, ceramics, hunting items and seaglass.”

There has been a special effort to make this year’s Festival family-focused.

“We’ve added some extra fun and magic tricks,” she said. “We have a clown all weekend, a very friendly clown, who’s very friendly looking, and he will be walking around and doing magic tricks and making balloon animals for the kids. In addition to that, this year, there is a bead bar that will be set up in the kids’ area with face painting, and henna art.”

“This year we have added some characters that a lot of the children will like. … They will walk around both days, doing photo opportunities and signing autographs. We will have a little children’s coloring area set up so kids can go there and color. We also have two beautiful princesses coming each day,” she said.

Donohue said the Festival has been organized to be budget-friendly as well.

“We have two bounce houses,” she said, “ and we staff it, but the bounce houses are free. Kids can come for free. We have some bubble fun that they can use, and chalk play. They’re quite some little artists that come. And they make beautiful things. arrows on the pavement for us. So all of that’s included, ages 14 and under are free. Admission is $7 a person, but that admission is valid for two days. So if you attend on Saturday, if you ask for a bracelet, you can return on Sunday for free. You can come back and eat from the trucks or enjoy some of the vendors you might not have had a chance to see on Saturday. We have plenty of seating, lots of tables and chairs, hundreds of chairs, and also inside of the dome, there’s plenty of seating in there to eat. But some people bring a blanket and they sit down on the turf inside the dome and make a picnic out of it.”

10th Annual Southern NH Food Truck Festival
When: Saturday, Aug. 1, and Sunday, Aug. 2,
Where: The Hampshire Dome, 34 Emerson Road, Millford.
More: Entry is $7 for two days. Children 14 and under are free. Visit gnefoodtruckfest.com.

Featured photo: ABCbowls Truck. Courtesy photo.