Dave invented a cocktail. I remain not much of a drinker, but I like green drinks, so he concocted this one for me. Hooray! It tastes like being alive, and like chill breezes on perfect warm days, and like the first day of spring when it’s warm enough to spread your toes in the grass.

(Scotty: “What is it?”
Data: “It is… green, sir.”)

Actually, what it is is delicious!

The Fort Greene
4 gin (Dave happened to use Tanqueray, but you surely know gins better than I do)
4 grapefruit juice
4 cucumber juice
2 simple syrup
1 lemon juice

This recipe is written in proportions, not quantities.

To make cucumber juice you just blend some cucumbers, strain through a fine strainer, then [optionally] strain through coffee filters. Squeeze your citrus fruits to get at their juices, as one does. Simple syrup is equal parts water and sugar, boiled until the sugar is fully dissolved, then allowed to cool. That’s about all there is to it, really. Mix, serve over ice, enjoy, think happy springtime thoughts my way!

The tea shelf in my pantry is absurd. Dozens of teas from everywhere I go, stacked and falling over next to nearly as many varieties of honey on the other end of the shelf. I’ve been a bit obsessed with Lupicia teas for the past few years, ever since I discovered that they make teas that taste like roasted chestnuts and salty sakura mochi and sweet beans. But I’ve never found a commercial chai that tastes as good as the one I’m posting here now. Just a bit of toasting and pounding, and you have enough chai to last months, perfect rich spices to ease you into your day each morning.

In other news, I finally put together a main site to gather up all my projects and portfolios. I’ve also started an etsy shop, where I’m selling my lampworked glass beads and jewelry.

My bees are doing well. It’s been a rough summer for them, and I had to replace the queen once, but the hive is now going strong. I’m pretty confident that they have good odds heading into winter, at least, and still have hope that they’ll manage to make some honey for me if we get a good nectar run this fall.

I finally got stung for the first time by my hive. Turned out that it’s much less of a big deal than it was back when I was a kid! And I totally deserved it – I was doing a hive inspection alone, and I squished more bees than usual when stacking the supers back up at the end. But that’s okay – I’ll still gladly go in wearing shorts and tanktops and a loose veil, and pet fuzzly walls of bees in the hive. Me and the ladies, we get along just fine.

Archives
2008: Black and White Cookies
2007: Dolmas (stuffed grape leaves)


Toasted Hazelnut Chai
37g black tea leaves
50g toasted hazelnuts
12g rose petals
20g cinnamon sticks
15g cardamom pods
A couple vanilla beans (optional)

A mortar and pestle honestly is the best and easiest tool for the job, this time.

I toast hazelnuts on a baking sheet in the oven, 315 F for about ten minutes (or until they smell good to you). Let them cool for a couple minutes, then coarsely crush them and mix them in with the tea.

My rose petals come in the form of curled up rosebuds, so I crush them just a bit until the petals separate out and break up enough to be mixed in with the rest.

Crush the cinnamon sticks into shards small enough to fit into your tea strainer. (It ended up being about 5ish 3″ cinnamon sticks, for me.) Mix in with the rest.

When you crush the cardamom pods, get in there with your fingers and rub the seeds out of the pods – but pour the pods along with the seeds into the mix with the rest.

If you’re using vanilla beans, just snip them into little pieces with a pair of scissors and mix those in.

That’s it. Sniff it to see if you’re happy, and adjust the proportions to taste. Store in a sealed container. Use like you would any other fantastically delicious chai.

The last recipe in Niloufer Ichaporia King’s new Parsi cookbook, My Bombay Kitchen, this light dessert drink is supposed to be served on March 21st, the Parsi New Year. It is a creamy, slipperycrunchity, really tasty delight, and certainly delicious enough to have year round, or perhaps on our own New Year’s Eve tomorrow night.

It’s a cinch to throw together. Soak some basil seeds in water (just a teaspoon or so will be enough for several people, since they swell up quite a lot). Once they’ve had a chance to swell, spoon some into each glass. Add whole milk up to about an inch from the top of the cup, then pour in some saffron or rose syrup, and top it with a bit of vanilla ice cream.

You can buy basil seeds and rose syrup at Kalustyan’s (Lexington Ave at E. 28th St. in Manhattan), or order them online.

If you prefer to use saffron syrup, as I did, it’s simple to make your own at home. Just steep a pinch of saffron in some hot water, then simmer it in a pot with equal parts saffron water and sugar until it thickens into a simple syrup. Strain out and discard the saffron, and chill the syrup, which will keep indefinitely in the fridge.

