It was a hot day at the dog run, and I had to do chores at work in the afternoon, so when I got home and started pitting fruit for my annual batch of maraschino cherries, my mind got to wandering about how to use the excess maraschino liquor in a refreshing beverage. (You need more liquor simmering in the pot than you will use in the jars.)

My first impulse was to put a splash of it in some soda water with a wedge of lime, but I’d been hankering to use some of the spicy coffee flower honey I got at the coop. So I made limeade - 3 limes, 1 cup of water, 2 tablespoons honey - mixed it 1:1 with the cherry-stained maraschino left over from simmering and canning the cherries, and topped with soda water. Pink, tart, sweet, floral.

In medieval Scandinavia fish was preserved by being buried in salty sand on the shoreline. The salt would extract the moisture in the fish flesh, and allow the fish to be kept longer. The hole that was dug and filled with fish was a “grav” - you can see the etymological roots of our “grave” - and the fish itself (usually fatty salmon capable of standing up to a salty profile) lax. Gravlax. Buried salmon. Funny that a dish received as so celebratory and elegant should have such a sepulchral, earthy origin.

The process of making gravlax is not at all difficult except that it takes foresight and time. You don’t have to prepare it on a whole side of salmon or anything crazy like that; you can make a pound or two to use as an appetizer for a dinner party or as a brunch at home.  The steps are as follows:

• Get yourself a salmon filet
• Cover it with a dry cure of salt, sugar and spices
• Let the fish sit out until the salt and sugar disolve 
• Wrap and refrigerate
• Wait for 2 days for the moisture to be extracted from the flesh and for flavor to be imparted
• Rinse off the cure
• Slice as thin as possible on an angle, against the grain of the salmon flesh.

Cooking for Engineers, which has a delightful convention for displaying recipes, recommends freezing the fish prior to curing to kill and lurking parasites, but if you use fresh, high-quality salmon, it isn’t necessary. You are already preparing this at least 2 days out, for goodness sakes. 

The gravlax we made used 2 cups of salt, one cup of sugar, caraway seeds, aquavit, no dill. Mark Bittman collected recipes for both basic and more elaborate flavor profiles in a Minimalist piece on gravlax from a decade ago. Rather than the traditional mustard-and-dill sauce, we served the fish with what amounts to a tartar sauce prepared with crème fraîche instead of mayonnaise. Shallots, capers, cornichons and cream: I could eat it by the spoonful. 

The silky, dense, salty fish with its tart, creamy cloak of sauce was heavenly with René Geoffroy “Rosé de Saignée” Brut champagne, dry and redolent of orange peel. Incedentally, the champagne is called “saignée” because of the process by which it gets its pink color, wherein the grape skins are left to imbue the wine, literally “bleeding off” color as well as flavor.

Gravlax, the buried fish, is perfectly complimented by a bloody wine.

My girl at Dirt’s World makes the best hot buttered rum I’ve ever tasted and I’m hoping that this endorsement will lead her to post the recipe in the comments below, as I’ve lost it. Or email it to me and I’ll post it. Until that point, and with this weather, I thought I’d muse on the art of the hot toddy and make some suggestions a for cold-nose appropriate beverage.

There are three bartenders at the restaurant, only one working on any given evening. When I was feeling low (the head cold, before-Mexico kind of low, not the antibiotics and depletion kind of low in the week after), I asked each of them to make as my shift drink the kind of hot Toddy they would make for self-medication were they suffering from the same stuffy exhaustion.

Each had a different approach in terms of booze (Jack Daniels, house Brandy, Bookers), fruit (none, orange, lemon), sweetener (sugar, none, honey) and spices (none, a cinnamon stick and none). All were equally dilute with hot water, which is to say, only dilute enough to make it hot.

The Toddy is a wonder drug that makes you forget you are sick long enough to go to sleep. It resonates with old worldiness, calms your ribs and envelops your face in healing vapors. It also has the potential to be delicious on the level of a magical treat.

I’d like to say all that were offered to me lived up to their Toddy potential, but actually Jack and sugar made me feel like I was trying to make an unpleasant thing taste better, and hot orange-scented brandy isn’t nearly as good as a Sidecar. The winner was the bartender/lead singer of Making Friendz, who combined:

• 2 oz Bookers bourbon
• 1 generous tablespoon honey
• Juice of half a lemon
• Hot water

It is a tasty and nourishing beverage even in the flourish of rude, good, Cipro-ensured health.

The limes commonly served with food and beer in Mexico City are small, round, smooth and thin-skinned. They look like key limes aside from their bright green color, and give off far more juice then the Persian limes you find in an American grocery store. They are delicious - more intense, more floral, more tart - and adorable.

