Last winter, I tried making two punches using Batavia arrack, a funky high-proof liquor from Indonesia that’s similar to rum. I didn’t like either punch much, so I tried another this past weekend, United Service Punch, and it’s a keeper.

It appeared originally in Jerry Thomas’ Bar-Tenders Guide of 1862. I followed the adaptation by David Wondrich in Punch, which hews to the original almost exactly. (The recipe below is his, in my words.) Wondrich accurately describes the recipe as extremely conservative yet “fundamentally sound,” which reminded me that my previous pair of arrack-based punches were too alcoholly; I like more flavor diversity. The best punches blend the fundamental tastes of sweetness, sourness, bitterness, and, of course, booziness. This one delivers in all four departments with that precise number of ingredients, which I assume is the conservativeness of which Wondrich speaks: the bitter tea, sour lemon, sweet sugar and slap-bass arrack. Sure, it’s not complex but each element shines through and the end-product is a lip-smacker.

I actually screwed up this one by using the juice of only six lemons instead of eight. I though eight would make it too sour because, at the time, I’d been reading some weird, nerdy discourse about the size of Nineteenth Century lemons relative to the same today. With only six lemons (which yielded one cup of juice), the punch is too sweet. Not cloyingly so, but close; I’ve been thinning each Old Fashioned glassful I serve with about an ounce of water. Next time, I’ll follow the recipe below exactly or I’ll do that but also ratchet back the sugar by either 1/2 cup or 1/4 cup, under the reasoning that it’s easy to add more sugar to a finished punch, less so to remove it.

Also worth pointing out: mainly on account of the black tea and a lack of other colorful liquids, this punch isn’t visually arresting. If I needed to describe its color in terms of poetry or marketing, I’d go with “burnt orange” or “tan sierra.” In fact, the actual hue is closer to “rusty.” Like, if you saw a liquid this color emerge from your kitchen tap, you would let it run for a full minute before deciding whether to boil it. Also, this one gets a touch of sediment on top after it’s been bottled and racked for a day; a final strain through cheesecloth may be in order.

Last night, I made gougères using the 101 Cookbooks recipe on account of its simplicity and, well, beer. Delicious! I can’t pronounce “gougères” so I’m stealing a name and calling them Cheesy Poofs. They remind me of miniature popovers, only more savory and with creamier interiors. My mom has a Christmas pastry recipe that I believe uses a similar choux technique for the dough. You just wanna pop these things by the handful like they’re salted nuts. They’re a great cold-weather snack that would go great with drinks, or as an appetizer.

For a dinner party last New Year’s Eve, I made USS Richmond Punch and for a similar party this New Year’s Eve, I tried Light Guard Punch.

I’d made this one once before for a small get-together at my apartment, but I wanted to reprise it because it was delicious, easy, and turned out well, and I figured it’d go over well with a slightly larger group. I think it did. In short, where the USS Richmond is more or less a red punch, the Light Guard is a yellow punch: sweet but not sickly, crisp, very citrusy (actual citrus + a majority of alcohols with strong citrus notes = very citrusy), and of course golden-colored, on account of the many straw- or amber-hued liquids.

Although I used David Wondrich’s suggestions for assembly (and precise amount of sugar) from his book Punch, I’m pleased that this recipe can be replicated more or less exactly how it would have tasted when it was published in 1862 in Jerry Thomas’s The Bartender’s Guide: How To Mix Drinks. I halved the recipe for our group of nine; the original 20-person recipe by Thomas is listed below with my consolidation of Wondrich’s instructions.

Sauternes, a French dessert wine, commonly comes in 375 mL half-bottles but I assume the “1 bottle” in the original recipe refers, like every other liquid ingredient, to a full 750 mL bottle. Some versions of the recipe I’ve seen don’t assume that but I have little use for leftover Sauternes and it’s the most expensive ingredient; I selected the cheapest half-bottle I could find, a Château Grillon 2009, and it still set me back $22. In another section of Punch, Wondrich admits there’s no such thing as a cheap Sauternes even though that’s what you want for punch, where it’s used “chiefly as a softening agent, to tame the brandy without making the Punch watery.” Instead, he suggests looking “for a dessert wine from the Loire area, such as a Coteaux de Layon,” but my short, less-than-thorough search turned up nothing cheaper than the Château Grillon.

I selected an equally cheap pale sherry, Tio Soto Fino, which costs under $6 and comes in a classy, opaque gold-colored bottle. (Hey, it served me fine last year, and this is punch not a highfalutin, savor-worthy cocktail.)

For Cognac, I used a Pitaud VSOP. Normally I’d dumb it down to a VS, but this was leftover from the USS Richmond Punch I made last New Year’s.

And for the topper, I hate Champagne and I’d rather support the Italians than the French so I used the dry, citrusy Mia Prosecco Colli Trevigiani, a staff pick at Astor Wines & Spirits and often on sale there for about $7 a bottle.

I can tell you this: fruit at the bottom of a punchbowl is always a sodden treat, but I found that by merely waving around some of the supersaturated pineapple rings from the dregs of this recipe and the fumes alone made me more tipsy. As my brother has noted, “It wasn’t named punch due to its soft caress.”

Kale: it’s this season’s “it” vegetable, getting hippies taken to court and ranking among the top so-called superfoods, a word I dislike.

Superfood, you say? Well, last night I grabbed my shallow Le Creuset casserole and made this recipe, posted by Megnut from the 100-Mile Diet: Local Eating for Global Change cookbook and reprinted by the NYC Greenmarket Recipe Series, and I can tell you: this is kale’s kryptonite. Yes, it includes a pound and a quarter of kale, which shrinks considerably when simmered, like many leafy greens. But then the healthfulness gets asphyxiated by butter, cheese, heavy cream, “crunchies” (homemade bread crumbs), and bacon, which science has shown to be the polar opposite of kale.

It’s amazing. The cheese, cream and kale combine to be somewhat reminiscent in consistency and taste to that of equally bad-for-you spinach-artichoke dip, offered by everyone from Alton Brown and Martha Stewart to T.G.I. Friday’s. And the bacon and the breadcrumbs: oh, man. Often a gratin is merely a side dish but this one’s a meal. I’d like to make it again but I’ve noticed the avability and quality of greenmarket kale sliding as the price rises. I did have the foresight to buy two bunches on Saturday but I’ve reserved the spare for my other favorite kale recipe, ribollita.

Wondrich calls the whiskey sour “the fried-egg sandwich of American mixology: simply, dull, reliable in a pinch.” But last night, I wanted something similar so I took the deluxe route: the Dizzy Sour.

A basic Dizzy Sour, which apparently predates the trumpeter of the same name, takes a whiskey sour, adds a bit of Bénédictine, that mysterious monk-made herbal liqueur, and replaces 1/2 ounce of the whiskey with a dark rum float. I used Jay Hepburn’s version at Oh Gosh!, which adds egg white for texture and a creamy edge to the flavor, which, as he notes, deepens as the rum seeps through the drink.

I’m a rye guy so I used Old Overholt (and anything nicer would be lost and wasted among the other ingredients). For the float, I chose Goslings Black Seal Rum. A float is bartender code for “top a drink by pouring an ingredient over the back of your barspoon into the glass.” I call it “showin’ off” so I just pour it in slowly directly from the jigger.

This one’s sneaky and, at least without the garnishes, just sweet enough—really a perfect drink to bridge summer with autumn. It’s not an everyday tipple but a pleasant feet-up cocktail-hour beverage; and it’s a keeper in my book.

(photo via Stew*’s Flickr photostream)

I’ve been tearing through Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything and tonight I made blueberry cobbler from two pints of New Jersey blueberries I bought yesterday at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket.

I used less sugar than suggested, closer to 1/4 cup for tossing with the fruit. Bittman notes the key is to not overmix the dough, writing: “get it so that it’s just combined, barely holding together, then drop it onto the filling in mounds, leaving space for steam to escape from the cooking fruit.”

Towards the end of the 35-minute cooking time, the berry-juices just started to gently bubble out of the Corningware pie plate I used, so I slipped a baking sheet under the rack to catch any runoff.

Cobbler of course pairs perfectly with vanilla ice cream or whipped cream, but I’m trying to watch my cholesterol, so boo-hoo.

We really, really enjoyed this casserole from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. The way he starts with a core recipe then riffs with variants large and small is like hearing a great jazz piece unfold. It also makes transcribing the actual final recipe difficult, but here goes. This one started out as a plain ol’ wee-bean and regular-tomato vegetarian so-and-so and blossomed into this husky fellow:

I have misplaced or hidden my casserole dish, so instead I used my trusty 10" Lodge cast-iron skillet. Using water as a measure, I noticed it held two quarts of liquid. Alas, that didn’t translate to holding the bulk of ingredients meant for a two-quart baking dish and I ended up with a lot of extra stuff, most of which I froze for later use. Here’s an adjusted version of the recipe for me, for the next time I make this, which will be soon.

A few notes: before this recipe, I’d never knowingly eaten a tomatillo. Raw, they’re crisp and as green tasting as their color, almost rhubarb-like. Cooked, they mellow and taste more like an inoffensive pepper. I added more cheese because, well, I like cheese. For my shredded chicken, I boiled an obscenely large chicken breast from Costco that I’d frozen as a leftover from a Fourth of July picnic. I just threw it in a pot of boiling water and cooked it through, then put it on a cutting board and used two forks to shred it. As for the crowning touch of fresh marjoram or oregano, it may appear trivial but I’ve always found fresh spice essential when I’m making something especially greasy/cheesy/meaty/heavy or any combination thereof. It lends fresh levity— see also fresh basil leaves on lasagna, fresh parsley on meatloaf, etc.

Today New York magazine’s Grub Street NY blog posted a slideshow with recipes for 107 spring cocktails, all hailing from New York City bars and restaurants. They’re organized by color and many of them contain sub-recipes and/or rather obscure ingredients.

