In Which Grain is Exchanged For Grape, with a great spiritual uplifting

Well it seems even my quiet lobe of the internet (the lobe that is whiskey-related, not streamable jazz flute music or the history of exotic tree barks) has been invaded by Big Media, with the recent deluge of taunting clickbait about the looming "whiskey shortage". Is nothing free from the charnel taint of the Content Mill? I put "whiskey shortage" in quotation marks to show that I know the entire concept to be spurious, just another cataclysm-of-the-day aimed at gumming up a news cycle already swollen with dubious threats and tedious regurgitation. If the inability to purchase Pappy Van Winkle, something you possibly neither knew or cared about 3 years ago, causes you heartache then perhaps it serves you right to suffer. You Will Die before even the worst liquor store has less than an aisle of whiskies available for you to purchase, many of them cheaper than even a mid-range bottle of wine.

While shortage is the wrong term, there is unquestionably a whiskey Gentrification of sorts occurring. Prices (not costs) are up across the board, with the sharpest increases among enthusiast whiskies (aka "lawyer whiskey") which reluctantly prices out many who have never IPO'd. Oh well. Yoghurt Liqueur is still affordable.

Should your preferred bottle become hard to find, maybe that is a sign from God that you should stop being so boring and branch out. The world of whiskey is broad, with enormous variations in flavor and something for everyone.  Bourbon is often characterized by its sweetness, heavy with vanilla and cinnamon. Scotch, more expansive, is iconically linked with the honeyed Speyside malts or the bolder peated whiskies of Islay. Craft Whiskey is most profoundly flavored by oak; raw, overextracted, sawdusty oak, like a chair leg jammed into a bottle through a perverse combination of greed and incompetence.

Why the polemic? The topic has been on my mind, as I am struggling to find a purpose for a particularly egregious craft whiskey. I'm not one to turn my nose up at anything with liquor in it (see my ongoing battle with Florentino) but something about a less-than-year old whiskey that is RED gets the bile duct on overdrive.

Well I've been sitting, staring at the bottle of it now for an entire bowl of oatmeal and have made little progress towards acceptance. Let's have some grappa.

The Herb-of-Grace bestows some civility on a fraught morning

Rue (ruta graveolens), Herb-of-Grace, is a Mediterranean herb once fairly common which seems to have fallen out of favor. It was used for many unlikely purposes, as you might imagine a pre-Internet civilizations would try to apply something they grew in the their gardens to the problems at hand. Eyewash, an anti-magical herb to prevent witchcraft related indigestion while eating with strangers, and also fried in batter or as a salad green. It was also a universal poison antidote, despite being somewhat toxic. I know more about it but am tired of typing, so visit this wonderful site to learn more. The most lasting use and the one most relevant to me, has been to aromatise and flavor grappa. Grappa alla ruta. It adds a heaviness to the grappa, a slightly vegetable bitterness, with a musky lemon aroma. Quite nice. Easy enough to make, just snip a few fresh leaves prior to flowering from the plant you had the foresight to plant 2 years ago, and allow to macerate in grappa or white brandy for 1 month. The plant can cause Phytophotodermatitis in hot weather, so avoid that.

Let's end this post on a different note than we started, with some Elizabethan poetry.

'Then sprinkles she the juice of rue,

With nine drops of the midnight dew

From lunarie distilling.

In Which The Root of Shirking Is Uncovered

One of the greater obstacles to keeping a rigorously updated blog, beyond the crushing limitations of time (DEATH IS INESCAPABLE), is my lack of empathy for the audience. All day long, my glowing brain churns up a frothing slurry of brilliance, my skull crowding with spiteful bon mots and ferociously innovative cocktail ideas. Meanwhile the oppressive specter of Charity nags that I should share these delightful insights with the teeming throngs. Why should one so obviously gifted in such a gamut of capacities not try to brighten the days of the Damned?  But once I settle in to really GIVE BACK to society, Charity is quickly bludgeoned into silence by Desire For Nap and the luminous pearls of the day's mental exertions slip through the cracks.

Where does Desire For Nap come from? The original germ of it doesn't lurk in my blood, being built from robustly Puritan stuff my heart beats to the scheme of "WORK HARDER - MAN'S LOT IS TO TOIL". So the desire for a nap must be a foreign importation. Perhaps it lurks within the Absinthe Milkshake?