Saffron syrup is my new favorite condiment, after making it for this shake. I’ve been pouring it over bowls of ice cream, and at some point I want to soak it into my homemade nutless baklava.

In honor of the new year, I’m going to take an idea from a few of my favorite fellow food bloggers, and try to make a habit of telling you what was going on in my kitchen each year around the time I make each post. To start it off:

Around this time last year, we were making: Cardamom Meyer Lemon Créme Brûlée Bubbles, Scallop Chickpea Tagine

This recipe was inspired by The Orphan’s Tales: In the Cities of Coin and Spice by Catherynne M. Valente. It is the second book of the now-complete series (the first was The Orphan’s Tales: In the Night Garden), and it was just published a few weeks ago. It is brilliant and beautiful, rich and deep, powerful, and important for you to read.

(Obligatory disclaimer: Cat is a friend of mine. But these books are so wondrous that I would recommend them even if I didn’t know her at all.)

The stories in these books are told by a girl with ink-stained, story-stained eyes, to a young son of the Sultan who escapes the watch of his older sister to come out into the garden and hear them. The stories are nested each within each like dolls, like the tales from Arabian Nights, all twining together to make a larger epic. They are not fairy tales, exactly, because they have plots and characters with lives of their own, men and women and beasts who are real people stalking the pages of these books.

In Cities of Coin and Spice, a young Djinn, one of the queens of the Djinn army surrounding a dying city where only the artists and performers remain, enters the city alone to search for a small object. She is caught up in the tales of its inhabitants, and just before the army begins to crash up against the gate, she thinks:

“I think I might have stayed there, I might have walked through the Carnival with a child’s hand in mine, eaten apples doused in cardamom wine and told her how once, when I was very young, I had seen the old Queen dancing in her lonely hall, her embers red as bleeding, and I thought she was so beautiful, then. I thought she must be so happy. I might have done those things.”

When I came across that, it occurred to me that I happened to have home-brewed cardamom wine in abundance already.

You see, this past April, I began brewing a batch of Herbal Masala mead (so named because the spicing was based on that of Kalustyan’s Herbal Masala Chai) – honey wine with cardamom, vanilla, cinnamon, and ginger. Months later, when we racked and bottled it, we found that the cardamom was the strongest note, the flavor that with each sip blew each of us away.

This recipe is inspired by the dreams of a queen of the Djinn seduced by a dying city. She might have walked through the Carnival eating these apples, poached in cardamom honey wine and filled with cardamom whipped cream. She might have.

But she didn’t.

I did, though. And you can.

This is my first gift to the newborn book. And given the overflowing inspiration of it, I am sure this will not be my last.

Apples Doused in Cardamom Wine
Apples
Cardamom honey wine (recipe below)
Heavy cream
Ground cardamom
Sugar

Peel the apples and core them from the bottom with a melon baller. Put them in a saucepan with enough cardamom honey wine to cover. It helps to add clean glass paperweights to bring the level of the wine up if necessary, and you may also want to weight the apples down with the lid of a smaller pot to keep them from floating.

Simmer until they are soft, which you can test with a knife.

When they are done, remove them with a slotted spoon, then raise the heat and boil the wine until it becomes a syrup.

While that’s going on, make the cardamom whipped cream by beating heavy cream with ground cardamom to taste. You probably don’t want to add any sugar here, since the other elements of this dish are so sweet already.

Serve the poaches apples with the cardamom honey wine syrup and cardamom whipped cream. You can sprinkle sugar atop the apples and brulee it with a kitchen torch for extra beauty and tasty crunch.

Cardamom Honey Wine, a/k/a Herbal Masala Mead
15 lbs roman olive honey
1.5 lbs fresh ginger, peeled, and cut into chunks
2 oz cinnamon sticks
20ish vanilla beans, split in half the long way
3/4 oz green cardamom pods, lightly crushed
Water
A packet of champagne yeast

Put all ingredients except for the water and yeast in a large pot over medium-low heat and simmer gently, stirring, for about 30 minutes, or until the honey is liquid like water. You can skim the foam off, but you don’t have to if you’d rather not. It has impurities, but it also has flavor.

Let it cool until it is about blood temperature, or slightly above.

Start your yeast in a cup with a bit of warm water, and leave it be until it gets foamy.

Sterilize a 5-6 gallon glass carboy.

Remove the ginger from the honey and discard, but leave the rest of the spices in there.

Add some water to the carboy, then some honey, then some water, and keep going until you have about 5 gallons of liquid in there altogether. Stir in the yeast. Put on a vacuum lock.