Spring began this weekend and the weather started warm, so in a mini-fit of Spring Cleaning, I opened the fridge and took stock of the leftover fruit (Kalamata olives from a dinner party) and soon-to-spoil vegetables (one oddly large carrot and a half-bag of near-flaccid celery). Then the weather turned cold and I thought of soup. So I combined the two and made ribollita, which is one of those filling peasant recipes that involves throwing beans, near-wilted stuff and stale bread into a pot and making a meal of it. I used Heidi Swanson’s recipe at 101 Cookbooks and it’s awesome. On her recommendation, I used two cans of cannellini beans and some ciabatta, which I picked up from the greenmarket and de-crusted. You know how everyone’s always going on about how soup tastes better reheated the next day? This fact is built into the recipe’s name: ribollita means “reboiled.” I like that.

Here’s a method for me to invent cocktails:

1. Read a description of a cocktail that sounds good, as happened with the Scottish Navy Sour offered at Momofuku Ssäm.
2. Consider visiting that establishment to sample the cocktail and/or see it being made, so I can try replicating it at home.
3. Decide I like the combination of ingredients enough that I’ll try making it myself, given only the cocktail’s description.

(Plus, I have off Presidents’ Day from work and I’m bored. And seeing that George Washington made his own hooch at home, the least I can do is tip my hat to tradition and holiday with a home-brewed cocktail.)

In the case of the Scottish Navy Sour, all I had to work with was the menu description of “smith & cross rum, laphroaig, lime, clove.” I know that a sour is alcohol, citrus juice and a bit of sugar. And I know Smith & Cross is a very funky rum and Laphroaig is a very smoky single-malt scotch. For years, I’ve enjoyed the latter neat or with a splash of water. But to my knowledge, it isn’t found often in cocktails. I Googled around.

I found a recently celebrated Laphroaig cocktail, the Laphroaig Project by Bourbon & Branch in San Francisco. It uses only a half-ounce of the Scotch and a bunch of other stuff. And I learned that, at this time last year, Laphroaig was enjoying some popularity as a mixing ingredient, according to drinks writer Robert Simonson, who theorized that “mixologists, seeking that smoky component to add depth to their concoctions, are using Laphroaig the same way they are using Mezcal. They’re both liquid smoke without being, you know, Liquid Smoke.”

Got it: no need to use a lot of Laphroaig.

So I got off the net and into the kitchen. It worked out better than expected. The sweet-sour base burnishes the smoky, funky edge of rum and Scotch. But the strength of both remains and the syrup presents a pleasant clove aftertaste. Here’s the science:

The name alludes to the scent, if it’s clove cigarettes that are being smoked. Or maybe I’m referring to “Don’t Stop Believin’” (“A singer in a smoky room / The smell of wine and cheap perfume”).

Why was I buying cremini mushrooms yesterday? To make coq au vin today. I also bought an expensive chicken and chicken stock from The Meat Hook. Given the number of steps and braising time, it took me three hours and 15 minutes to make. But it looked and tasted amazing. I followed exactly Molly Stevens’ recipe from her cookbook, All About Braising, as reprinted by The Amateur Gourmet and was not disappointed. A fine way to gussy-up chicken for dinner!

I hadn’t been to Dutch Kills in Long Island City, Queens for some time before last night. They’ve redesigned their menu to include full recipes for their headlining cocktails, including ingredient lists, amounts, procedures and recipe sources. Very interesting. I appreciate this transparency. It’s as if to say, “We’ve no secrets. If you want to make it at home, go ahead. We’re confident enough in our atomosphere, service and hand-cut ice that we know you’ll be back.” And they’re right, really.

I tried the boozy American Trilogy because it combines two of my favorite liquors, resulting in a sort-of Super Old Fashioned. The menu didn’t state which rye was used, so I asked. Later, I found a video of the drink being made behind the Dutch Kills bar, with text overlays naming the ingredients, visible brands, and a soundtrack featuring the instrumental part of The Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.” Transparency!

Mark Bittman is ending The Minimalist, his weekly New York Times column of simple recipes. And he’s picked his 25 favorites from the archives. I do believe I’ll be trying some of these.

Dammit. I couldn’t get this Seville orange marmalade recipe by David Lebovitz (from his book Ready for Dessert) to work to my satisfaction either.

I tried it on Sunday. I halved the recipe and the only point I deviated from was to put the tidbits of rind—as well as the seeds—in a cheesecloth bag instead of loose in the pot, like the slivers of peel. I figured that’d allow pectin and flavor to leach out while sidestepping a chunky end-product, which was a beef I had with my previous marmalade attempt.

Where’d I go astray? I noticed the mix took an oddly long time to gel (1 hour and 35 minutes!) and by then, I’d over-caramelized the sugar. Once everything cooled down, the proof was in the taste: a slightly “browned” or “cooked” taste up front, followed by a craw-lingering bitterness. Not as much bitterness as in my previous attempt. But it still wasn’t sweet enough.

Yeah, it looks good (although maybe that amber hue reflects the over-caramelized taste). And the consistency was fine. I just can’t nail the flavor. I think I’ve got one attempt left in me before I yield. (And if my temperature and/or timing are off, must I invest in an instant-read digital thermometer? Beware of all enterprises that require new utensils, I say.)

Marmalade is way easier than it looks claims a blog post at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, so I gave it a try. I had six Seville oranges left over from a recent punch attempt so I tried the recipe last night. Yikes! Way too bitter. The recipe may have been expecting sweeter oranges, like navel. Seville oranges need a lot more sugar and/or a different infusion technique. Sugar’s cheap so I’ll be trying again.

Despite my mandoline fear, I need to get one if I ever want really, really thinly sliced potatoes, as this frittata recipe from 101 Cookbooks calls for. They really do need to be thin; when I made this for dinner last night, the recipe otherwise turned out great, save the slightly but unacceptably semi-raw potato slices. I’d also comment that all those slices of potatoes and zuchinni don’t really fit in anything as small as a 8.5" skillet—I’d go a size larger. And the leftover cilantro chili sauce, which I’d place in the pesto family, makes an excellent tortilla-chip dip.

From How to Cook Everything, Mark Bittman’s Smoky Black Bean Soup is admittedly nothing special but it’s inexpensive and simple to make, relatively nutritious, and another fine way to use my favored black beans other than my black bean chili recipe.

The difference is the flavor from that single dried chipotle chile. I thought it’d break down (as the adobo version does) when the soup boiled and cooked but when I peeked in the pot, there it was floating on top, sinisterly, like the devil’s ear. In step 3 of the recipe, I chose to blend it up with the beans—for spicy results! Only do this if you can take the heat; if not, discard the chile before serving the soup. The prefect natural complement is cast-iron skillet cornbread. This time around, I used coarse-ground cornmeal (also known as polenta) and it turned out better than the regular yellow cornmeal version.

Here’s an idea: an Iron Chef-style competition involving cocktails instead of multicourse meals. I participated in just such a boastful contest at a New Year’s party yesterday/today.

The secret (predetermined) ingredient? Molasses.

And not just any molasses: blackstrap molasses.

Molasses is a byproduct of sugar. When Domino or whoever boils sugar syrup to get sugar crystals, molasses is part of the package deal. Blackstrap molasses is the wicked child of a third boiling so it’s ultra-concentrated and potent. Consistency and color recall used motor oil. Taste notes skank the scale from sweet and tangy to smoky and bitter. It’s an ingredient that lingers, one you have trouble kicking off your couch long after the party’s over. And it’s sinister. During my early experiments, I discovered that molasses in concentrations greater than a half teaspoon per drink suffocated all other ingredients, including the most potent of liquors.

When this competition was announced earlier in 2010, I had many ideas. The most immediate of these was to introduce the molasses to a Tiki-style cocktail containing rum, given that rum is also a product of sugar. The problem was that the two were too similar. The flavor of the molasses got lost in that of the rum

Other ideas were wackier. None of them worked, either, but I had fun trying them. They included a “pioneer Jack Rose” with a touch of molasses; a “molé margarita,” made with molasses and jalapeño-infused silver tequila; a gingersnap-spice cocktail, for which I made a simple syrup infused with freshly peeled slices of ginger root; and an orange flavored concoction (based on Grand Marnier) with molasses, in an attempt to create a duck sauce flavor—or maybe it was an orange Tootsie Roll Pop flavor. My notes were sketchy to begin with, and then I lost them; I blame the blackstrap.

I avoided even attempting the only classic molasses cocktail in print, the Black Stripe, which was fortunate because the other guy in the competition ended up making that. (It was a real kick in the head that reminded me of bitter drinking chocolate. This is a drink for ice fishing or chopping firewood, possibly both at the same time.)

My official entry was inspired by the Double Fill-Up, a rye-based drink that uses pomegranate molasses, which is much sweeter and gently tart than actual molasses. It turned out all right. The molasses in my cocktail is present but it doesn’t overpower the drink; it took much tweaking to balance the proportions. I made my simple syrup (a cup of Sugar in the Raw and a half-cup of water brought to a gentle boil and simmered for a few minutes) with a handful of whole cinnamon sticks to lend the drink a spicy kick. The star anise garnish, like most garnishes, is flexing nuts. If I must justify it, I’d say it does add a gentle licorice scent while resembling a miniature floating tarantula. As a hat-tip to my inspiration, and because I wanted an old-timey name to match my old-timey ingredients/toil, I named my creation after our 13th president. I don’t know if I’ll be making it again, not when there are so many other more-delicious beverages to make.

This classic ’70s dessert, slightly adapted by my mom from the Better Homes & Gardens New Cook Book recipe of that era, is as sweet as it is bright. The near-fluorescent glow of the pineapple, studded with bull’s-eyes of atomic-age cherries, can enliven a winter funk! I baked one today for a New Year’s Eve party tonight.

