Kristin Janz

No, this post isn’t about haggis.  Before going to see Cowboys and Aliens the other night at the Somerville Theater, Donald and I went out for dinner at Highland Kitchen.  I’d never eaten there before, but it seemed to get good reviews, particularly for its cocktail menu.

It’s a little out of the way, about a half hour walk from either Porter or Davis, but the 88 bus goes right by the restaurant. Here’s a picture of the apple tree in someone’s front yard along the way, that I resisted the temptation to poach from.

Mmm, apples!

I really liked the restaurant, and can confirm that they serve “real cocktails”. I had the “Rarely Eagle”, with bourbon, St. Germain, lemon juice and orange blossom water, and it was very tasty and not too sweet. For an appetizer, Donald and I shared a serving of grilled artichokes with some dipping sauce. I wasn’t too impressed by these, but I think roasting in a hot oven with olive oil or deep-frying is probably a better preparation for baby artichokes. The grilled ones we had didn’t really have much grilled flavor, and no crispy caramelized bits (which I think you need a good amount of oil for, with artichokes, if you don’t want to just burn them). It was like eating vegetables or something!

I thought my entree–sea bass with roasted potatoes, summer succotash and pinot noir butter–made up for it, though. The fish was perfectly cooked, and the summer succotash (summer squash, lima beans and corn) was a nice complement to the fish. I do think they could have improved the potatoes with a bit more oil and a hotter oven, but then, I’m not really a big proponent of low-fat cooking, and I understand how some people might prefer them just the way they were. And anyway, it’s hard to go wrong with potatoes (unless you mash them–yuck!). Donald had the blackened catfish po’boy sandwich, which came with a huge pile of delicious hand-cut fries, and he said his was good, too (I can attest to the goodness of the fries!).

We were too full for dessert (or popcorn at the movie, for that matter), and there wasn’t anything on the dessert menu that either of us found terribly compelling (though had I been less full, I might have tried the plum shortcake).

Another nice thing, although we didn’t take advantage of it, is that if you want a non-alcoholic cold beverage besides water, you’re not limited to the usual Coke/Sprite/ginger-ale spectrum; they also have a couple of IBC sodas, ginger beer, sparkling limeade, and fresh lemonade.

There’s not a ton of vegetarian options, but they have a vegetarian soup of the day, and one each of the sandwiches and entrees on the regular menu are vegetarian (and, of course, all the desserts). So if your vegetarian friend isn’t too picky (or just wants to eat dessert!), you could probably bring them here.

I heartily recommend this place, and would certainly go back!

I recently bought this cookbook. It’s a gorgeous hardcover with a colorful cover, and many beautiful pictures of delicious-looking food inside. It was an impulse purchase. I’d been shopping for a dress for my wedding (yes, yes, the store at which I purchased the cookbook also sold dresses!), and the book was just so lovely, and the recipes sounded so good (at least to read about) that I just couldn’t resist.

The gimmick for this one is that it’s divided into 4 chapters, one for each season, and the recipes in each chapter feature foods that are at their peak in that season (at least, in the northeastern US; the author is based in New York City). Within each chapter, there’s a 2-page spread highlighting what’s best this time of year, then a section for seasonal cocktails, one for appetizers, one for main courses, one for desserts, and one for breakfast foods (also a couple of sample menus at the end of each chapter).

First off, I love that it includes seasonal cocktails, and most of them sound very tasty. Though the only one I’ve made so far, the rhubarb mule (a Moscow mule with the addition of sweetened rhubarb puree), was WAY sweeter than it needed to be. I made it a second time with extra lime juice, and it was still too sweet. There’s a preponderance of vodka cocktails, as well, which suggests that the recipes are tailored to the palates of those who like the idea of fancy drinks, but don’t actually enjoy the taste of alcohol. But I should try more of his recipes before I judge. Also, the author seems to feel the need to give a shout-out to every brand of premium vodka currently on the market. There are three vodka cocktails in the Spring chapter, and each one suggests a different brand of top-shelf vodka. I mean, really? Do you even need top-shelf vodka when you’re drowning out whatever flavor there is with fruit juice and sugar? Maybe I’m just not a vodka connoisseur, but I made the rhubarb mule with Level vodka one time, and Skyy another, and really couldn’t tell the difference.

