Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Odds and Ends

No one ever seems to blog much during Christmas week, and I’m no exception. Just wanted to drop a quick post linking out to a couple of other things I’ve been working on.

The biggest news is that I’m contributing to Serious Eats. I’m writing a weekly column for the next several weeks on basic cocktail techniques. Right now, I’m in the middle of a three-part series on party planning. Parts 1 and 2 are up, along with a recipe for a batched Negroni. Part 3 should be up next week. I still can’t believe people pay me to write about what I love.

I also have a recipe that’s part of a crowded field at Food52, competing for best Hot Toddy recipe. My entry, the Rum Tum Toddy, features baked apple and Smith & Cross rum. I love the drink and hope it has a chance, but we’ll see. Here’s a video of me flaming an orange twist to go atop the toddy. I sloppily managed to drop the twist pith side up, which irritates me, but I didn’t get a smudge of match soot on the peel, which would have vexed me even more. (Yes, that’s a box of wine behind me. Sigh.)

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Jen on the radio

Two Jens, in fact! A couple of Wednesdays ago, Jen Huntley-Corbin and Jen Hess got to talking on the radio about food, blogging, and Jen’s inspirations in starting Last Night’s Dinner. Check it out here.

Since I was in the studio, Jen H-C prevailed on me to make a couple of comments too, but I tried to keep from stealing the focus from the Jen Party. She asked first about my use of vodka in making pie crusts, and then later, we talked briefly about pairing cocktails with food.

Oh, and I babbled pretty incoherently when Jen H-C asked me about the tip about the vodka in the pie crust. Jen (Hess, that is) had pointed me to a post on Smitten Kitchen about it way back when, and that’s where the idea originated. Deb explains it much, much better than I did on the radio, so if the idea intrigues you, go read Deb’s post for a better explanation.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Jen’s Dish, audio

I now have the full audio from my appearance on the Jen’s Dish radio program.

Download it here.

Or listen to it, embedded, here:

Download audio file (JensDish_3_11_2009.mp3)

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Blogroll + Google Reader + WordPress = Easy!

As I was redesigning this site, I wanted to make the blogroll a priority. It had been dramatically out of date for months. One thing I wanted to do was link it to my Google Reader account, so that whenever I add a feed to the Booze section of my account, that feed will automatically appear in my blogroll. Same thing for deleting feeds. It’s annoying to have to manage your subscriptions in two places–in your feed reader and in your Links panel–and it makes it difficult to keep your blogroll up to date.

I found out linking my blogroll to my Reader account was actually pretty easy to do, even though Reader doesn’t really hype this feature much. If you use WP and Google Reader and you have your feeds sorted by folders or tags, here’s what you do:

1. Log in to your Reader account.
2. In the top-right corner, choose Settings.
3. Choose Folders and Tags.
4. Choose a folder and set it to Public. (All of my cocktail and spirits feeds are sorted into a Booze folder, for example. I chose that and made it Public.)
5. Once it’s public, you should have an option that says Add a Blogroll to My Site. Click that.
6. You should see a pop-up window with your new blogroll. For my site, I deleted the default title that Google provided and I changed the color scheme to None, so that I could control the title in WP and let my own custom CSS styles govern the presentation.
7. Copy the code from the box.
8. Switch to your WP admin panel, go to Design, and choose Widgets.
9. Create a new Text widget and paste the code into the widget box. Title your Text widget with whatever you want–in my case, Bartenders and Cocktail Nerds. Save the new widget and then click Save Changes.
10. Et voila.

Because the Google code uses JavaScript to load your blogroll, it will take a couple of seconds for it to appear onscreen whenever you view or refresh your blog, so be warned. But the advantages to this method make that “problem” pretty trivial. If I change anything in Reader, it’s automatically updated in my blogroll–additions, deletions, whatever–just seconds after I make the change.

Now, what this obviously means is, the list to the right of this post is the list of everyone I’m currently following in Reader. If you’re not there, it’s probably because of one of three things:

• You haven’t updated in a few months and I’m assuming your blog is dead
• I’ve never heard of you.
• I’ve been too lazy to add you to my Reader account.

If you’re a cocktail or spirits blogger, you want on this blogroll, and you’ve updated since, oh, October or so, drop me a comment here and I’ll try to add you.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Happy New Year!

As promised/threatened, I made the Ford Cocktail that Ted “Dr. Cocktail” Haigh recommended on NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday. Doc said to Liane Hansen that this is a drink he wants to revive in 2009 and rightfully so. It’s delicious. He describes it as lovely and beautifully balanced, and once again, the doctor’s prescription is right on the money. I’m happy to do my part.

Although the only source Haigh mentions is “an 1895 book,” I was able to uncover it with my fancy Google fu–George J. Kappeler’s Modern American Drinks.

Modern American Drinks How to Mix and Serve All Kinds of Cups and Drinks By George J. Kappeler

Haigh modernized the measurements for Hansen as follows:

Ford Cocktail

• 1 oz. gin
• 1 oz. dry vermouth
• 3 dashes Benedictine
• 3 dashes orange bitters
• Orange twist, for garnish

Technique: Stir over cracked ice in a mixing glass. Strain into chilled cocktail glass. Add garnish.