It pleases me that seven slices of pineapple line the bottom of a 9" round pan perfectly—my mom discovered that; the original recipe calls for an indeterminate number of half-rings wedged into a 8" square pan.

(photo by Kat)

I don’t need a food dehydrator to jerk beef after all! Today I made Rachel Graville’s Black Pepper Jerky recipe from the June issue of Food & Wine. (There’s an accompanying article featuring tips on making it, plus a few other jerky recipes.) The soy sauce gives it a big teriyaki flavor and the cracked pepper spices it up—I found myself brushing off the excess when I couldn’t take the burn.

This recipe, which I made for dinner last night from the Weight Watchers New Complete Cookbook, was very simple and tastier than expected. It’s sort of like a meaty version of pasta puttanesca (although that’s probably just the capers making me think of that, as I often do).

I used red bell peppers instead of green (as always) and two links of regular spicy Italian sauce instead of what would have worked out to 1.5 links of turkey sausage. The next time I make this, I’d cut the chicken into smaller pieces, to be closer in size to that of the sausage.

The week of Thanksgiving, Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks, a recipe blog I follow and enjoy, published her Fall Favorites List and mentioned that perhaps her most-made soup of the year was Hassan’s Celery and White Bean Soup from the Moro East cookbook.

She didn’t reprint or link to the recipe but I tracked down a copy online. I converted the metric amounts to imperial, simplified and clarified some steps, and put my version below. The original includes several accouterments (lemon juice, additional scallions, other greens, olives, etc.) that I skipped to keep things simple.

Yeah, that’s a lot of celery. Even so, for a vegetarian recipe, it yields a hearty, excellent cold-weather soup that I’ll be keeping and making again.

As my requisite Halloween Eve horror film, I watched Alien. During the heartwarming chestburster scene, I remembered this thorax cake, which, you will agree, is both totally gross and totally awesome. (See also this zombie cake.)

(thanks to Jolene for the links!)

McKinley’s Delight, a Manhattan variant, has been my drink of choice lately. In The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book (1935), Albert Stevens Crockett writes:

Just why it was McKinley’s delight, I am unable to ascertain. The chances are that President McKinley never found out whether it was or not. In its favor, I may mention that the [Waldorf-Astoria] Bar was a great hangout for the G.O.P.’s of yesteryear, who may have passed their enthusiasm for their candidates across the counter for the barman to translate into terms of liquid intensity.

Here’s the recipe as printed in that book. I’ve bracketed my notes.

(photo of McKinley, with crop marks, via The New York Public Library Digital Gallery)

I wager few classic cocktails are named after movies¹ but the Blood and Sand, named after a 1922 Rudolph Valentino film, has endured.

It’s a curious combination that tastes better than it sounds and probably is the least Scotchy a Scotch cocktail can taste.

I’d tried making one of these before, when I first saw the recipe on the Death + Company website. I don’t remember liking it or really thinking that much of it. Recently, I came across the recipe again, this one using different proportions. I made it (using Johnnie Walker Red as my Scotch and Carpano Antica for vermouth) and liked it much more!

A quick bout of research reveals there are two schools of thought on how a proper Blood and Sand is made:

1. The classic equal-parts version. The Savoy Cocktail Book, first printed in London in 1930, calls for 1/4 ounce of each ingredient. Gary Regan, in his book The Joy of Mixology (2003), mentions the Savoy recipe and ups the ante to 3/4 ounce of each ingredient, which is the same version used by Death + Company.
2. The more recent unequal parts version. This one uses the proportions I use in the recipe version printed above. The unequal parts version may have first appeared in Ted Haigh’s book, Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails, originally published in 2004. Since then, it’s been championed by drink blogs such as The Cocktail Chronicles (in 2005) and The Manhattan Project (in 2009).

¹ Close: The Florodora is named after a Broadway musical from 1900. [back]

Oh my, this soup by Melissa Camero Ainslie is a keeper. Perfect for autumn, plus it renewed my faith in the usefulness and tastiness of lamb. The meatballs float and cook in the soup as it simmers—only 10 minutes and they’re browned through!

And I can confirm the recipe is hearty enough to yield six servings; it’s one of the few soups I’ve made that filled me up after one bowl.

I used low-sodium chicken stock and everything remained pleasantly salty but not too salty.

I didn’t add the olive oil or Parmesan; the flavors were rich and varied enough that I didn’t need them (although I like spiciness, so I opted-in for the optional cayenne). I couldn’t track down whole wheat Ditali on short notice, either, but the regular albino variety worked swell.

And I’m glad I looked up photos and aliases of Lacinato kale beforehand or else I wouldn’t have known what to make of the “dino kale” sign at the farmers’ market yesterday.

The first result for a granola recipe that Google fetched for me was this one by Roxanne Webber at CHOW so I made a batch early this afternoon using raisins and chopped, toasted pecans as my extras. It’s easy to make and fantastic for breakfast or a snack.

The situation turns sticky quickly once you dip your hands into that morass of honey and oil but the finished product is insanely addictive and much cheaper than storebought granola, which I’d been buying too much of recently.

What to do with applejack when one tires of the autumnal Jack Rose?

Try a Marconi Wireless. I certainly have. They’re exceptionally alcoholly but have a surprising and welcome spicy tang. Despite the goofy name, Lauren Clark at drinkboston.com wonders whether the cocktail could hail from the very early 20th century; the recipe appears in The Old Waldorf-Astoria Bar Book, so it’s at least from 1935, the year that book was first published.

For vermouth, I use Carpano Antica, the first brand of Italian sweet vermouth. My bitters are Fee Brothers West Indian Orange. And my apple brandy, of course, is New Jersey’s finest.

Whenever I encounter a recipe with cornmeal, I’m reminded of the elder Italian-American guy I used to work with (this would’ve been in the late ’90s/early ’00s) who was immensely amused with the add-water/heat/serve “polenta lunch-in-a-cup” things I used to bring for lunch. He was required to eat hot polenta gruel for one or more meals daily and would be entirely happy to never eat polenta, much less see polenta, ever again. The fact it was being marketed as a hip, presumably overpriced instant lunch was a source of perpetual mirth to him.

Yes, this recipe, from the current issue of Bon Appétit, is rustic, which is code for “simple and hearty.” Normally cheap, too, probably, although I bought my coarse polenta from Whole Foods because I assumed I wouldn’t be able to find it in my neighborhood supermarkets. Then I decided to buy the rest of my ingredients at Whole Foods, too. I don’t like Whole Foods much, but they do carry polenta—like, three different kinds—plus hemp flour, should I ever need that.

Really, this soup was exactly what I was hungry for tonight, with the damp weather and early darkness. I paired it with a chunk of fresh whole wheat bread and an Old Fashioned. Expect more soup recipes to appear here in the near future.

I swore I’d posted my favorite Ratatouille recipe, from the The New Moosewood Cookbook (2000), on here but I hadn’t. And here it is. When I’m on the road, I’ll know to find it here and never again hunger for Mediterranean vegetable stew. This one takes about 45 minutes to make and I find it hearty enough for a main dish—Moosewood bills it as an entrée. To make it even more filling, you could serve it with rice or noodles. I eat it straight up. It’s a great recipe for summertime vegetables.

As a kid raised on Pecan Sandies, I can confirm that these pecan shortbread cookies, from the October 2009 issue of Food & Wine (and, by extension, my save-this-recipe three-ring binder), are an excellent and superior substitute. Rich, crisp and savory. And, because they’re a roll-and-slice style cookie, simple to make.

Vanilla beans: nuts to those. They rank in what I’m going to call the Saffron Pantheon of Spices. A jar containing two two-inch-long scrawny strands of bean runs more than $15—at Stop & Shop, no less. I substituted one teaspoon of pure vanilla extract per bean; the version of the recipe I've reprinted below includes this edit.

Also, my yield on the recipe was about 18 cookies while the reported yield was 2 1/2 dozen. Oh, man: but so good. In a sense, I’m glad I didn’t get those reported 30 or else I’d have eaten most of ’em by now.

This classic pesto recipe is fine but I can tell you now that you don’t need the teaspoon of salt—the cheese more than enough salts it up. (Also, next time I want to toast the pine nuts.)

I wasn’t thinking clearly and added the salt. When I sampled the food-processored pesto, I got grumpy over how salty it was. Had I been pairing it with pasta, I would have been even more disappointed.

What it did go well with was this recipe for Pesto and Cheese-Filled Chicken Breasts. I merely substituted the pesto for the custom thyme pesto the recipe calls for. Delicious. I needed to pound-down down the chicken breasts even more to make rolling easier and use toothpicks to keep ’em rolled—the filling kept squeezing out. Despite their unruly appearance, once lightly fried and baked, they more closely resembled croquettes than rollatini, juicy and tasty.

Sucker Punch, “a delightful cocktail made from the sweat of Lady Summer herself” contains equal parts limeade concentrate, club soda, tequila and Mexican beer. Yeah, I know; but it tastes great and sneaks up on you like a ninja. It truly is the New Age Beverage of summer.

Cucumber pairs so well with gin it’s a summer sin to keep ’em apart. So I’ve been quaffing these, made with Plymouth (Henrick’s would work well, too; or, one day I’ll dismount from my highfalutin horse and buy some Beefeater or Gordon’s).

I’ve lost the source for this recipe (and edited-down the simple syrup from 3/4 ounce to 1/2) but I know it was adapted from the version published in the April 2009 issue of Bon Appetit (apparently not online).

I may be using too much ice in mine (or my rocks glasses are a substandard size) because the drink made this way won’t fit into any cocktail glass I own; I just drink ’em straight from the mixing (pint) glass.

For dinner tonight, I made shish kabobs with teriyaki marinade on the grill and, for dessert, grilled peaches. Both were awesome.

Using a chunk of the money my grandma gave me for Christmas, I attended a classic cocktail class taught by cocktail historian David Wondrich at Astor Center back on April 9. Only now have I dusted my notes to write this belated entry.