Cover the carboy (sunlight would wreck this project) and forget about it for 3-6 months. I wrapped mine in a blanket and stuck it in the corner of my living room, nestled between bookshelves. You should be able to hear it bubbling a bit and smell alcohol when you check on it the next day.

Rack the mead (remove the mead with a plastic tube, leaving the gunk on the bottom behind) into bottles. (We racked most of ours into half-gallon mason jars.) If you want, you can do a secondary ferment to carbonate it – I did this quite by accident with some of my sealed mason jars, actually.

The longer you let it age, the smoother and tastier it will be.

Many of you are probably familiar with the horchata you can buy at Burritoville, a pale, dairy imitation of the real thing made with fat-free milk, rice powder, cinnamon, and sugar. It’s potable, but doesn’t even begin to compare with horchata made with actual rice and almonds, cinnamon and vanilla, with no milk in sight.

Horchata is a sweet, creamy beverage that I love to drink when eating spicy foods. When Dave first tried it at a nearby Oaxacan restaurant a few weeks ago, he went on a horchata-making binge. And y’know what? I am totally okay with this!

In other news, I’m extending the deadline for Yes, Of Course You Can Pair Garlic With That! a week until next Monday, October 15, 2007 – a lot of people wrote in and said that they’d just run out of time, and honestly, I’m too busy to post the round-up this week, anyway.

Please take advantage of this extra week to get me some more wonderfully creative garlic pairing recipes!

Horchata
(adapted from Josh Friedland’s recipe, which was adapted from Gale Gand)
1 C basmati rice
2 C blanched, peeled almonds
4″ piece of cinnamon
5 C water
3/8 C sugar
2 vanilla beans

Grind the rice into a fine powder using a coffee grinder. Place the ground rice, almond, and cinnamon into a large bowl with 3 1/2 C water. Cut the vanilla beans in half the long way, scrape the seeds into the bowl, and then throw the beans in after them. Cover and leave overnight.

The next day, add the sugar and 1 1/2 C water. Puree everything in your blender, then strain. The best tool we’ve found for straining is a Thai tea sock, which is basically a fine cotton mesh on a metal ring with a handle. Serve chilled.

Dave and I are members of the Park Slope Food Co-op, where we each do a two and a half hour work shift once every four weeks in exchange for the right to shop. Sounds crazy, maybe, but I can walk three blocks from my apartment and find fresh turmeric root, fresh galangal, curry leaves, organic everything, and incredibly inexpensive Scharffenberger chocolate. That’s worth a few hours a month of physical labor.

A few months back, we were stocking produce when Dave decided he had to buy a big sack of Stark Crimson pears. The problem with working with produce is that at the end of your shift, you know exactly what is freshest and ripest and best in the store, and you have the time to shop then and there. Those pears came home with us.

Dave rinsed them, chopped them up into approximately 1″ chunks, and threw them into a big mason jar with some cinnamon sticks and vanilla beans. He added just enough vodka to cover the contents, then closed the jar and left it in the pantry for a month or so, taking it out and shaking it occasionally. Once it tasted strong enough, he strained out the pears and spices, and added sugar syrup to sweeten the liquor.

We like to leave it in the freezer for a while before serving, as you would limoncello, so that it has a chance to thicken and chill. It is one of the best things to ever emerge from our kitchen. Sweet, rich, intensely flavored – neither of us tend to enjoy alcohol, but we can’t stop sipping this liquor, and he has another batch in progress already.

Also, did I mention that I have a new camera? The Canon 30D. It’s my first digital SLR (oh, let’s be honest – it’s my first SLR, period). These are among the first photos I took with it when it arrived last night. The photo of the liquor was taken with the Canon 100mm/f2.8 Macro lens, and the photo of Dave protesting (yawning, he says) was taken with the Canon 50mm/f1.4 lens.

They’re already better than anything I could do with my old Canon PowerShot S400 (what I’ve been using up to this point), and I still haven’t really figured out how to use this thing yet.

I love the new camera set-up. I want a better tripod and more lenses already.

I’m having a hell of a lot of fun.

Sugar High Friday #19: Ginger It Up! posed a real challenge for me. You see, I love gingery sweets. I make them all the time. I’ve posted about one here already, my ginger rum churros with milk chocolate dipping sauce. I use ginger in my apple pies, my ice creams, everything. And I hate using old recipes for food blog events.

I almost made ginger mousse, but time is hard to come by lately, and this isn’t really the month for extensive experimentation. I’ve never made a non-chocolate mousse before, and it may take several attempts to get it right. But I have brewed soda before, and there are few things easier to put together than homemade ice cream.