Notes: Doc didn’t actually mention the garnish to Hansen, but since it’s in Kappeler’s, I’ve added it. You can see from Jen’s photo that I used lemon. You might recall that Jen’s allergic to orange. Finally, to address the perennial question–how much is 3 dashes of Benedictine?–I dashed the orange bitters first into my measuring cup and noted the level. I then carefully measured a roughly equal amount of Benedictine.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

The Flowing Bowl

You might have noticed from my previous post that The Only William’s book The Flowing Bowl is available on Google Book Search. Well, guess what?

It’s available here, too, thanks to a nifty new feature from Google Books:

Edited to add: Hrrm. It’s showing up only sporadically.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

MxMo in the Crescent City

For this month’s Mixology Monday, which has a New Orleans theme, I’m going with a couple of drinks, both inspired by panels that I attended at Tales of the Cocktail.

The first drink is the Sloppy Joe’s Mojito, inspired obliquely by the To Have and Have Another panel, on the drinking life of Ernest Hemingway. Whether Hemingway actually drank Mojitos appears to be in some dispute. The eminent Eric Felten argues persuasively that he probably did not, but it is clear that old Papa frequented the Havana bar that originated this version of the classic rum drink. He even apparently persuaded the proprietor of a Key West saloon to rip off the Havana original’s name. So, who knows?

Charles Baker, writing in The Gentleman’s Companion, describes the drink thus:

Put several lumps of ice into a 16 oz collins glass, toss in 1 tsp sugar or gomme, insinuate a spiral green lime peel about the ice, turn in 1-1/2 jiggers of Bacardi; white, or Gold Seal, and the strained juice of 1 small green lime–not a lemon. Stir once, fill with really good club soda and garnish with a bunch of fresh mint.

What I love about this variant is that a) it’s not too sweet, and b) it’s not too minty. I don’t feel like I’m chewing rum-spiked Doublemint gum.

The second drink comes straight from the Beefeater reception at Palace Cafe and also the Juniperlooza session. I had heard of this drink prior to Tales, but I had never tried it. It’s the Jasmine cocktail, devised by architect and booze writer Paul Harrington. It tastes remarkably like grapefruit juice even though it contains no grapefruit whatsoever. Honestly, this is one of those drinks that I often post where I’m sure the majority of my single-digit readership is thinking, “What! New to the Jasmine? He needs to crawl out from under Plymouth Rock or wherever the hell he lives and actually drink from time to time!”

No argument here, Skippy. I will say this, though. I’ve mixed a lot of cocktails at home, and I’ve had many others out. It’s a rare treat when something passes my lips and earns a spot in my regular drinks rotation. The Jasmine is right there. Jen and I both adore it. It tastes like an old-school cocktail, even though it’s not old enough to drive, let alone drink, and the ingredients are perfectly balanced. A new favorite.

Jasmine

• 1-1/2 oz gin
• 3/4 oz lemon juice
• 1/4 oz Cointreau
• 1/4 oz Campari
• lemon twist for garnish

Technique: Shake, strain, add garnish, sip, and smile.

Many thanks to Paulernum Clarke for hosting.

Photos by Jennifer Hess.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Very Good Taste

I’ve been remiss in linking out to this, but my friend Andrew Wheeler, an English food and drinks writer, is blogging, with his writing partner Jill, at Very Good Taste.

Among the foody posts at Very Good Taste are a couple of great boozy entries–one on the Sazerac and another on gin.

I feel like I should introduce Andrew and Jill to Jay Hepburn.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

Neo-prohibitionism

If you think Repeal Day, 74 years ago, was the end of the story, think again. Check out this great, exhaustive site by David J. Hanson, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York in Potsdam:

Alcohol: Problems and Solutions

The gist of the site is to explore, even-handedly, the effects of alcohol use and abuse on both individuals and society. Hanson explores just about every facet of this topic you can imagine–youth drinking, binge drinking, alcohol and health, drunk driving, you name it.

Among the resources, though, is a long page of prohibitionist personalities and organizations, both past and present. It’s remarkable how many groups are today actively seeking to discourage and restrict adult drinking behavior. Hanson writes:

Because Prohibition is now recognized by most people as having been a disastrous failure and currently lacks strong political support, modern prohibitionists are using a different approach to achieve their goal.

Their tactic is to establish cultural rather than strictly legal prohibition by making alcohol beverages less socially acceptable and marginalizing those who drink, no matter how moderately. Like the anti-alcohol activists who preceded them, the neo-prohibitionists of today (often called reduction-of-consumptionists, neo-drys, or neo-Victorians) don’t distinguish between the use and the abuse of alcohol. Both should be reduced.

I think this Repeal Day, we owe it to ourselves to take some time and read up on these groups and their tactics.

Unless otherwise noted, text and photos copyright © 2011 Michael Dietsch. All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without prior consent.

The green fairy of record

Happy Repeal Day! I’m going to have a couple or three posts today, but I’ll start briefly.

The Times, this morning, continues to trip merrily through the spirits world with a piece on absinthe. The piece, by Pete Wells, opens with a bit of surprise, at least to me–the first American-produced absinthe of the revival. St. George Spirits, from Alameda, has cleared all regulatory hurdles and should be on the market soon.

Wells then samples the absinthes of Lucid, Kubler, and St. George (which provided him an early sample) and judges the St. George the most complex of the lot. The piece, with quotes by Ted Breaux and St. George’s Lance Winters, is worth a read, although absinthe aficionados probably won’t find anything new.