The word “resurrecting” might be inaccurate, admitted David Wondrich as he served a Russian Cocktail made from a lost century-old recipe—possibly the first on record for a vodka-based mixed drink. No, tonight, we’d dabble in necrology, blowing the dust from brittle bartending guides and back issues of long-folded New York dailies. We’d attempt to reassemble the tipples via modern methods and ingredients, Meddling With Powers We Couldn’t Possibly Comprehend. We’d become mixology acolytes. We’d get toasty in the process.

But one must begin with a clear head. Back in the day, cocktails were more complex. Measurements and techniques were written in a shorthand that no longer exists. Some ingredients are gone and can’t even be Googled. (Well, now they can—it’s gotten challenging to unearth drinks that haven’t been rediscovered by some hip bar or rival cocktail historian.)

For example, the ruhinoy in the Russian Cocktail: what is that? The original recipe, which offhandedly notes the drink has been “much appreciated in the Northern part of Europe” and is now appreciated by connoisseurs at the St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans, doesn’t say. At first Wondrich thought it could have been a corruption of ryabinovaya (rowanberry liqueur), then learned it’s an extinct Russian cordial made of cherry stones. Cherry Heering mixed with a splash of Kirschwasser served as a substitute. The funky, nutty flavor of the Kirschwasser, a light and sweet brandy distilled from whole cherries (including their pits), lends a lightness not present in the sweet, dark Heering liqueur but found in contemporary Russian cordials.

Wondrich had perfected the Russian Cocktail adaptation beforehand but he hadn’t touched any of the next four on the syllabus, all recipes likely unmade by anyone living today. It was also the first time, he said, that he’d used his two-liter cocktail shaker (allegedly purchased in a classic metric-system conversion error), in order to make drinks for the class at once.

He made for the class a dry martini using maybe the first recipe (1891), with modern equivalents of Plymouth gin and splashes of Grand Marnier, orange bitters and Noilly Prat vermouth, with a twist of lemon peel. Exactitude in small amounts hadn’t a chance—Wondrich defined “a drop” as “whatever spilled off my barspoon there.” He deemed the finished product light, brisk and bracing.

As an aside to break up these woozy blocks of text, here’s a photo of my class workstation, complete with barware, glassware, copious notes and an egg.

Cocktails simplify over time, shedding frills and minor flavors to satisfy hurried barkeeps.¹ The Jack Rose is a great example of this. Here are the contents of a modern Jack Rose: applejack, lime juice (or lemon; each citrus has its camp) and grenadine. Wondrich found a recipe (again: possibly the first!) from the very-rare 1910 edition of Jacks’s Manual and it has more than twice the number of ingredients, yet retains a certain Jack Rose-ness.

I don’t think the drink was named after him but the Jack of the Manual was one Jack Grohusko, bartender at an Italian restaurant on William Street in Manhattan. Things were different then. He would have been familiar with the Wall Street Jigger, for instance. Back then a normal jigger was two ounces but the Wall Street variety was 1.5 ounces for the traders who nipped in for a quick midday drink and couldn’t afford to leave completely drunk. This adaptation uses the classic bonus ingredients but returns the jigger of ’jack to post-5:00 p.m. proportions.

I picked up some handy tips making this one. Sugar doesn’t dissolve well in spirits so always mix a cocktail’s nonalcoholic ingredients first. For the raspberry syrup, Wondrich alluded to its long-ago popularity by noting it “was the St. Germain of the 1910s.” (He used a brand called Marco Polo.) He also pointed out that he prefers to use applejack, a blend of brandy and grain alcohol, instead of Laird’s traditional bonded apple brandy, which is straight 100-proof craziness and often too harsh for cocktails.

Next, the class crafted a drink from the same manual as the Russian Cocktail. It was a disaster. The Venus combined an egg yolk with dry gin, creme Yvette, lime juice and muddled mint. “This hasn’t been made in 99 years!” said Wondrich, by way of a toast. The group sipped and there was a round of silent frowns. He added, charitably: “This needs to be made with cognac, not gin.” One thing I did learn from this exercise was to not overshake a cocktail with mint—for this one, we treated the mint tenderly, muddling it with the Yvette, then discarding it.

We closed class with a Rag Time Cooler from 1912. My notes get sparse at this point for a variety of reasons but this obscure mingling of spirits was made with two teaspoons lemon juice and one teaspoon sugar, stirred with 1/3 jigger each of dry catawba (a semi-dry white wine not included in Astor’s robust inventory but made in Northern Ohio—we substituted German Riesling), cognac and arrack (for a “funky edge”). We then topped it with seltzer, stirred and strained it into a Collins glass and added a pineapple-slice garnish. Refreshing!

That was the official end of the semester and more than 3/4 of the class left. But I lingered because I figured any outing involving a renowned barkeep/drinker would sport some afterhours action. Sure enough, Wondrich said, what the heck, shame to let these leftover ingredients go to waste. He called the remaining 10 or so of us down from our seats to gather ’round and make a Silver Fizz, a restorative concoction about which he’s written, “Before Alka-Seltzer, there was the Silver Fizz. Damn you, progress!” I toasted Wondrich with this one. Good show!

¹ Yet, note that the converse of this is true among the Tiki species of cocktail. The original Trader Vic and Donn Beach recipes are much more simple than the juiced-up, fruit-festooned versions often seen today. [back]

Sunkist navel oranges have hit 50 cents each at Hoon’s, my local fruit-bodega. As it gets warmer, they’ll go lower, but I wanted to get my drink on tonight so I bought one after work and whipped up a Ward Eight or so.

How is it I’d never previously home-made one of these? (I’ve had at least one, a few years back at the Flatiron.)

On account of these tough economic times, I reached for my dusty Old Overcoat. I agree with Wondrich’s commentary on this one: the fruit juices—plus that sweet tad of grenadine—muzzle the rye’s bite without silencing its bark. It’s nice because it occurs to me now the Ward Eight is the closest to a summer whiskey-based cocktail I’ve ever made. I’m sick of calling warm-weather cocktails “refreshing” but dang it, it is, and so be it.

Bittman, you’ve done it again. This list, a perfect companion piece to the 101 picnic recipe ideas he published in 2008, appeared in the Times yesterday. I’ve pasted it here for easy reference, and if I ever get my own grill. (Ha!) Apologies for the length of the list; but you must agree, at least some of this—likely more—sounds delicious.

Instead of making another Planter’s Punch tonight, as I’d planned, I made this and I’m glad I did. It’s a refreshing cocktail to drink while quietly sweating in the summer heat. It’s also quite green.

I lost track of where on the internet I found this recipe but I do remember that it’s based on the version served at Rye, a cocktail bar in San Francisco, with slightly different ingredients and proportions.

The original Trader Vic and Donn Beach versions of Tiki cocktail recipes are much more simple than their modern adaptations, which tend to go bananas with fruit, juices, liqueurs and garnishes.

Case in point: Planter’s Punch. Lord knows what passes for a drink with that name these days, but the original contained nothing but fresh citrus juices, a touch of sweetener and a stiff two jiggers of dark rum. Funky stuff.

I made one over the weekend and I’m already looking forward to another after work tonight. I used one of my new Collins glasses and Smith & Cross, a traditional Jamaican rum.

Coincidentally, David Wondrich, the cocktail-historian/master-barkeep, who reprinted the 1947 Trader Vic version of the recipe I used, acted as a consultant for the production of the rum, a new brand from a long-defunct distillery.

This is my grandma’s recipe for sweet pickles—I made a batch this morning with Kirbys from the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket and they turned out just as I remembered them. They’re a taste I associate strongly with visits to my grandparents’ farm during summers of my childhood.

These may appear to contain too much sugar—and they’re undoubtedly sweet pickles—but they taste mostly tangy-tart from the vinegar and the celery seed. (If you don’t have any of the latter, seek it out at a cheap supermarket or a dollar store. I bought a 3.25-ounce plastic container of it under the Spice Classics brand name for $1.19; at a regular supermarket, it will cost much more for less. On the other hand, I have yet to find mustard seed at a dollar store.)

Also, note that some of the amounts below may seem wonky on account of my halving Grandma’s original recipe.

I’ve been drinking a lot of these lately, the Double Fill-Up. The recipe’s from Death + Co. although they’re not on the menu currently. I never bothered to learn whether the name is a pun; one of the head bartenders at D+C is named Philip.

You can find pomegranate molasses at an Indian or Middle Eastern food store. I bought a bottle of Al Wadi brand at Kalustyan’s. It’s sweetened and thickened pomegranate juice with a kick of citric acid that makes the cocktail pleasingly tart. I like mine that way, so I add a scotch more than a teaspoon and a scotch less of simple syrup.

For the simple syrup, I made it myself from Sugar in the Raw: two parts sugar to one part water. Boil it and stir it until the sugar dissolves completely and the solution is thick. Let it cool in the pan then funnel it into a bottle, adding a shot of vodka to retard spoilage.

I don’t muddle the mint much; the shaking will loosen a lot of its flavor into the drink.

For the rye, my regular Rye Rules apply: use Rittenhouse bonded (100 proof) when I need it strong, Sazerac when I need it smooth and Old Overholt (“Old Overcoat”) when I need it cheap (but still tasty; any drink this sweet with this many ingredients doesn’t always need a top-shelf spirit).

Adapting a recipe from bits of others found online, I made lasagna tonight because I wanted a dinner featuring the sweet fennel sausage I’ve enjoyed at Frankies. I took the 1 down to Greenwich Village yesterday and bought a few links from the same shop Frankies gets theirs, Faicco’s Pork Store, “the finest sausage and Italian specialties since 1900.”