This is an easy treat to throw together; it requires mostly pre-planning and patience. I went over my old notes from when I made habanero ginger ale a few years back, and adapted it into lemongrass saffron soda. (It was going to be rhubarb soda, but for the unavailability of rhubarb in the area on Monday. It almost ended up as lemongrass apricot soda or lemongrass currant soda, but saffron really turned out to put the lemongrass in its place with a dignified firmness that nothing else was able to provide.)

The important thing to remember when making ginger ice cream is that you have to use fresh ginger, not candied ginger. The one time I used candied ginger in an ice cream, it had a jellied texture and tasted like canned tuna fish. But fresh ginger, oh, that works just beautifully.

Lemongrass, saffron, ginger, coldly fizzing together! It is hard for me to be patient, but it is so worth it in the end.

Lemongrass Saffron Soda
5 half-liter bottles of water (2 1/2 liters total)
2 C granulated sugar
12 stalks lemongrass
2 tsp cream of tartar
3 large pinches saffron (threads)
1/2 packet champagne yeast

Remove the roots and grassy bits from the lemongrass, leaving only the white and pale green portion – should be the bottom 6″ or so of each stalk. Cut these into 2″ pieces and bruise with a mallet or rolling pin.

Close each bottle immediately after emptying the water into the pot, and keep the bottles safe and clean. You will need them again soon enough.

Bring the water, lemongrass, and sugar to a boil, then simmer until quite lemony. Remove the lemongrass with a slotted spoon. Stir in the saffron and cream of tartar, and simmer until the tastes blend together. The saffron should deepen the flavor, balance out the lemoniness, and make everything taste less sweet and cloying. If you feel like you’ve been simmering for too long without the flavors really coming together, just add more saffron and simmer until it works for you.

Set up another pot of boiling water, and use it to sterilize a ladle, a mug, a spoon, and a funnel.

Let the soda cool to around 100°. Lining the funnel with a coffee filter, filter and pour about 1/2 C of soda into the sterilized mug. Stir in the champagne yeast with the sterilized spoon, and set it aside.

In the meantime, empty the pot you used to sterilize your equipment, and filter the remaining soda into it using coffee filters and your funnel. This should take enough time to let your yeast get its start in that mug. Once all the soda has been filtered, pour the yeasty soda from the mug into the rest of the soda and stir until it is evenly distributed.

Fill the empty bottles (you did keep them nice and clean, right?) with the soda. Screw the caps on very tightly – I use teflon tape (the sort usually used by plumbers) to improve the seal. The better the seal, the more carbonization and less alcohol you will end up with. I’m not particularly good at this step, so my sodas always end up mildly alcoholic.

Remove the labels from the bottles, and re-label them yourself with the date and contents. Place them in a cool, dark place for about a week, or until they start to really scare you. Check in on them every day or two in order to gauge your fear quotient.

I use plastic bottles when making soda because if they explode, at least there won’t be glass shards all over the place. The pressure can build up enormously as the soda carbonates, so explosion is a very real concern. Don’t place these in the cabinet where you keep your fancy linens. Do check in on them at least every other day.

At first, you will be able to squeeze the plastic bottles easily. After a day or two, you may notice the bottles becoming firmer to the touch. Soon you won’t be able to squeeze them in at all. Eventually, the shape of the plastic will deform as the pressure forces it to bulge outwards. Once a formerly bloopety plastic bottle becomes smooth, that’s when I get scared.

Once the bottles begin to scare you, put them in the fridge. The cold will slow the fermentation process almost to a halt, and you will be safe. At this point, your soda is ready to drink.

Just be careful when opening the bottles.

Ginger Ice Cream
About a 6″ knob of ginger
2 C cream
1 C milk
2 vanilla beans
1/2 C sugar

Scrape the vanilla beans into the cream. Peel the ginger and chop roughly. Bring the cream, ginger, and vanilla beans just to a boil, stirring all the whole, then remove from heat, cover, and let steep for at least 15 minutes. Strain into a bowl. Whisk in milk and sugar. Cover with plastic wrap, making sure the plastic is touching the surface of the liquid so that a skin doesn’t form, and place it in the fridge to cool. Follow the instructions on your ice cream machine for the next step.

Sugar High Friday, SHF

“I’m not stupid, you know.”

Now Westley knew that she meant to say “not a single syllable of it,” because a syllabub was something you ate, with cream and wine mixed in together to form the base. But he also knew an apology when he heard one. So he held her very close, and shut his loving eyes, and only whispered, “I knew it was false, believe me, every single syllabub.”