There are a few explanations for the lime-in-the-beer phenomenon ubiquitous with Mexican lagers: originally used to wipe dust off of cans, to keep flies out of the opening, as marketing gimmick for tourists. My theory is that Mexicans understand that so many things taste better with lime that they extended the practice to their beers. I know that there is an idea that lime-in-beer is strictly for gringos, but to my eyes limes were being added to cervezas by everyone, everywhere, which makes sense as it adds a pleasant acidity to the sweetish lagers. 

Limes were also offered with most food. A squeeze of lime brightens the flavor and creates harmony between the individual components of a complex dish like a tacos al pastor: achiote-rubbed meat bringing pork, fat and smoke; corn tortilla giving an earthy sweetness; onion, chile and cilantro lending sharp, hot and soapy-green, respectively. Lime adds a further dimension (sour) at the same time that it pulls it all together into what I think of as a meat-flowery finish. It also enhances a simpler foods, bringing out the various layered flavors of an individual fruit or a meat. If you don’t understand, squeeze some on a sliced mango.

Lime is the salt of the vegetal world!

Last weekend night before Christmas, the restaurant was carnage tonight, literally a full house of customers with menus 15 minutes before we opened. Which meant orders for an entire restaurant right out of the gate.

Three women on the line. Each of the three of us got her period this morning. No joke. The bleeding ones. Coincedence, not any of that lunar sisters BS.

We were fierce. And we were seamless. We made great food fast.  Irritable, but seamless. The bartender treated us to homemade lime rickeys, hereafter called “The Dragon Time“, at half-time.  1 tablespoon grenadine, 2 tablespoons lime juice into a highball packed with ice, topped with soda water, a lime wheel and a maraschino cherry. Sweet hydration. Make it “adult” with a jigger of vodka.

 The male host was made very sorry for opening early.

On a recent trip to a suburban supermarket I was astonished to see the variety of Flavored Adult Malt Beverages on the market today.  A bit of internet research and I learned that there are literally hundreds of these things on the market. I want to taste them all.

Some malt beverage (aka alcopop, clear beer, malternative) background: these drinks were pioneered in the mid ’80s by the Gallo family with the introduction of Bartles and Jaymes wine coolers (now called “flavored malt cooler” as they in fact contain no wine).

In the early ’90s lemonade-flavored varieties debuted in Australia and the UK and became massively popular youth culture drinks. These non-US varieties contained spirits (namely, vodka) in addition to the malt beverage and flavored sugar water, and were served in tiny bottles and as I remember from one ravey-gravy night in London, got you fucked up. At the same time in the US, Zima hit the market with it’s clear, spirit-free, less lemonadey citrus drink and incurred much ridicule (at least amongst my group of friends, Dave Letterman and the Simpsons). I can attest that while I was glad to drink Hooch in the UK, I wouldn’t have touched Zima with a 10 foot pole. Why? The clear trend was really stupid and had terrible branding. Zima had a faddish burst of popularity and them petered out.

In 2000 both Mike’s Hard Lemonade and Smirnoff Ice were introduced to the US market. I am happy to drink either on a sweaty summer evening and I’m not ashamed to admit it. This new crop was embraced by the drinking public and resulted in the flavored malt beverage explosion that led to this post.

For our inaugural flavored malt beverage tasting, I had wanted to obtain a variety of watermelon flavored drinks, but poor planning left me with only Smirnoff Ice beverages to choose from, and no watermelon at that.  So rather than a horizontal tasting, we had a vertical tasting of this boozy summertime treat. We paired with excellent fried chicken plates from Mama’s Food Shop, and the crunchy fat was a nice sponge for all the sweet carbonation.

We each had about 3 ounces of every flavor and by the fourth  flavor all complained of headaches, brought on more by the sugar than the alcohol. This being the first tasting, we didn’t have a strict process for tasting or structure for comparison, but did make the following observations:

• Smirnoff Ice Triple Black - The alleged difference between this and the original is its “triple filtering”. When allowed to warm to room temperature another difference is discerned, which is the distinct flavor of cinnamon. Cold, it tastes like adult Fresca, as the original does. Redolent of Airheads.
• Green Apple Bite - Straight up Jolly Rancher, with a touch of Cel-Ray.
• Raspberry Burst - Sort of tastes like actual fruit was used in the process of making this beverage. 
• Arctic Berry Blast - One taster thought that this tasted “like feet mixed with dead bubblegum”.
• Wild Grape - Tastes like fake grape.
• Pomegranate Fusion - nothing pomegranate about it. Also, has the following inscrutable and questionably grammatical tagline: “Wherever pomegranate chills, cool and luscious is soon to follow.” I was in the room with the pomegranate and cool and luscious were nowhere to be found.