But that’s just an excuse because I like lasagna and would have made one regardless. When we were kids, my Mom had a super-shortcut version, which is not sexy but likely inspired by having three mewling, hungry children: she used spaghetti sauce and in addition to mozzarella, added cottage cheese. My recipe still has shortcuts: I didn’t use fancy cheese for any of the three types, and canned tomatoes I don’t have a problem with. I did use fresh basil although I had the bunch pushed too far back in my fridge and about 90% of it froze and wilted horribly. But there were enough surviving leaves for the recipe.

And I used wine (Montepulciano d’Abruzzo) that met my two strict criteria: cheapness ($8) and the first bottle I picked up that claimed its contents were “dry.” The label further claims that the wine pairs well with seafood, pasta (with “red sauce or cream sauce”), red or white meat, Asian food, pizza, hamburgers, Mexican food and “mild to strong cheeses.” Apparently it does not go well with hot dogs.

I have changes to consider next time. I would not put the Parmesan—or so much of it—on top. It browned well and I’ve always enjoyed crispy toppings in Pyrex-based oven-dinners but the cup of Parmesan ossified into a super-crème brûlée-like crust that was difficult to cut cleanly into orderly servings.

I would add more fresh basil or add it at a later point in the cooking. I couldn’t taste it well and wanted to: my idea was that it would be a crisp balance to the heaviness of all that meat, cheese and starch.

The amount of sausage may not seem like a lot to you—at Fiacco’s, a half-pound is a mere three bratwurst-sized links. But I think it was the perfect amount. I removed the casing and crumbled it up into pea-sized pieces to spread it around; I’m not a fan of tons of meat in lasagna. You get too much in there, as many recipes do, and you’re flirting with meatloaf that happens to have noodles in it.

The mozzarella all but disappeared. I may need to add more or add it to a layer apart from the ricotta, which survived (nicely) intact, but which I should have mixed with an egg (for better spreadability; plus, that’s traditional) and maybe some chopped parsley.

My home internet’s been down recently and I had an intense craving for brownies tonight with no way to look up a recipe. Then I realized there’d likely be one of the back of my Nestlé baking cocoa container—and there was. These turned out so well that this may become my default “base” brownie recipe (e.g. in the future, I’d like to experiment with different types of nuts and chocolate chips.)

This recipe from Mollie Katzen’s New Moosewood Cookbook sounded appealing to me on paper except that the squash doesn’t hold everything together as solidly as I’d have liked it to, resulting a vegetarian goulash that resembles something that might be served in prison. Vegetarian prison.

No disrespect to New York City’s status as the cultural center of the world, but since I’ve moved here, I’ve been equally impressed by its proximity to natural wonders. In the thick of a metropolitan bustle of hot asphalt and skyscrapers, take a subway about an hour south and you’ll arrive at Coney Island and the Atlantic Ocean, a teleportation as strange as passing through a wardrobe to enter a fairyland of fauns and witches. Take a train about an hour in the opposite direction and you’ll find yourself amid mountains.

A band of nine of us took that route this morning from Grand Central to the charmingly named Breakneck Ridge, located in upstate New York in Hudson Highlands State Park, which borders the Hudson River and straddles Putnam and Dutchess Counties. The Metro North train station there was built solely for the purpose of hikers such as ourselves and in fact there’s little other reason to debark at it. There are no ticket machines, billboards, parking lots, roads or even garbage cans. There is a large “Breakneck Ridge” station sign on posts that someone or something had knocked it down. We showed our appreciation to the MTA by placing assorted change on the rails in order to later retrieve the train-flattened discs, unaware our winding trek would take us 5.5 miles south to the town of Cold Spring.

The trail rises 1,250 feet around the first 3/4 mile alone, rocky with strenuous and tricky climbing. But there are flat spots at which to pause and take in awesome views of the river and the surrounding hills, heavy with forest and tops invisible with morning mist. During our initial ascent, buzzards circled lazily overhead, presumably hoping the “breakneck” half of our place-name might come true. At an outcropping planted with an American flag on a tall pole, we could better see Bannerman Island, home to a castle built in the early 1900s to store munitions and now in ruins. As we watched a freight train skirt the west bank of the Hudson, I realized I’ve never been at a vantage point at which I could see an entire train laterally at once; the thing must’ve stretched a mile.

Wind and overcast skies shrouded the hike until the afternoon sun burnt off the gloom; I discovered later I was a literal redneck from sunburn. It was good hiking weather but I frequently peeled off layers only to put them back on a short time later. In the woods, kamikaze clouds of tiny black flies dove-bomb us; waving around the stalks of wild chives we picked didn’t deter them for long although we then smelled more of onions than sweat.

I learned that Dr. Martens shoes make for not-unpleasant hiking boots. They’re heavy and 90% comfortable—the skin over the lower part of my Achilles tendons wasn’t blistered but sore by the end of the day. But the traction of the thick, grippy soles facilitates clambering up and down rocks and the shoes’ sturdiness won’t bend a foot that slips between rocks. They also worked well when I ventured off-trail, attempted to navigate a steep decline, slipped on a pile of leaves and slide-tackled Vincent.

We packed water, light lunches and fruit and everyone seemed to have brought his or her own trail mix. Here’s the recipe for mine. It’s salt-free, energy-packed and sweet (the only added sugar is from the dried cherries) and probably moderately healthy. Its yield I will describe as “filling a gallon Ziploc freezer bag to bulging capacity so that everyone says, ‘That’s a lot of trail mix!’” I still have a bunch left if you want some.

Having lost sight of any blazes near the end of our descent, we exited the woods through the backyard of rich people, their low-slung house of long horizontals resembling something by Frank Lloyd Wright. After a detour through a centuries-old graveyard, we wandered the streets of Cold Spring, lined with quaint clapboard homes featuring wraparound front porches and carefully tended gardens. As I’d assume is the case with many small towns of the Hudson Valley, the main street contains chiefly antique shops and restaurant-bars. We chose Cold Spring Depot, nearest the train station, and negated any health benefits gained from our exercise by knocking down greasy food and several beers.

I took these snapshots during the hike with my Lomo LC-A on Kodak 100UC film, which is overkill for a camera this cheap. I then had jpegs output directly from the negatives by a nice guy at the Penn Station Duane Reade. They turned out blue but were even bluer before my quick-and-dirty Photoshop Auto Color adjustment.

Do you ever wish you had your own personal smoker? But maybe you don’t have the money to buy or build your own. Maybe you don’t have easy access to mesquite chips. Or maybe you don’t live in the country and have a spare shed out back in which to string up sausage links.

I’ve stumbled across a quick, low-cost option that works even for people who live in a big-city apartment. First, bake something with a high fat content—say, a meatloaf made with two pounds of ground round from the Florence Meat Market. Then neglect to consider that as the meat cooks for an hour in its sexy red Le Creuset loaf pan, it will sweat hot grease faster than John Travolta. This is key: you will want to have neglected to line the oven rack with tinfoil or to have placed the loaf pan in a shallow baking tray. Because then grease will pool on the bottom of the oven and start smoking like a tire fire. Soon, everything in a large radius will be coated with an acrid, sort-of meaty film, whether it’s ham, love seats, shirts, hair, etc. There you have it: your own walk-in smoker in a few simple steps.

Incidentally, the meatloaf turned out superbly despite a pause with 20 minutes of remaining bake-time in order for me to run out and purchase scouring pads and a cheap foil roasting pan to catch any remaining grease. I could have pressed on without these items but I was weeping uncontrollably from the billows of gray smoke and I didn’t want to set off my neighbors’ smoke alarms.

This is my Mom’s recipe, which means it’s pointless to reproduce it here in that everyone swears by his own Mom’s meatloaf recipe and every Mom’s meatloaf recipe is different. But for me it’s a delicious taste of home that I’m hoping to continue to associate with good times and not grease fires.

Today for Purim, I made hamentaschen. How would I grade the taste? A solid “A.” Texture? “B-.” (I could have rolled the dough thinner.) Fun making the recipe? Also an “A,” maybe an “A+” because I enjoy working with dough.

But the shape? “See me after class.”

See, they’re supposed to be tri-cornered, like the hat of Purim’s villain, Haman, but mine resemble jelly-babies snug in miniature cradle boards. And the cookies that didn’t have tightly pinched corners came undone during baking and resembled large open sores. I, of German heritage, felt I’d defiled a sacred Jewish ritual and that when I next peeked in the oven to check on the prune butter-filled variety I baked following a batch of raspberry, a bolt of pure YHWH would shoot out and punch a hole through my chest just like it did to the Nazis who opened the ark in Raiders.

I don’t know what about “form circle of dough into a triangle” I didn’t understand. This hearkens back to my challenges with spatial relations. Remember those standardized tests you’d take in grade school with a sharp #2 pencil and on the last page there was always that mind-twister with an unfolded paper dodecahedron that had different patterns on each segment and you had to imagine what it looked like assembled, rotated 120 degrees and viewed in a mirror? I was never good at that and grumbled about what use it was in real life. Well, it’s useful for hamentascnen making.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, dill is the ultimate cold-weather herb. It figured prominently into this Moosewood soup, which I’ve now made twice. The first time, I followed the recipe but found the soup frothy, possibly from over-blending, or just blending, period. This time, I added the milk to the soup after the blend cycle, plus I didn’t fully puree the vegetables, and it made for a much soupier and more pleasant consistency.

A coworker mentioned a stack of fabulous brandied-cherry pancakes she ate during a recent restaurant brunch. They sounded great and I imagined it’d be easy to substitute a cup of brandied cherries for the cup of blueberries in my mom’s time-tested blueberry pancake recipe. And it worked. Sweet, sweet brandied-cherry pancakes!

After pitting the cherries, I cut each into eighths and soaked a cup of them (about 20 cherries) in brandy. Then I strained them and pressed them so they didn’t retain too much liquid. With a pat of butter, I cooked each pancake in my trusty Lodge cast-iron frying pan and found I could cook two simultaneously, each made with 1/4 cup of batter, which yielded eight hearty pancakes. I also learned I’ve got to rid myself of my grilled-cheese habit of smashing down the pancakes with the spatula; they’re much better when they’re roughly 1/4-inch thick because the fruit stays juicier.