The only other recipes I’ve tried so far are “Mammy Louisette’s Ginger-Rhubarb Tart” and “Vermont Double Cream Ice Cream” (vanilla ice-cream with extra egg yolks and creme fraiche). The ice-cream is quite delicious. It seems pretty hard, but this is the first time I’ve made ice-cream at the new apartment, so I don’t know whether that’s the recipe or our freezer. I wasn’t quite as happy with the tart, but I think that might have been my fault. It had a puff pastry crust, and the center never baked through, even though the edges would have scorched had I left it in for longer. I think I wasn’t as careful as I should have been, though, scooping the sweetened and flavored rhubarb into the crust, and I added too much liquid. I also think the crust wasn’t cold enough when it went into the oven. That might be partly the fault of the recipe, though. It says to put the puff pastry in the tart pan, then chill for 30 minutes, then add the fruit, fold over the edges, and bake. My timing was a little off, because Donald needed the oven for French fries at the 30 minute mark. However, there’s no way, after 30 minutes in the freezer, that those rock solid pastry edges are going to fold over. Even after putting it in the fridge for a bit, they were still quite hard. I had to bring it out to room temperature for a while to soften them up enough. However, it might have been a good idea to stick it back in the freezer for a few minutes after I’d added the rhubarb and folded the edges over, because that might have kept the juices from soaking through the center of the tart as much.

I do want to make other recipes in this book. However, it does seem to me that most of them are fancy dinner party food, and not really all that useful for helping me figure out what to do with all my CSA vegetables. Many of the recipes would just take far too long (and this is saying a lot, if you know how much time I typically spend cooking already). I mean, I just don’t have time to make “Aromatic Stuffed Suckling Pig” on a Wednesday night after work.

Which brings me to another issue with this book. I’m an adventurous cook and grocery shopper, and I live in a major urban center in the United States. And a good number of these recipes call for ingredients that I don’t know how to get. Fresh porcini mushrooms? I’ve never seen fresh porcini mushrooms at a store in Boston. Ditto veal sweetbreads. Not to mention suckling pig. Maybe I could order suckling pig from a butcher. But, seasonal or no, these are just not common ingredients. Huckleberries? I don’t think I’ve ever seen fresh huckleberries for sale even at Russo’s. I think you have to live in New York City to make a lot of these recipes.

I probably sound pretty negative about this cookbook, but I should also confess that I spend a lot of time reading it, and trying to convince myself that the recipes wouldn’t be that much work to prepare. They just sound that delicious! Maybe for a dinner party sometime….

The best part, though, is Rachael Ray’s blurb on the back cover, which refers to the recipes as “simple preparations and easy ideas.” Which might tell you all you need to know about Rachael Ray’s so-called 30 Minute Meals.

I used to be afraid of eggnog when I was younger. I don’t like either eggs or milk, and as I’m sure you’re all aware, both feature quite prominently. You can get soy eggnog these days, but I doubt that it’s the same thing. And I have weird food issues. Bananas, for instance. My hatred of bananas is, I am certain, more psychological than anything else, and many people (including Donald, who also doesn’t like bananas) have told me that plantains taste nothing like bananas. People who do like bananas say that plantains are gross, and that they taste nothing like bananas. And yet, I can’t bring myself to try one, because they look like bananas.

Eggnog was always the same. I liked chocolate milk, because the chocolate overwhelms the milk flavor. But eggnog? How could it not taste like egg? It says “egg” right in the name!

As I’ve gotten more and more into old-school cocktails, though, I have–cautiously, at first–extended my experiments to cocktails including raw egg. Initially I only tried the ones that used egg white but no yolk (such as the pisco sour, or Ramos gin fizz). Gradually, I worked up my courage enough to try the flip and the coffee cocktail, with their generous portions of whole egg. And you know what? You really can’t taste the egg. Honestly. They’re good cocktails. The egg adds richness and body, but it’s not gross and slimy. Or “eggy”. Not at all. And so, only in the past year or so, I’ve been able to ignore that word “egg” in the name of that favorite seasonal libation, and bring myself to drink eggnog.

Everything is better with alcohol, right?

Last night my roommates and I decided to have a pajama party. It’s sort of a running joke with us. One of my roommates was at a party where she overheard some women talking about an imaginary reality TV show they’d like to see, spoofing “Rock of Love”. From what I understand (I’ve never watched it), “Rock of Love” is about these women who go around bar-hopping trying to pick up random guys? Anyway, the joke was that there should be a show called “Cock Block of Love”, about women who are in their pajamas and ready for bed by 10 pm each night, and my roommate, who was eavesdropping, thought to herself, “Hey! That sounds like our apartment!”