– S. Morgenstern, The Princess Bride (from the good parts version, edited by William Goldman)

The theme for Sugar High Friday #17 is dairy, and to satisfy the Morgenstern fans out there, I’m using it as an excuse to post my recipe for a lime syllabub. Somewhere between a dessert and a drink, this syllabub separates into two layers when chilled which mix together in your mouth if you slurp them up properly, and it tastes like an alcoholic key lime pie.

Lime Syllabub
1/2 C sherry
3 tbsp brandy
Juice and zest from 2 limes
1/2 C sugar
1 C heavy cream
Additional lime zest for garnish

Mix the sherry, sugar, lime juice, lime zest, and 1 tbsp brandy in a bowl and let steep for about an hour. Begin to beat the mixture, gradually adding the cream as you go. When the mixture thickens and begins to form soft peaks, beat in the remaining 2 tbsp brandy. Pour into glasses and chill. Garnish with additional lime zest.

In case you’re curious, I used Bristol Cream sherry and brandy from an ancient bottle that claims to be Armenian brandy imported from the U.S.S.R.

“This is the Deep South dessert that is supposed to start Southern beaux and belles on their drunken downfall, since it is so mild that children are allowed to have it, thus acquiring a taste for the flavor of all liquors. The idea is silly, and the syllabub is delicious. The moral damage is negligible.”

– Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Cross Creek Cookery (as quoted in Classic Home Desserts by Richard Sax)

Sugar High Friday, SHF

I must confess: I’m off to a bad start. For my first post in this beautiful new blog that Lisa and Dave worked hard to create for me, I am showing off a recipe that I neither invented nor cooked alone. My partner, Dave, adapted Martha Stewart’s marshmallow recipe into something suitable to bring to the Hot Foods party we attended earlier this month. I helped make the marshmallows, named them, and insisted that we make hot chocolate to go along with them. Still, they were absolutely delicious, and it would be a shame not to share them with the world.

I love combinations of spicy and sweet, and am thrilled by the resurgence of spicy chocolates on the market, such as Jacques Torres’s Wicked Hot Chocolate and Dagoba’s Xocolatl. Gothamist recently posted a recipe for an Aztec Elixir martini. The City Bakery has a few levels of spicy hot chocolate at its Hot Chocolate Festival every year, and you can find spicy hot chocolate mixes from a number of companies in any gourmet food store. But none of them come close to making a plain, rich, dark hot chocolate and throwing in a few homemade aztec marshmallows. The creamy spiciness of the melting marshmallows in my hot chocolate did more for me than any storebought brand.

Aztec Marshmallows

2 1/2 tbsp unflavored gelatin
1 1/2 C granulated sugar
1 C light corn syrup
1/4 tsp salt
4 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp cinnamon extract
1 tsp hot chili powder
1 longish squirt of red food coloring
Confectioners’ sugar, for dusting

Combine the gelatin and 1/2 C cold water in the bowl of an electric mixer with a whisk attachment. Let stand 30 minutes. In a separate small bowl, combine the vanilla extract, cinnamon extract, chili powder, and red food coloring and mix until vaguely homogenous.

In the meantime, combine the granulated sugar, corn syrup, salt, and 1/2 C water in a small heavy saucepan. Place the saucepan place over low heat and stir until sugar has dissolved. Once the sugar has dissolved, raise the heat to high and clip on a candy thermometer. Cook the syrup without stirring until it reaches 241° (firm-ball stage). Immediately remove pan from heat.

With your mixer on low speed, slowly pour the syrup into the softened gelatin. Increase the speed to high and beat until the mixture is very thick and white and has almost tripled in volume, which ought to take about 15 minutes. Add the blend of extracts/chili/food coloring and beat to incorporate.

Generously dust an 8-by-12-inch glass baking pan with confectioners’ sugar. You want a nice coating of sugar on the bottom of the pan. Don’t worry too much about the sides – it’s hard to get the sugar to stick to the sides, and it won’t matter if you can’t manage to coat them. Pour the marshmallow mixture into pan. Dust the top with another generous layer of confectioners’ sugar. Let stand overnight (or as long as you can bear to wait – a few hours is enough if you are impatient or in a rush), uncovered, to dry out. Cut the marshmallow sheet off the sides of the pan and turn it out onto a board. Cut marshmallow sheet into 1″ strips, and then cut the strips into 1″ squares. Dust with more confectioners’ sugar as you go. Make sure that your marshmallows are coated with confectioner’s sugar in the end, as this is the only way to rescue them from being tacky.

Hot Chocolate

2 oz. semisweet chocolate
A small mug’s worth of 2% milk

Melt the chocolate into the milk on the stove.