This recipe, from the tragically designed recipe site Cooks.com, turned out a simple, tasty dozen of muffins, though they were a tad on the dry side: maybe next time I’ll add more oil or a “moisturizer” such as applesauce or sour cream.

I’ve been wanting to make this cocktail, the Cherry Smash, at home for some time. In late 2006, I believe it was, I tried it at the Flatiron Lounge (Julie Reiner there developed the drink) and I loved it, but didn’t think much more of it until I dug into
David Wondrich’s book Imbibe!. There’s a recipe for the Cherry Smash in there and Wondrich’s enthusiasm for well-made drinks made me really want to give it a try. (Many single young men I know got into the cocktails thing in college, partly as a seduction technique and mostly because they were budding alcoholics. This would culminate in several Leaving Las Vegas-style trips to the state liquor store next to Kroger, purchase of a paperback copy of Playboy’s Party Drinks and clearance of a bar space, usually the top of the dorm mini-fridge. I guess I’m a late bloomer.)

Shopping in Ohio over the holidays, I couldn’t find the dark cherry liqueur used by the Flatiron, a brand made in Denmark called Cherry Heering. I was told by clerks at two liquor stores that the state had halted on imports of it. You’d think an enterprising bartender could find an alternate cherry liqueur; you’d be wrong. I found liqueurs made with every fruit but cherry, including pomegranate, and it was driving me nuts. Back in New York, Park Avenue Liquors, my favorite single-malt scotch destination, echoed what the Ohio liquor-vendors had told me, but added that I should try Wine Library. And not only does that site carry it, it was on sale when I placed my order.

From my local liquor store, I bought the drink’s more common ingredients of Courvoisier VS (as specified by Wondrich, and if it’s good enough for Busta, it’s good enough for me) and Grand Marnier (which Wondrich says is a legitimate orange curaçao). The clerk was amused by this sale because apparently a well-off hobo used to come in with an empty 1-liter plastic Coke bottle, buy a hip-flask of those two liquors and mix them in the bottle to drink; apparently it was refreshing.

It’s of course not cherry season but the frozen Dole dark red cherries I tried for one batch were a fine substitute; even better from my local grocer were the fresh, here-today-gone-tomorrow cherries from Chile at $2.50/pound this time of year, though they involve more work for pit removal. (The Cherry Smash is too snooty for maraschino cherries, I’m afraid.) I soaked the fruit in some bottom-shelf Paul Masson “Grande Amber” brandy I had laying around from a previous bender. And if it’s good enough for Orson, it’s good enough for me.

Anyway, the drink is great: not sweet but tart and powerful. It may sound and look sweet and girly, but it ain’t. Stop by some time and I’ll shake one up for you.

I made this coffee cake for breakfast yesterday for my sister and I. The recipe’s from the Amy Sedaris cookbook Jimi got me for Christmas and which I’ve unexpectedly become enamored with. The recipe’s easy and looked especially handsome when I turned it out of the new cast-aluminum Wilton brand “Perfect Performance Plus” fluted tube pan I purchased recently from Bowery Kitchen Supply at the winding, peddler’s alley of Chelsea Market within the old National Biscuit Company. I’d walked by that complex numerous times and always thought it housed an expensive restaurant until someone pointed out I was an idiot. The coffee cake is rich and sweet with nutty-vanilla goodness, and it goes good with, uh, coffee.

Another recipe! This one’s a “classic suburban Mom” fruit salad made from a sweet blend of fruit and convenience foods that makes frequent appearances during the summer at barbeques and picnics involving my family. I believe it’s originally from the 1971 edition of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book, which indicates that this salad should be served in “lettuce cups.” I recommend actual bowls.

Instead of making genuine holiday fruitcakes every December that recipients will only pretend to like, my family has been making these Christmas nut loaves most years since 1987. They’re more nuts than cake although retain many classic fruitcake elements, like the candied fruit. The recipe is simple albeit expensive (especially those two pounds of pecans) and requires arms of steel to stir. These loaves don’t photograph romantically but I assure you they are tasty.

Nothing goes better on a cold, late-autumn day with Rocky IV on T.V. than a tasty beef stir-fry made by my brother Andrew, and this apple cake I made, the French of which I can’t pronounce other than to proclaim it “tasty.”

It sported a crusty, caramelized edge where the apples and the raw sugar did the nasty up against the buttered sides of the Pyrex baking dish. The majority of the cake itself was very moist, which I hadn’t expected, on account of the canned pineapple (which I couldn’t even taste) and the shredded apples. Appletastic!

The sauce was simple and effective. I am an apple brandy convert, and better to buy Calvados than some obscure old-lady schnapps of the type that’s used for a recipe calling for one teaspoon, then collects dust in a cupboard for the next 15 years. After refrigerating the leftover sauce, it solidified into a sugary, fatty mass that would cause the veins in a coronary surgeon’s forehead to bulge alarmingly by merely looking at it.

The recipe comes from chef Laurent Tourondel, as served at the BLT Market, and taken from the November 12th issue of New York magazine. I followed the directions to the letter except for the crème fraîche, but the dessert was just fine without it.

I’m not usually up for creatively cheap dinners in a pinch, but I had this sweet potato left over from a previous recipe that was starting to resemble E.T. so I thought I’d use it before it started wreaking havoc in my fridge. I diced it and sautèed it with some onion and garlic in canola oil, then threw in a can of Goya refried beans, spread the mix on some tortillas I’d warmed in a pan on the stove, then sprinkled on shredded mozzarella cheese. Tasty.

Lightly sweet and bright, this is a great August soup, which is when you’re going to find yellow squash (no, not butternut) in the stores. I like how most all the ingredients are yellow or orange: when you mix the onion-carrot-potato purée, it turns out the near-impossible-in-nature DayGlo orange of orange juice concentrate, but becomes golden yellow once everything is combined by the end of the recipe. This one’s not quite exciting enough for me to recommend as a meal in itself (although that’s how I ate it); I imagine it’d go well with a creative salad or chicken cutlets or whatever it is people eat at home for dinner these days.

Yesterday’s New York Times published a recipe for an eggplant salad that I made soon after returning from my California trip. This may very well be one of the tastiest ever summer salads and I nearly didn’t make it because of the precious little story accompanying the recipe that includes the sentence “But recently I found myself in possession of an eggplant and without a plan.” Via this anecdote, it’s clear the author/recipe-developer assembled this salad with some random stuff lying around her fridge, but it’s a genius combination of crisp and tender vegetables, and vibrant flavors: the green spark of the mint, the strong garlic, the nuttiness of the oiled and baked eggplant cubes, the citrus bursts of the lemon juice and the tomatoes, the salty and earthy feta). I’d surely make this again.

Every so often, as the song goes, I like to drink my liquor from an old fruit jar, so I mixed a batch of sangria in two Ball Half-Gallon Wide Mouth Mason Jars I bought upstairs at Zabar’s a year ago for no good reason.

Sangria arose as a quick and cheap party punch so conventional wisdom dictates bottom-shelf jug wine and overripe fruit. The soft fruit I’ll allow, but even though I’d be watering down and sweetening up the wine, I didn’t want cheap-wine migraines so I chose Yellow Tail merlot, which is to me on the upper scale of mass-market wines.

Buying my ingredients, I wanted a peach but they’re not in season yet so I selected an orange, a pear and a red apple. The true secret to successful sangria is to let the fruit soak not in the wine mixture solely but beforehand in another liquor. Brandy works best because you can get it cheap and, like the wine, was grapes at one point in its life.

After chopping the fruit and soaking it, I mixed equal amounts into a half-and-half blend of the merlot and lemonade. Then I shook in a few teaspoons of caster (superfine) sugar. (A sugar tip I found online is if you don’t have superfine sugar, which dissolves much more smoothly and cleanly than the typical big-crystal stuff, you can grind down regular sugar in a coffee grinder or food processor.) I screwed tight the metal banded lids of the jars and shook vigorously to mix. Amusingly, prior to my blending, the wine sat haughtily atop the lemonade in a distinct layer as if it would have no relations with that tart mistress Minute Maid.

Because of the lemonade, I found after taste-testing I didn’t need to add any more of sugar, but I figured I could always add more later if the brew turned too tart. Very refreshing, served over plenty of ice.

The recipe hinted that one chipotle pepper would be enough but this black bean soup could have used at least two. My grocer carried no less than six brands of canned chipotles in adobo sauce, a thick and spicy tomato purée that accents the natural smokiness of the chiles. I made my choice based on a label that appears to depict the cartoon head of Frida Kahlo emerging from a pile of giant raisins.

Another reason for purchasing that cast-iron frying pan was for the express purpose of preparing a bewitching recipe from 1966 reprinted recently in the Times Sunday Magazine, David Eyre’s Pancake. They’re a heavenly cross-bred crepe-pancake. I served mine with Swiss blackberry jam. Oh yes. This recipe is exceedingly simple but puffs up all brown-crusted and rich and eggy like you sweated soufflé-levels hardship into it. This one’s a greasy lil’ keeper.

I grew up in the suburbs of Middle America surrounded by mutant meal items made with convenience foods, entrées like hotdish and fruit-cocktailed Jell-O salads that I forget are chiefly a Midwestern Thing now that I no longer live there. For our office department’s St. Patrick’s Day party tomorrow, I wanted to bake something tonight different than the soda bread I made last year so Google found me a recipe for grasshopper bars on the Betty Crocker website.

“Grasshopper bars? What are those?” was the response from people around the office, their minds filling with a plague of chirping, leaping insects.

“You know, like grasshopper pie but in bar form,” I explained.

“Grasshopper pie?!”

“Crushed Oreo crust, Cool Whip or marshmallow cream filling with crème de menthe . . . ?”