Then, one of us found a retro card with the cover of a 1960s pulp fiction novel called “Pajama Party”, showing three women in various states of pajama-cladness, drinking cocktails and the tag line “Five campus cuties on a no-holds-barred spree!” (I guess they couldn’t fit enough skin on the cover if they put all five of the cuties in the picture? I don’t know.) Of course, the three of us tend to spend most of our time at home reading, writing, playing classical music, or studying; but we do sometimes enjoy a round of cocktails together in our pajamas. So we couldn’t resist putting the card up on our fridge. And we started talking about how we should have a real pajama party. Where we would stay up and eat junk food and watch chick flicks and paint our toenails. And drink cocktails, of course. Since it was mid-December by the time we got around to it, we decided that the most appropriate cocktail was eggnog.

I used the eggnog recipe in Dale DeGroff’s excellent book The Essential Cocktail: 3 eggs, 2 cups whole milk, 1 cup heavy cream, 1/2 cup sugar, 2 oz bourbon, 2 oz rum, freshly grated nutmeg. This was actually only half the recipe, which was supposed to serve 6. I suppose the amount I made does serve 3, if everyone wants seconds. And thirds. And maybe fourths. (If you divide the total amount of alcohol by 3, it is actually less alcohol per person than a typical serving size of alcohol; way more calories and cholesterol, though!)

How festive!

The pumpkin pie was made by my roommate Aubrey. We were supposed to eat it (or at least some of it) at the pajama party, but we felt too full after drinking all that eggnog! Ditto on the popcorn we’d been planning to make. So we’ll have to try the pumpkin pie today! Looks good, though, doesn’t it?

Clearly Dale DeGroff has been consulting with Rachael Ray on portion size

This is what was left in the bowl (of the theoretical 3 servings) after ladling out an initial cup for everyone.

It was very tasty, almost like a cold latte, with a liquid layer and a thick foam on top (I beat the egg whites separately and folded them in at the end). You couldn’t taste the eggs or milk at all!

We exchanged gifts, only I, um, hadn’t gotten around to buying any yet. (There’s still time!) Cory got me Ted Haigh’s book Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, which is very awesome. I’d never even heard of many of these cocktails, and some of the ingredients are almost impossible to find, which is my favorite sort of recipe! And Aubrey got me a beautiful mortar and pestle. I don’t know what I’m going to get for them, now–the bar is set pretty high!

As far as our pajama party went, we watched the movie “Love, Actually”, which I’d never seen (though they had). It was good, though Donald and I had just seen the new Harry Potter movie the day before, and they have some of the same actors, which is always weird.

We didn’t have enough energy for any of our other grand ambitions for the pajama party, like home pedicures or crank-calling Donald upstairs. When the movie was over, we concluded that the best part of a pajama party is getting to go straight to bed afterwards without even having to change.

Like maraschino cherries, modern grenadine isn’t what it used to be. The original product was colored and flavored with pomegranate juice. These days, it tends to be high-fructose corn syrup colored with FD&C Red #40, and flavored with … well, flavored with not much of anything, to be honest (my bottle of Giroux “Premium Quality” Grenadine Syrup also mentions citric acid, sodium benzoate and “natural fruit flavors”). It doesn’t add anything to a cocktail except color and a cloying sweetness.

Stirrings has a pomegranate grenadine, but it’s not a good substitute. It does contain real pomegranate, but it isn’t red enough to give your drink any more than an anemic salmon tinge, and, although I hate to say this, it isn’t sweet enough. Drink recipes that call for grenadine take the sweetness into consideration, and if you use a product that’s a lot less sweet, the drink won’t be any good. I’ve tried increasing the amount, but haven’t been able to come up with a solution that’s right. And even with double the amount, Stirrings grenadine, though a nice product in its own right, won’t color the drink properly.

Fortunately, I’ve found a solution. Monin pomegranate syrup! This is available at the fancier grocery stores like Whole Foods, among other places. It’s intensely red in color. You can tell it’s in there by looking at the drink. It’s sweet, but not too sweet. And it adds a delicious hint of pomegranate flavor, which will usually go very nicely with whatever drink you’ve added it to (assuming it’s a drink that calls for grenadine, that is; I wouldn’t go adding it to your dry martini).

Unlike Giroux “Premium Grenadine Syrup”, Monin contains actual pomegranate juice along with the natural flavors and citric acid. So does Stirrings, for that matter. I’m not sure why the flavor and color of Monin syrup are so much better; maybe Monin concentrates their fruit juice more. Another thing that Monin and Stirrings have in common is the use of real sugar, from sugar cane, instead of corn syrup. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence suggesting that sugar tastes better than corn syrup (people who swear by Kosher for Passover Coca-Cola, for instance). Though in Giroux’s case, I suspect the disappointing taste has more to do with the lack of anything approximating real fruit, than with high-fructose corn syrup.

