Cocktail Party Fun

On Sunday, I decided to try throwing a mini-cocktail party: small glasses and only 3 guests, plus a greyhound. The dog, not the drink. Hah.

Possibly my first solo cocktail party ever. Excitement! The thrift store afforded me assorted cocktail glasses and bar utensils for about $1 per item, on average. I bought a less expensive bottle of rye, a bottle of dry gin, St. Germaine in mini, a variety of citrus fruits, and a quartet of fancy flavored sodas: grapefruit, tangerine, vanilla creme, and ginger.

I cleaned up around the house, shined glass surfaces and drinking vessels, and wrote out a "cocktail menu" for my guests. I prepared my "bar" on the kitchen counter, and pre-sliced all my citrus garnishes. In a fog of Let's Play Pretend delight, I refilled my ice trays.

If I had really thought ahead, I would have worn my white bow-tie, too.

Guests arrived bearing hot pizza, a jar of maraschino cherry garnishes, and boardgames, plus a giant ecstatic greyhound. Dog treats were exchanged. Then I took my first cocktail orders: an Old-Fashioned, a Manhattan, and an Elder Collins. Chop-chop.

Lacking a jigger measure, I made all my drinks quite strong. But tasty! The cherries were not as unpleasant as I had imagined. I was pleased to put the Collins in a Collins glass, the Manhattan in a cute cocktail glass, and the Old-Fashioned in...yes, you get it.

My decanting strainer thingie performed very well. I got it for a dollar! As a matched set of utensils! How I enjoy that.

Running out of fizzy Jamaican Lemonade, I improvised the next Collins: fancy tangerine soda, lime juice, elderflower, and gin. A hit. Hilarity and boardgames followed.

I see fancifully flavored sugar syrup, bison-grass vodka, and sparkling apple cider in my future.

Without Rice-cooker, Panic Ensues

Well, not really. I didn't want to risk miscalculating the water needed for beans and rice on the stove. So instead of rice this week, I decided to try some other starch. I have bread, of course. Cornmeal mush. I could also make some kind of Vermont-inspired homemade cracker, or some approximation of Civil War hardtack biscuits.

I decided to go with my chewy Italian bread. Recalling that I enjoy the idea of strada, if not the actual execution, I created a meal - it's what I want strada to be in Lindseyland.

Lindsey's Pillowy Strada-in-a-Pan

2 or 3 slices of crusty Italian bread, cubed

2 large fresh eggs

Approximately 1/3 cup of PLAIN kefir or unsweetened yogurt

Approximately 1 cup of chopped fresh broccoli, spinach, or kale

Shredded mozzarella cheese (or whatever kind of cheese you prefer)

Salt, pepper, cayenne, sliced garlic to taste


Melt a little butter in a pan and dump the garlic in with it. Don't let it get too brown. Meanwhile, mix the eggs and yogurt together in a bowl until well blended and golden. Add the cubed bread to the bowl of egg mixture and stir gently - you want the bread to soak up the egg mixture until there's almost no liquid element at the bottom of the bowl.

Add some cayenne or whatever you like to the bread/egg mixture, and mix lightly. Pour into pan with hot butter and garlic. Add your fresh vegetables and sprinkle with cheese. Lower heat and cover. After at least five minutes, check the underside of the egg mixture with a spatula. Shouldn't be too burnt, just crispy and brown! Flip or mix up the strada and continue cooking, covered. By now your greens should be brightening up and looking tender.

When strada is just cooked through, serve and eat! The bread cubes will be savory, and fluffy, moist in some places and crispy in others. Soft, but resilient to the bite. Perfect.

This is not a photogenic meal, but it is a tasty and quick after-work nosh. Obvy good for messy brunch, too.

I followed it with my Recession Dessert: cornmeal mush topped with brown sugar, bananas, cinnamon, and a little more plain kefir. The sourness adds complexity, and is especially good with the sweetness of the ripe banana.

Pancakes and Cocktails (sounds trashy)

So far, I've created miniature versions of an Old-Fashioned and a Manhattan. A tiny bottle of bitters is not expensive and will probably last for a year or two a good while. For the Manhattan, I consulted the inherited booze cache in my kitchen cabinet: a bottle of dry vermouth and a bottle of sweet vermouth behind bottles of coconut rum. Exciting! Thus, I made a Manhattan sans disgusting cherry. AND it was tasty!

The Old-Fashioned is still my favorite: 2 oz of bourbon or rye, 2-3 dashes of bitters, two orange slices squeezed and tossed in (or not), maybe a little sugar, and ice cubes for chilling/dilution. Clink clink!

Tom Collins should be fine with some Jamaican sparkling lemonade. I've also recently read about an Elder Collins (as I'm calling it), which is a Tom Collins (gin and fizzy lemonade) with elderflower liqueur added. They've got tiny $3 bottles of St. Germaine at Blanchards, so I'm all set for Elder Collins.