Nothing but stares. I’d Suburbanized myself again. But I was determined to make the recipe anyway. It looked easy, tasty and had that requisite holiday color.

As I prepared the simple brownie base, I wondered why anyone would ever bother using a prepackaged mix when it probably takes only an additional minute to measure out the flour, cocoa, sugar, vanilla, baking powder and salt to blend with the eggs and oil/butter. Scratch tastes better, is “all natural” and most cooks will have the majority of those ingredients hanging around their cupboards anyway.

The bars end up very similar to petits fours with that sugar-butter frosting. But baby, they got real ugly once I cut them into squares. The thin chocolate coating chipped and splintered, giving the tops wear patterns of polished nails after three weeks.

Friday, March 16th Update: My coworkers said they liked the bars as they scarfed down the entire pan faster than the soda bread someone else supplied this year. But I don’t think I’ll make them again. In addition to the chocolate-chipping issue, the frosting was too thick and powdered-sugary plus not as minty as I’d have liked. Perhaps my dusty, forlorn bottle of crème de menthe, the lowliest of the liqueurs, had lost its efficacy. I also learned not to use a metal knife to cut thick bars made in a new Calphalon pan, which now appears to have been mauled by Wolverine.

Mmm. Who likes cornbread? I find it particularly tasty drizzled, when warm, with real maple syrup, on a cold night, as the perfect complement to chili. I made a pan tonight from the simple, serviceable recipe on the back of my bag of Indian Head brand Old Fashioned Stone Ground Yellow Corn Meal. It’s even better, I discovered, when I mix into the batter about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of whole corn kernels.

Like many in my Moosewood cookbook, this recpie makes a hearty cold-weather soup. And, say: saffron is costly. I’d never used it before but knew of its legendary expense. The kind I bought was $2.49 for a half-gram pinch packed in a tiny plastic box. That works out to $2,258.89 per pound, if my math is correct.

Moosewood soup for chilly weather! This one was better than I thought, with its quarter-cup barbecue sauce imparting a smoky-spicy-sweetness. Hearty and goes well with Fritos.

The gazpacho I made this afternoon from a 1968 recipe reprinted in today’s New York Times Sunday Magazine tasted bright and refreshing, but the color was off. It may have been the anemic plum tomatoes I used, but the hue ended up a sort of brownish-Creamsicle. I wonder whether food dye would have make it look more palatable, as one guy recently found making Pepto-Bismol ice cream. Or maybe I should have tracked down some redder tomatoes of the hothouse variety.

The uncooked ingredients look more pretty than the finished product. (That’s the chopped rosemary atop the onions.)

Folks often talk about how soup tastes better the next day, after the spices and flavors have had a chance to mingle. This may be a soup that’s flat-out required to chill overnight because the cornmeal didn’t gel right way, only after the soup had sat and cooled for a half hour or so. It may have been that the meal wasn’t fine enough; I couldn’t find any in the store explicitly labeled as fine-ground.

Man, butter beans: habas grandes. I must start making chili with these. They’re like albino lima beans, only tasty. They make a pretty good soup, too. Moosewood writes that the inspiration for this recipe is a white chili, but it’s closer in texture and taste to a cheese soup that happens to be spicy. Not too bad.

So fresh and so green, this soup is like an earthy, leafy embrace from the Jolly Green Giant himself. It’d likely be even springier had I sprung for homemade stock, but that’d have me rolling around on the floor from the sheer deliciousness.

All the vegetables I used were fresh except the peas, which were frozen. For my shredded greens I used a cup each of spinach and beet greens.

I couldn’t find ground fennel at various grocers, then remembered the Braun coffee grinder I’ve held onto even though I’ve been using Eight O’Clock pre-ground coffee for the past two years. After I cleaned out the coffee gunk with a clean toothbrush, the Braun ground the seeds in a snap. I wondered if this licoricey ingredient would overpower the recipe, but its taste falls back, blends in and lets the greenery holla. This is a perfect soup for a day like today: birds chirping, sunny, 65 degrees and breezy.

Lest you think the very definition of minestrone has been bastardized by the lack of any pasta in this recipe, I can assure you cannellini beans are the next best thing. They’re pasta-colored, pasta-bland and more nutritious. I didn’t miss anything and the Parmesan I liberally sprinkled atop had my brain convinced there was pasta lurking in there somewhere. In fact, a cursory Google shows there are many popular minestrone recipes without pasta.

As for substitutions, I may have made one: is zucchini the same as “green squash”? It sure looked like zucchini. Tasted like it, too.

As long as the vegetables are in season, I’d make this recipe again. If I were making a dinner of it, I’d serve it as an appetizer or first course before a pasta dish. Then the party would move to the veranda for sorbet, cappuccino, witty banter, charades, and after the second jug of Chianti, strip Scrabble.

I exhausted the free soup recipes I wanted to try from the Moosewood website, so I broke down and bought one of their cookbooks. They have many, but not one specifically for soups, so I settled for Moosewood Restaurant Daily Special, which was billed as including recipes for “soups, stews, salads and extras.” If you like mostly vegetarian soups, I can recommend it: a bit less than half the book is soup recipes. It breaks down to include 40 bean and grain soups, 32 vegetable soups, 24 creamy dairy soups, 20 chilled soups, 11 seafood soups and six recipes for stock.

One of Moosewood’s strong points is exotic and intriguing spice combinations, so I decided on the Indian Roasted Eggplant Soup, which included several spices I had to buy that will likely sit in my cupboard never to be used again. After half a dozen stores, I gave up on finding black mustard seeds and just bought the regular yellow ones. And, boy, they really do pop when you cook them in an oiled skillet, in my case, all over the stovetop like a miniature, tightly contained hailstorm.

It was pretty tasty although a chore to prepare the vegetables, particularly the de-skinning; those peppers are stubborn. I’d maybe make this again if it was for an Indian-themed dinner spread, but if I must make another creamy soup, I’ll just stick with that potato-cheese one I really liked. Much easier and just as savory despite the fact that it doesn’t include any spices other than dill. I’ve decided that in general, I like my soups to have more varied textures, with ingredients identifiable by eye.

As I paced the housewares aisle at Kmart tonight, I decided that blenders are like toothbrushes: the base technology, which in both cases is exceedingly simple, has never changed. But that hasn’t stopped marketers from making up additional “features” as a point of difference or so they can re-sell the item to the same consumers multiple times.

The store must have had 20-some selections and my mind whirred with speed options, pitcher styles and button layouts. The one I ended up with, a Hamilton Beach model for about $40, I chose simply because it was fire-engine red. Well, and it had a glass pitcher, which I think would be more durable than a plastic one.

I bought the blender for making another Moosewood soup recipe I got off their site, reprinted from the 1987 cookbook New Recipes from Moosewood Restaurant. I made it mostly without substitutions or additions, other than omitting the parsley garnish. And curiously, in the version of the recipe on Moosewood’s site, dill is mentioned in the steps but not the ingredients list, so I threw in two tablespoons, fresh and chopped, and that seemed about right.

It’s a rich and hearty soup. I’m normally not a fan of cream-based soups because they resemble mud-like pabulum. But this one has flecks of orange from the carrots, tiny pieces of potato skin, and bits of fresh dill.

You could use cream to make the recipe richer (I used 2% milk, which to a skim-raised fellow like myself is cream), but the blend of cream cheese and cheddar cheese don’t fail on the creaminess front. If you’re all about cutting down on fat, the recipe’s authors note you can substitute Neufchatel cheese, which is lower in fat than cream cheese, but has a similar taste and creaminess.

Maybe it’s a lifetime of brainwashing by commercials for Minute Maid and breakfast cereal, but I’ve always had the sense that breakfast must be enjoyed in sunlight, glinting though white-curtained windows off those syrupy griddlecakes and beaming through an iced glass of orange juice. Brunch, too, I seem to have been informed, should be an a.m. affair. But why? Nighttime is often the right time when I have a hankering for French toast.

As on Saturday, I tried again in the late afternoon to purchase a loaf of challah at Zabar’s. Challah lovers must be early risers. The store had one loaf left, but it was “water challah,” lamented my clerk, a bored looking Latino youngster. “No egg,” he added before I had a chance to ask. What do I know of challah? I bought it.

Man, I thought Catholics had it going on in the religious-holiday bread sector. My Mom used to make this glazed braided bread that somehow had whole pastel-dyed Easter eggs embedded in it. But this challah took the cake, as it were. Lightly sweetened, nice crackly glazed surface, simultaneously light and firm in texture, a complex curvature of a pleasing symmetry. I knew it made good French toast; I’ve been to fancy restaurants, too. But I’m thinking it should be a requirement now that I’ve tried it myself, and much more cheaply than a restaurant equivalent—my whole, Chihuahua-sized loaf was only $3.

Here’s the recipe I tried, via megnut.com and written by Bob and Melinda Blanchard from their cookbook Cook What You Love (2005).

The recipe’s authors stress that you use unsweetened coconut instead of the easier-to-find sweetened variety, which they say is too moist and makes the bread soggy. The original recipe called for 1 1/4 cup of coconut and three cups cornflakes, but I think that’s too much, which is why those measurements above have been adjusted. After quadruple coating my egg-dipped pieces of bread, I measured the leftover coconut/cornflakes combo and had just over two cups to spare, which I was loathe to save for reuse because it was tainted with egg snot.

The recipe is messy and it’s not just that you’re getting egg goo and coconut all over your hands. Inevitably, some of the cornflakes come off in the skillet and char until they’re tasty butter-blackened bits of carbon.

But the messy prep is worthwhile for a bruncheon feast both succulent and scrumptious, crisp on the outside, still a bit chewy on the inside. They kind of have the texture and outward appearance of crab cakes. I’d definitely make this recipe again.