For years, I’ve been a devotee of the sadly-out-of-print book Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century (Paul Harrington and Laura Moorhead). I learned about the book from a friend, and managed to find my own copy at a used book store (and pay far too much money for it). It’s served me well, and while I wouldn’t say I’ve tried all 275 drink classics described therein … well, to admit how many I have tried might reveal more about my drinking habits than I’d care to confess.

Recently, however, The Drinks Bible has been shoved rudely from its pedestal by a new cocktail cookbook, Dale DeGroff’s The Essential Cocktail: The Art of Mixing Perfect Drinks, which I received as a Christmas present from the thoughtful parents of my teetotalling boyfriend. Each book contains cocktail recipes that the other has left out. However, they both provide recipes for the essential classics (the Martini, the Manhattan, the Mojito, and many drinks that do not begin with the letter M). For the most part, I’ve found that I prefer DeGroff’s version of a cocktail to Harrington’s. Harrington’s recipes are sometimes so sour as to be almost undrinkable. I occasionally do find DeGroff’s just a little too sweet, but overall, the flavor profiles of the drinks are more interesting. And it’s a better cocktail cookbook for right now; Harrington’s is a bit out of date in terms of what ingredients you’ll actually be able to find at even the best-stocked liquor store, these days; DeGroff’s is more mindful of this issue, and also includes newer products (like the ginger liqueur Domaine de Canton) that may not have been available when Harrington’s book came out.

Be that as it may, I just got around to trying DeGroff’s recipe for one of my favorite cocktails, the Aviation. And I found that I like the Drinks Bible version much better.

The recipe DeGroff provides calls for 2 oz gin, 3/4 oz maraschino liqueur and 1/2 oz lemon juice. Harrington’s recipe is 1 1/2 oz gin, 1/2 oz maraschino and 3/4 oz lemon juice. I found DeGroff’s recipe too alcoholic, and out of balance with the tartness that I think this drink needs from the lemon juice.

This might just be me, though; I do like my drinks more sour than most people. But if someone wanted a sweeter Aviation, I’d probably recommend keeping Harrington’s proportions, and just increasing the maraschino up to 3/4 oz (though I haven’t tried that yet, to be honest).

It’s also possible that I’d think differently with a different gin. I used Tanqueray, which I usually prefer because it has a stronger juniper flavor than Bombay Sapphire, and I find that Bombay Sapphire with tonic tastes too much like Sprite (though it’s not quite as Sprite-like as Tanqueray Ten and tonic – shudder!). Perhaps Bombay Sapphire or a milder gin would work better in DeGroff’s recipe.

A nice variation, which I got when I ordered an Aviation at Clio Restaurant, is to use Meyer lemon juice in place of ordinary lemon juice.

A friend of mine once threw some old maraschino cherries in his compost. A year later, they were still there, as round and brilliantly-hued as the day he first opened the bottle.

I’m not a huge fan of maraschino cherries. Food doesn’t come in that color! And yet, I like to make old-school cocktails, and some of them call for one of these cherries as a garnish. A Manhattan just doesn’t look right without one. I’ve been buying the Silver Palate brand, which at least don’t have any artificial coloring, but they don’t taste much better than the standard grocery store variety.

The kind you get at the grocery store are not actually the original maraschino cherries, though. The term used to refer to a product made by the Luxardo Corporation: marasca cherries (a small cherry native to the Adriatic coast of Italy and Croatia) bottled in a liqueur made from the same (Luxardo’s maraschino liqueur, which for a long time wasn’t readily available in the US, but now is, thanks to the trendiness of fancy cocktails). When Prohibition came along, these became illegal, and a non-alcoholic substitute was invented. And is, sadly, with us to this day.

So, the other day I was at the bar at Clio Restaurant in Boston, and what did I see on the counter but a jar of Luxardo brand maraschino cherries! It wasn’t very busy, so I asked the bartender about them, and he gave me one to try. Was it ever tasty! He said that you can buy them at Boston Shaker (a bartending supply store) in Davis Square. I haven’t yet put this to the test, but I hope he’s right! I’m looking to forward to garnishing Manhattans, Old Fashioneds and Aviations with a cherry that not only looks pretty, but tastes good, too.

(On this latest visit, I was only at Clio with a friend for a drink, but I have eaten there before, and I think it’s one of Boston’s best restaurants. We did end up on a whim getting the Miso Dark Chocolate Cremeux, which my friend ordered without either of us looking at the menu, and I would never have ordered it on my own because it comes with banana ice-cream, and I hate banana more than any other flavor on the planet, but we scraped the ice-cream off to the side, and the chocolate part was just amazing! It was like a rectangle of this luscious, dark chocolate pate, with a burnt caramel sauce on the side.)