Now all I need is some cocktail drinkers in the mood for mini cocktails, and perhaps a freshly delivered pizza (or a stir-fry, if I wanted to be labor-intensive). Oh, and a board game.

This morning, I made blueberry cornmeal pancakes for myself and my lady friend. The blueberries were big, fat, and sweet = a little surreal. I went with it this time. Lots of blueberries per pancake, lots of butter and wildflower honey involved in the batter, with grade B maple syrup for topping...AMAZING. Extremely pleasurable - particularly after a sweaty run - and the only pancakes I'll eat with gusto. Photos forthcoming. I halved the recipe from Bon Appetit, and it worked out perfect for two.



Now I sip a gin and tonic with lime; my reward after cleaning the fridge with soap and hot water, and then mopping the floor. SUCCESS.

The Golden Beet

So I bought some bright, carmine-colored beets at the Copley farmer's market the other day. Looking forward to beet greens and to the beets themselves, of course. Tonight I sauteed the greens and boiled the bastards. Didn't knick the beets even a little bit, just washed them, left generous stems on them, left the roots alone...and plunked 'em in boiling water for 55 minutes.

When I checked back, they were no longer carmine. They were golden yellow.

My first thought = Omg, BUNNICULA WAS HERE.

Okay, so I guess these must be golden beets. The unicorn of root vegetables! Who knew. Taking the skins off was fine; each beet is smooth and golden, with a blush of almon pink at both the stem end and the root end. Speaking of salmon, slicing the beets really looked a lot like slicing salmon sashimi. Or some kind of raw, beautiful fish. The layers of the beet - like the layers of an onion - look like the fat layers in a cold-water fish like salmon. So...yeah, my mind was freaking out. Hoping for sashimi, but tasting a mildly sweet beet.

Sweet beet.

I'm too sleepy to pep them up with vinegar, and I don't have any blue cheese. Drat! Perhaps they'll take a low-key vinaigrette tomorrow.

Don't the pictures remind you of peaches? Golden and kissed with reddish pink...I need a better camera phone.

Drinks To Sample: a list in progress

Harvey Wallbanger (orange juice, vodka, galliano)

Manhattan (bourbon or rye, lemon juice, bitters, sweet vermouth, a non-disgusting variant of a maraschino cherry garnish)

Tom Collins (gin, lemon juice, sugar or syrup, soda water)

Old-Fashioned (bourbon or rye, bitters, sugar, soda water, orange slice garnish)

Alabama Slammer (vodka, amaretto, sloe gin, southern comfort, orange juice, holy shit)

Then, there's this super froofy, delicious-sounding Cucumber Lavender Sour made with Hendrick's gin and lavender bitters and all kinds of other things difficult to find. Like sugared vanilla beans. And lavender-infused simple syrup.

Or! An Earl Grey Fizz! (Zubrowka Bison Grass vodka, Earl Grey tea syrup, lemon juice, vodka, champagne, a dash of the good life.)

I would also like to try more drinks with delicious elderflower liqueur. The French 77 (St. Germain, lemon juice, champagne, lemon twist) was super.

And posh. Super and posh. Okay, it was mostly super.

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Note: I tried an Old-Fashioned and a Tom Collins! The OF was delish - the bitters really balanced out the sweetness. Definitely something to order again; I feel like different bartenders will make wildly different versions of the drink. This most recent cocktail had orange slices squeezed into it, and a cherry (meh), and bitters and bourbon and possibly sugar and definitely soda water. Exciting.

The Tom Collins was okay. Basically hard fizzy lemonade with a slight evergreen/gin aftertaste. Nice. Not as exciting as the OF, but nice.

Fresh Corn and Blueberry Cornmeal Pancakes

So I have been thinking of blueberry corn pancakes for a while. And the other day, I bought blueberries and fresh corn, and also found a recipe on epicurious.com. The recipe is from Bon Appetit, and involves the whipping and folding in of egg whites. Exciting!

Despite forgetting to add the egg whites for the first patch of cakes, my pancakes ROCKED HARD. Fresh corn I cut off the cob myself, very sweet and crisp. Blueberries from the pint container. Kept them warm in the oven while I finished the last batch. Drizzled them with molasses - since I'm out of maple syrup - and they're fucking fantastic. God, I love breakfast for dinner! And I don't even like pancakes generally, but I like these pancakes; they have texture, a vegetable element, a fruit element, a little bit of crunch... It's the perfect pancake, as far as I'm concerned. A glass of peach kefir cut with skim milk completes my dinner. I think I might have seconds.

The photo I took is so bad. I wait for a better camera phone from Craigslist!

Wooden Sushi Playset

Realistic chopping sound. I like the little green lump of wasabi. Is that the pink pickled ginger underneath it? Is this set really meant for yuppie toddlers who love sushi?