Free Will & Divine Providence

1.5 oz Absinthe
4 oz Avocado flavored Ice Cream which is a real thing and not a sick joke
1.5 oz Mint Simple Syrup
1.5 oz Some Kind Of Dairy (I Forget)
1 Egg
1/2 Lime
Ice

Step 1 - Make a To Do list. Don't feel limited to things you have to accomplish today, go ahead and include broad, far-reaching goals like "Grow Even Taller", "Make A Shitload Of Money" or "Wash Dishes".
Step 2 - Stare at list for 10-15 minutes, with increasingly mounting anxiety. Feel depressed that item #1 is "Eat Breakfast" even though it's past 10.
Step 3 - Get out blender to make yogurt smoothie, realize that you are out of yogurt but have plenty of Absinthe.
Step 4 - Combine ingredients and blender to milkshake consistency. Quickly decide that this would taste better in the bathtub.
Step 5 - While using To Do list as bookmark, accidentally render illegible by dropping it in the tub. Interpret this as Divine Providence, and when done in tub take a nap.

I consider the Absinthe Suissesse to be in the Pantheon of breakfast cocktails, the bibulous and overstuffed Dionysus compared to the Gin Fizz's Hermes. While I'm sure this imbibe recipe produces an excellent drink, I dispense with much of it and retain only the Absinthe, Heavy Cream, Egg and simple syrup (ideally mint, but practically whatever is in the fridge). For lighter fare, I will omit the Egg & Heavy Cream and instead use Soy Milk which is bizarrely tasty. For heavier fare, see the above recipe. 

Mixology Monday LXXXV Nuts - In Which Jupiter Features Prominently

I received another reminder of just how rapidly my life is speeding away from me, as apparently somehow it is again time for another Mixology Monday.*  This month is hosted at the distressingly well-photographed http://stirandstrain.com/, with the theme of nuts.

Nuts? Yes! A few months back I tried, and was wowed by, a peanut-y take on an Old Fashioned at a bar here in L.A. They had infused peanuts in bourbon and with a touch of honey had made magic. Nuts of all sorts make it into cocktails now. Some black walnut bitters here, the sweet almond flavor of orgeat there… circus peanuts. Your challenge is to utilize nuts (and since we’re NOT adhering to the strict rules of what are nuts, peanuts and walnuts both count) in any way you see fit to create a cocktail. Infusions, bitters, almond tinctures are all game. Amaretto, homemade nocino, Frangelico too. Go nuts!

I was aware that peanuts are in fact not nuts, having heard people tediously repeat that they are legumes for my entire life, but transmuting that fact into knowledge requires adopting a more complicated and nuanced world view than I feel I really require. The idea that walnuts are not nuts either is almost too much to bear. Verily, is there any logic to the world if the nuts of Jupiter, King of the Gods and Lord of Thunder, can't lay claim to the title?  

Jupiter chillin on a Cloud with some nymph

Walnuts, Juglans regia (lit. Jovis glans or 'Jupiter's Nuts'), have an array of uses, few of which are suggestive of a gastronomic delight. Did you know the fruit can be used for hair dye, the bark used for 'healing indolent ulcers', the nut meat for furniture polish, and according to good ol' Culpepper the leaves if "taken with onions, salt, and honey, they help with the biting of a mad dog"? That was a very long sentence and I have significant doubts whether it was properly claused and punctuated.

Additionally, if the unripe, green walnuts are chopped and soaked in alcohol for a while they will yield a surprisingly normal tasting digestif liqueur called Nocino (or possible Vin de Noix or maybe Orohovac). Slightly bitter with a warming baking spice (cinnamon, powdered ginger, clove, brown sugar) flavor, it makes an excellent post dinner drink or a more-versatile-than-anticipated cocktail ingredient.

According to tradition, in Italy the walnuts are picked the night of June 23rd for the Feast of John the Baptist. A website which Google very poorly translated for me claims that in addition to nut gathering-

People started from all the districts of Rome , by the light of torches and lanterns, and concentrated in St. John Lateran to pray to the saint and eat snails in the inns and cabins specially prepared for the party. The snails were a customary dish , because the tradition was " a lot of snails , so many horns for witches ."

In Portland, the walnuts seem to be ready around then too or maybe a little farther into June. If you aren't able to find green walnuts, just drink one of the several thousands other liqueurs that are available in your local liquor store. The internet is teeming with recipes and there is a lot of latitude for process and ingredients. Basically you want to chop up around 25-31 nuts per liter, soak them in alcohol for about 2-3 months maybe with a bit of clove, lemon zest, cinnamon or vanilla, then strain, add cold simple syrup to taste, rest 3 months, then strain again and bottle. At the distillery, we make Nocino with a mixture of unaged Rye Whiskey and aged Pinot Noir Brandy because we fancy. At home, I make it with rum because there are many cheap delicious rums. The internet tells you vodka, but the internet is composed of the same people you see when you are out in the world at the post office or grocery store and so I don't tend to put too much stock in their advice.