The overall winner was the Green Apple. Also consumable was the Triple Black, and there was consensus that the raspberry could be tasty if cut with seltzer water.

I’ll be more proactive about collecting different brands as I see them from here on out, and can’t wait to have a watermelon tasting!

To utilize my homemade maraschino cherries (and I may sound elitist, but I’m going to pronounce it “maraskeeno”, as it should be said, from here on out), I had a delightful cocktail party featuring Manhattans here at Old Stove HQ last night.

The Manhattan is a solid cocktail, balanced, masculine without being rough, complex and sweet without being overwhelming.  Best enjoyed slowly, it tastes as nice on the last sip as it does on the first.

I recommend a drier version than the classic 2:1 ratio, mixing a 3:1 ratio of bourbon to sweet vermouth with 3 dashes of bitters over cracked ice.  I laced the pitcher with a little of the maraschino cherry juice, strained it into the cut crystal, then dropped my ruby beauties in the bottom as a garnish. 

The drinks were refreshing and the cherries eaten at the end were swoony, tasting of flowers and spice.

I picked up a pint of sour cherries at the market today and stopped in at Astor to buy a bottle of maraschino liquor in order to execute Melissa Clark’s recipe for homemade maraschino cherries.  It was quick and easy, and when the cherries are properly steeped in the fragrant Italian booze, we’re going to have Manhattan Night at the restaurant, hopefully in coincidence with a viewing of the new print of Manhattan at the Film Forum.

With leftovers of the “distinctively funky” maraschino liquor, I’ll be making the “Seventh Heaven” from the always helpful Cocktail Chronicles.

Seventh Heaven

• 1 3/4 ounce gin
• 1/4 ounce fresh grapefruit juice
• 1/2 ounce maraschino liqueur
• fresh mint sprig

Shake with cracked ice and strain through a fine-mesh strainer into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a mint leaf.

The question of time as a factor in the value of a food product was reflected upon in two different ways today.

In class we finished making puff pastry and used it to make more fruit tarts.  I made one with pistachio frangipane and apricots:

Puff Pastry involves a couple of different stages.  First you create the sticky flour and water dough called détrempe.  Then you pound out some butter to soften it, and shape it into a brick; this is called beurrage.  You evenly wrap the beurrage in the détrempe and roll the lot out into a wide sheet that consists of a thin layer of butter between two layers of dough.  You fold it up and roll it repeatedly, resting between roll-and-folds.  Eventually you have a hundred layers and presto you can use it for turnovers, beef wellington, cheezy poof sticks, whatever.

OR. You buy frozen puff pastry, because it has a better consistency than what you can put out, because it is cheaper when you factor the labor that goes into all that rolling, and because in my opinion this is an area of cooking where the hands-on love doesn’t actually add anything.

After class a few of us took advantage of the cool, overcast afternoon and shorter lines, and had lunch at the Shake Shack.  The Shackburger is very tasty indeed, made with great meat and griddled with a nicely salted crust.  The special sauce is well balanced.  And I don’t mind waiting in line.   

But at the end of the day it isn’t the best burger in the city.  The real charm of the Shake Shack is that it facilitates a civilized pint of beer in a lovely and lively park, rarely a legal option.   It is the atmosphere that makes the 45 minute investment in your burger worth it.  The mix of office drones, mommies, tourists, hotties, hobos and that one crazy Tarzan-looking dude stalking around shirtless looking like he’s just committed a felony makes Madison Park one of my favorite people watching locales in Manhattan, and being able to wash it down with Brooklyn Lager is the real treat.

When my train of thought came to a complete seizure due to the odor of bacterial decay on the corner of 14th and Union Square East, I knew summer in the city had arrived. 

I celebrated the annual Blessing of the Air Conditoner (or “airca” as my Russo-Honduran classmate calls it) last night by inviting cook crush over to Old Stove HQ for lambrusco and salami.  The report:  cook crush is still a giddifying dreamboat, “Zucchi” Lambrusco di Sorbara has a raspberry aroma and a nice dryness, and Fra’ Mani Handcrafted Salumi are really tasty.  Created by former Chez Panisse chef Paul Bertolli, Fra’ Mani uses happy pigs to make great meats, available at Whole Foods and online.  In particular the salty, peppery Toscana was a hit when washed down with the fizzy red wine.  I could not be happier about the building momentum behind artisanal sausage-making.