Whiskey Cocktails, Hangover Breakfasts

In my search for new and not-too-sweet whiskey cocktails to sample, I came across a drink called a Rusty Nail. It's Scotch whisky, Drambuie (a Scotch whisky liquer made with herbs and honey), and a lemon twist. On ice. I ordered it from the very friendly bartender in the Midway, and I enjoyed it very much. Slightly medicinal, but indeed, not too sweet. Next, perhaps I will try ordering a Manhattan. I also ordered a whiskey and ginger ale, which was just fine; there's a camera phone pic to prove that I was still walking around after the whiskey and ginger, but my memory is not bringing back a lot of information. Other than bobbing along in a small crowd, like a cork in a stream! Nice - a high level of debauchery (for me), in a low-key environment. It's practice for the larger clubs, I say.

Normally my post-alcohol breakfast would be something very savory, with a salty and spicy element. Like maybe poached egg over toast with greens and sriracha. Mmm. But today I'm trying something sweet: shredded oats, sliced organic strawberries, sliced banana, a little peach kefir, and skim milk. Accompanied by hot cranberry juice doctored up with licorice-mint tea and sugar.

The verdict is Super Tasty.

My Pride Day Breakfast

Happy Gay Pride!!! Yesterday at the March, I bought a rainbow wrist cuff. I was pleased by the Bostonian bystanders clapping and cheering as we marched through. Go, Boston.

This morning I prepared zucchini ribbons with garlic and pepper, a foached egg, and some multi-grain toast. Also a cup of blueberries, a lemon tea cookie, and oolong tea.

If the blueberries had been organic and the toast hadn't been freezer-burnt, my breakfast totally would have substituted for a good girlfriend.

Maybe I could barter!

Scavenger Score at the Workplace!

After a meeting of the Higher-Ups, what leavings! A fine Cafeteria-style Lunch Score:

My first course involved a tortilla filled with slightly pink real roast beef (as opposed to deli roast beef), iceberg lettuce leaves, pale tomato slices, and pale mystery cheese.

My second course involved a reasonably nice and crusty half-baguette with cucumber slices, a different kind of mystery cheese, and the unwanted "butts" of the roast chicken fillets.

My dessert involved a wedge of 7-layer bar about the size of a make-up sponge; one normal-sized M&Ms cookie; one Krackel mini, one Special Dark mini, and one Mr. Goodbar Mini.

Desserts redolent with palm oil and corn syrup. I suspect the 7-layer bars involved lemon as well as coconut, plus walnuts and...who can say. The meats and the baguette were the best parts, and if I hadn't been over-excited with the apparent bounty, I would have made wiser choices. For example, two baguette sections, heavy on cucumber, with a selection of the higher-quality chicken and beef (avoiding cold-cuts), the reddest tomato slices available, some romaine, and one mini candy bar for dessert.

Ah, but it was lovely to a have free lunch with so many options! I am pleased. Ravenous Workplace Vulture Points: +5

Zucchini Tomato Madness

So summer doesn't begin officially until the 21st of June. But I'm feelin' it. The weather is absurdly perfect and temperate, meanwhile there's fresh zucchini and good-looking tomatoes at the Co-op. So I've been eating the beans, the brown rice, and tomatoes, zukes, garlic, and cheese. This is either a one-bowl meal (or work lunch), or it's a super quesadilla.

Also, it's cheap. Salsa, too. I recently tried some new tortilla chips with embedded, flattened peppercorns. Pretty tasty, gave the chips extra zip.

My brain is all cottony due to my cold, so I think I'll stop blathering.

O, there's tofu chocolate pudding, too. Choosing a milk chocolate hazelnut bar seems to cover up the "bean-y" taste of the silken tofu. Really fine, smooth, almost whipped texture after a bout in the food processor. Also makes a damn good tofudgesicle.

It will be exciting to exercise again, but for now, I must return to my sniffling and prone reading.

Beans and Rice, continued

Summer is starting to kick in; May was a gorgeous, perfect, wondrous month (aside from that week of rain, fine). Having recently come back to Mexican food, my staple diet continues to be salsa, tortilla chips, tortillas, beans and rice, tomatoes, and some kind of cooked green. Last night I made my usual lunch-in-a-box, but added diced and very good-looking zucchini: zuke, black beans, butter beans, brown rice, tomatoes, salsa, cheese. I could use more vegetable items in my diet, but the salsa is so flavorful. Beans and rice seems to go down real easy, too. For cheap.

But, adding the minced raw zucchini was great, because it cooked perfectly in the microwave at work. I'm awesome.

This morning I needed something especially substansive, so I made a quesadilla with more diced zucchini, tomato slices, salsa and cheese. The zuke cooked very nicely in the 'dilla. Good to know, good to know.