This particular batch was made by Margarett, so the recipe details are unknown but in general it follows the above guide lines. It tastes best after sitting in bottle for at least a year. What to do with it? How about a Manhattan? That seems easy and doesn't require me to get the citrus juicer dirty.

While some might shrivel at using a $50/half bottle of whiskey in a cocktail, I would suggest that those people need a remedial class in Ballin' (Ballin' 101 - How to Silence Your Inner Critic). More practically, my degree in accounting tells me that using $6 worth of whiskey at home is still cheaper than spending $12 for a drink in a bar, with the almost priceless bonus of being able to drink it in the bathtub. Also, the bottle was free...

Not Effective As Hair Dye
1.5 oz Whiskey (I used Westward Whiskey, a bourbon would suffice)
3/4 oz Nocino
Dash Regan's Orange Bitters

Mix over ice and stir for 30 seconds. Strain and the spend the rest of the evening struggling for a name that isn't a groan-inducing 'nut' pun. 

*Some might assert that it is actually Tuesday and not Monday, but they are operating under the fallacy of linear time.

In Which I Learn A Lot About Armenia But Relay Little

Things might appear abandoned round these parts, but fear not, while Hephaestus may be a spotty chronicler, the forge fires still burn bright. Why, you might wonder, in the face of utter indifference, continue to struggle onward? "What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! [...] To give birth to an idea - to discover a great thought - an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plow had gone over before."

Sometimes, to some people, that nugget is a drink. Like all triumphs, this was born out of great suffering - namely, Margarett cooking from Yotam Ottolenghi's "Jerusalem" cookbook.

While some households accumulate dust on the flat surfaces of their home, ours accumulates cookbooks. And also dust. And liquor bottles. And cat hair. The dust and cat hair are hard to divine any significance from, but the cookbooks are the tea leaves by which I read the upcoming week's meals. Some sightings, like a bookmarked page in Tadashi Ono's "Japanese Soul Cooking", can lift the heart as much as any rare bird. "The Joy Of Cooking" is as constant a presence as gravity, and doesn't provide many clues since it includes seemingly every existent and non-existent (Woodcock In Cream Sauce) human food. Others are a portent of grim times and empty bellies ahead; perhaps a vegetarian cook book left open on the bowel shredding, indigestible Sunchoke, or a dog-eared recipe for 'lentils' with a handwritten note to "Feed Andy More Punishment Food". When Yotam Ottolenghi's "Plenty" makes an appearance on the bedside table, I know I'll need to tighten my belt another notch and starting hunting for fast-food coupons. I've come to suspect that an Ottolenghi cookbook is a mandatory inclusion in the Yuppie Gourmet Starter Kit, along with your maldon salt and 'eco-friendly' bamboo cutting board.

The bit about great suffering was actually a rare moment of hyperbole. The 'Chicken with caramelized onion & cardamom rice' was perfectly fine and choked down without issue. (Ed note - To be fair, I just flipped through "Jerusalem" and some of it looked tasty. I can't seem to find any of the pathetic grain salads Margarett served in lieu of actual dinner. Maybe I should complain less. Well, rather than try to revise the previous paragraph to fit my now altered world view, I will press on to the cocktail section.) The recipe also yielded roughly two drinks worth of barberry flavored simple syrup. Barberries are quite tart, with a somewhat similar flavor to currants. Arak (a broad array of middle eastern anise spirit) would have been a more thematic choice for liquor, but my robustly American sense of geography is poor enough to think that Armenia is pretty close. Churchill is apocryphally quoted to have said that the keys to longevity are "Cuban cigars, Armenian brandy and no sport!" something that rings quite true to my ears. It was difficult to find more information on this particular bottle, as I'm not sure how hard you have to hit the keyboard to produce that letter in the middle. AP [something foreign] AX yielded few google results. To finish, a sliver of salt-cured preserved lemon which adds a quite nice something or other to the proceedings. This was a hit.

Purely Decorative Tajine
1.5 oz Armenian Brandy
3/4 oz Barberry Simple Syrup
Juice Of Half A Lemon
2 thin strips of Preserved (salted) Lemon Peel

Mix all ingredients except lemon peel in a shake with ice, and make a cocktail out of them. Then, once you have the cocktail, garnish it in a nice way with the preserved lemon. Maybe rub a bit on the lip of the glass, unless you have bloody lips for some reason, in which case you would find their salty acidity quite painful.

Barberry Syrup was made by simmering an ounce of barberries in a 1:1 simple syrup for ~15 min, and then straining once cooled.