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.

Kiddie Pool 25/05/08

Family fun for whenever

Faire time

• The New Hampshire Renaissance Faire, which bills itself as a “family-friendly, educational, visual, theatrical and fantastical event,” will run two weekends in Fremont — this weekend Saturday, May 10, and Sunday, May 11, as well as the weekend of May 17 and May 18. Tickets, which can be purchased at nhrenfaire.com, cost $20 for adults and $15 for ages 6 to 12 and for military and veterans, the website said. Kids ages 5 and under get in for free. The event includes performers across several stages, as well as archery, craft demonstrations, tea with the queen, knights and pirates and theme days — May 10 is “Pirates Vs. Ninja” and May 11 is “Celtic Vs. Norse,” according to the website, where you can also find a list of participating vendors, food vendors, games and more.

Outdoor time

Petals in the Pines (126 Baptist Road in Canterbury; petalsinthepines.com) officially opens for the season on Saturday, May 10. Featuring 7 acres of native plants and natural features as well as garden beds, Petals in the Pines will be open Wednesdays through Sundays from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. See the website for a look at the trails, gardens and labyrinths.

Charmingfare Farm (774 High St. in Candia; visitthefarm.com) will offer moms free admission on Mother’s Day (Sunday, May 11) when accompanied by children.

Storytime

• Authors David J. Preece and Jim Webber will celebrate their book Mr. Higgins to the Rescue, the latest in their series about the Scottish terrier Mr. Higgins, on Saturday, May 10, at 11:30 a.m. atBookery Manchester (844 Elm St. in Manchester; bookerymht.com). RSVP online to reserve a spot.

Movie time

• The recently releasedMinecraft(PG, 2025) starring Jack Black and Dwayne Johnson will screen on Tuesday, May 13, at Chunky’s Cinema Pub (707 Huse Road in Manchester; chunkys.com) in two sensory-friendly screenings — 11:30 a.m. and 4:45 p.m. For both of these screenings the sound will be turned down and the lights will be up, according to the website.

Game time

• The Fisher Cats continue a series of games at Delta Dental Stadium in downtown Manchester against the Hartford Yard Goats with games Thursday, May 8, at 6:35 p.m. (with a koozie giveaway); Friday, May 9, at 6:35 p.m.; Saturday, May 10, at 4:05 p.m. and Sunday, May 11, at 1:35 p.m. with a Mother’s Day celebration and a visor giveaway, the website said. See milb.com/new-hampshire.

Library time

• The Derry Public Library (64 E. Broadway in Derry; derry.org) will host a puzzle swap on Wednesday, May 14, at 6 p.m. Donate a puzzle, take a puzzle or both, according to the website, where you can register for the event (or call 432-6140).

The Friends of the Derry Libraries are also holding a book sale on Saturday, May 10, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

• The Manchester City Library (405 Pine St. in Manchester; manchester.lib.nh.us) will hold a Bug Hunt for ages 1 to 5 on Tuesday, May 13, at 10 a.m. Kids can listen to bug stories, play games, make a bug craft and then head outside for bug hunt-related activities, according to the website. Register online or by calling 624-6550, ext. 7628.

The library will also hold a Family Game Night featuring different board games and puzzles on Tuesday, May 13, from 4 to 7:30 p.m.

And on Wednesday, May 14, from 10 to 11 a.m. the library will host Storytime Science for ages 2 to 6 featuring Ms. Yvonne and Ms. Amanda from the SEE Science Center, according to the library’s website. The storytime will have a STEM/STEAM theme and include a hands-on activity, according to the website, where you can register for the event (registration required). Or register by calling 624-6550, ext. 7628.

Treasure Hunt 25/05/08

Hello, Donna.

Maybe you can help in giving me some information on these coins. They are all buffalo nickels. They were in a change jar belonging to my dad. I could read some of the dates so I shared that with you if it helps. They are in used condition so not sure there is any value left. Any information would be helpful, Donna. Thanks for your time.

Ken

Dear Ken,

Coins are really a specific field. Going directly to a coin dealer is truly recommended. I can provide you some history and guidelines but the final determination should be made by a numismatic dealer (fancy name for coin dealer).

Buffalo nickels have been around since 1913–1938. The values always depend on condition, mint mark, date, etc. So you can have a pile of them but just one can line up right with all of the above and have a high value. In general buffalo nickels had a 25-year run until they were replaced by the Jefferson nickel.

Giving you values without seeing them, as I said, would be incorrect. So I suggest doing a search for a local coin dealer. Then do a historical check for some interesting stories about the coin.

I hope this gave you some good advice, Ken. Good luck with your coins.

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