I spotted this recipe in the March 22 issue of The New York Times and made it tonight in my slow cooker. It was O.K. It could’ve used more spice. And it wasn’t very attractive, although not much is when it’s crammed in a ceramic bowl under high heat for three hours. Also, I think I just really don’t like pork.

Our department has some hardcore Irish in it so celebrations are aplenty on St. Patrick’s Day. Even at work, it’s a daylong feast of food, decorations and silly hats.

I was directed today to bring in food tomorrow so I emailed Dana in Dublin to get an authentic Irish recipe for “cookies or bread type items.” She responded with this one, supplied by an actual Irish lady who made it for Dana and her housemates.

I converted the heathen Celsius and metric system measurements to American and discovered that the recipe’s original call for “caster sugar” is the same as superfine sugar. (Then I found actual caster sugar at an Upper West Side grocer and bought it even though it was $7 for a pound bag.) Also, the original recipe called for butter but didn’t say what to do with it other than spread it on the finished slices; instead, I melted it and threw it on the dough before baking to enhance taste and browning.

Initially I was concerned that the recipe didn’t contain any baking soda as I thought soda bread would, but a hasty Google revealed three things:

1. Both baking powder and baking soda are leavening agents, which make bread rise.
2. Just like meatloaf, everyone and her mother has her own recipe for soda bread.
3. The reason you cut a cross in the dough is to let the fairies out.

I found other soda bread recipes with baking powder and not baking soda, baking soda and not baking powder, and some with both. Some had eggs, some didn’t. Some skipped out on the sugar. Others insisted on caraway seeds. And there were many passionate bids for specific dried fruits. I chose an even mix of Zante currants and unsulphured dried apricots, which I diced and floured so they didn’t stick together.

Other than the buttering, I stuck to the recipe and I think it was a success. It resulted in what resembles a small UFO-sized scone, which isn’t a bad thing by me. We’ll see how it survives a subway journey downtown and the judgment of my coworkers.

For the dinner of my Stick’a-Butter Saturday, I wanted eggplant parmesan. The recipe I viewed at Epicurious.com was too involved for a dish so simple, so I called Mom for her recipe. If you want to immpress someone, make eggplant parmesan with your own tomato sauce and fresh mozzarella. But if you are hungry for eggplant parmesan and feel you can skip the razzle-dazzle, this recipe’s gold.

The only thing holding me back was that I didn’t have a baking dish. I was happy to not have to trek out to Target in the cold, instead finding one at my local ferreteria, which turns out isn’t a polecat repository after all, but a hardware store. It’s unclear why this hardware store had Pyrex baking dishes, but it was exactly what I sought, only required me to walk a block, cost $11 and will provide years of culinary happiness until I drop it.

With the long holiday weekend calling, I rolled up my sleeves and did some cooking. By the end of the day, I had used most of a stick of butter.

For breakfast, I made pancakes from a recipe I saw mentioned on megnut.com. It’s from Epicurious, Condé Nast’s recipe collection reprinted from its Gourmet and Bon Appétit magazines. This one’s from the April 1998 issue of Bon Appétit.

I learned some things making this dish. Bread goes stale more quickly if you spread it out. I stacked mine on a plate which I covered with a sieve to make less accessible for bugs that may have happened by my kitchen counter. A day later and only the top piece was truly stale; the others were just less soft, which isn’t saying much when you’re dealing with commercial sandwich bread pulsing with multisyllablic chemicals. Instead, I should have put the slices on a cookie sheet and kept them in my unheated oven for protection.

Also, and I admit I had this same problem when I began making grilled cheese sandwiches: once the pan is greased and heated, turn down the damn heat. The first few pancakes were flash-fried and blistered with shameful char spots. The next few, I dampened the flame, but used too much butter, so the pancakes ended up more like crêpes, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

Refrigerating leftover pancakes: it may have been because I hadn’t allowed mine to cool completely, but after stacking and sealing them in a Ziploc bag that I refrigerated, I discovered later several of them had glued together.

But most importantly, how did they taste? Rich and custardy. I thought that with the addition of bread cubes, they would resemble cross-sections of conglomerate rock, but that’s not the case; they look like pancakes. I recommend serving them with U.S. Grade A Dark Amber maple syrup. Some readers on Epicurious.com insisted on adding cinnamon, nutmeg and/or vanilla to spruce up what they perceived as blandness, but my batch’s unadorned sugary-butter-warmth taste was satisying.

I hung around with Dad today as he conducted his last minute Christmas shopping, a time-honored tradition for him. As he explains it, it’s less stressful to purchase gifts a day or two before Christmas because he’s more or less stuck with whatever’s left in stock at the store, so there’s not a lot of aimless fretting about to find particular items. We went to Best Buy, Borders and the local mall, where he was able to knock off the majority of his purchases.

Back home, I made a batch of cookies from a recipe I’d saved from the December 4 issue of the New York Times Sunday Magazine. The recipe is standard for ginger cookies with one major difference—instead of oil, butter or margarine, you use bacon fat, three-quarters of a cup. No, the cookies did not taste like meat. They were in fact savory in their rich scrumptiousness. I think the kosher salt may have even made a difference, pleasantly offsetting the sharp tang of the ginger.

Here’s a sample plate of Christmas cookies: the ginger ones are in the foreground; the rest are new varieties and traditional favorites Mom made.

I found a simple recipe for black bean chili from a list of 100 “healthy” recipes that’s been making the rounds on the internet. Each recipe is billed as requiring less than 30 minutes of combined preparation and cooking time, but this one took me more like 40 minutes. It’s thick, hearty and spicy. Great leftovers, too.

The weather was cool, dark and rainy today, perfect for some salsa, which I made and ate more than half of. Here’s my recipe. It’s purposely basic and you can add ingredients easily, such as drained canned corn or black beans, garlic and chopped peppers.

Andie, Eric and I each laid down our unstoppable cooking skills for our non-traditional Easter dinner. Andie made her famous vegetable lasagna, with lotsa layers, extra cheese and fresh veggies, like eggplant and portabella mushrooms. Eric prepared a big pot of matzo ball soup, which had lots of fresh dill and a rich chicken broth. He carefully tended over the matzos during their cooking and offered us occasional updates on how many were floating and how many were still sunk in the schmaltzy depths of the pot. (Floating matzos are tasty matzos, I learned.)

For my contribution, I tried my hand at my Mom’s peaches-and-cream cheesecake recipe, a rich kind of cake-pie hybrid.

Katie and Erica came over and we chowed down. I went to bed early, but the others stayed up late to play The Settlers of Catan board game, which is a sort of Monopoly-Risk hybrid.

I threw the roast I bought yesterday into the Crock Pot at 10 a.m., along with some carrots, potatoes and celery, a half cup of water, and an envelope of Lipton’s Onion Soup Mix, that miracle foodstuff used for almost everything but making soup. Nine hours later on the low temperature setting and the meal was complete, tender and delicious. (The celery was shriveled, so I think it need to be added later in the cooking process.) I also boiled some noodles and made gravy with the leftover meat juices.

In the middle of tonight’s blustery and icy snowstorm, I made spinach lasagna for dinner using a recipe from The Moosewood Cookbook, which was the source for the Gypsy Soup I made last weekend. It’s one of the signature dishes at their restaurant and I had high hopes.

Alas, I’m not giving you the recipe because I was disappointed in the results. First, I wasn’t keen on the white sauce that served as the base of the recipe. Like any white sauce, it was mainly milk, butter and flour, and I know that’s not exactly a flavor sensation, but this recipe was in dire need of some taste. I’m surprised there wasn’t anything more than a shake of nutmeg in the sauce because Moosewood usually goes bonkers with the spices. The texture of the sauce was nothing to write home about, either. It was like paste, or Soylent Green, except white.

The spinach was fresh and earthy, but I should have added more vegetables—mushrooms, maybe broccoli. As it was, both texture and taste were monotone from all those leafy greens.

Also, I forgot to add the mozzarella. It was one of the middle layers of about 10 total, and I just breezed right over it. I can’t help but think that missing stratum would have aided the texture a bit. At least I remembered the ricotta and the Parmesan, so there was some cheese.

Finally, even though I bought prepackaged spinach, the recipe called for two pounds. That didn’t seem like that much to me until I set about de-stemming it. That took a very, very long time, and in retrospect, it was something I probably didn’t need to do anyway.

On the other hand, the apple crisp I made for dessert turned out great—not that I had any doubts because it was Mom’s easy and time-tested Brown Betty-like version. Have at it! If you can cut an apple without losing a finger, you’re dexterous enough to make this cold-weather dessert.

Tonight I cooked up a meal of Gypsy Soup from The New Moosewood Cookbook, that mainstay of vegetarian cooking by Mollie Katzen. It’s a superb cold-weather soup that’s exotically spiced, hearty and filling. I paired it with some Santa Cecilia malbec wine, made from a thick-skinned grape that the French have designated the least of the six varieties approved for Bordeaux, but which is enjoying a John Travolta-like resurgence of fame in the Mendoza region of Argentina. It’s a rich, dark and buttery wine, and went great with the soup. I rounded out the dinner with a loaf of crusty bread and a wedge of Asiago Fresco, which I chose from among the 150 or so different cheeses at the Andie-recommended Murray’s Cheese, a small, bustling shop on Bleecker Street that’s been around since the ’40s.

Here’s a link to the original recipe for the soup and I’ve listed my version below with a few clarifications and slight substitutions. I have the sneaking suspicion you could get away with buying canned crushed tomatoes to replace step 1. I’d also like remind myself that, in the future, I can buy my spices really cheap at non-grocery stores. CVS, I discovered after I paid many, many dollars for my spices at Gristedes, had the basil, cinnamon and, oddly enough, the bay leaves, in 1.5-ounce plastic containers that were 99 cents each.

The cold weather brought on an intense craving for Mom’s macaroni and cheese. A quick email to the homestead resulted in one back with a PDF of the recipe attached. I whipped up a batch tonight; order restored to chaos. And tasty!