Martini

I have a few extra minutes this evening since Andrea is working on another of Rachel Ray’s 30 Minute Meals.

My favorite cocktail is pretty simple – gin and tonic. I’ll try other things and certainly enjoy many of them, but it remains my steady favorite. Over the last few years, I’ve been slowly working my way through the various brands of gin available from my local small liquor store. So far, I’ve only found one, New Amsterdam Smooth Gin, that I actively dislike in a gin and tonic.

It’s been sitting in my small liquor cabinet since shortly after Christmas, unique in its nearly full bottle. I’ve been pondering ways to get rid of it that don’t involve pouring it down the drain, and I’m sure I can mix it with some sort of witches’ brew for our annual Halloween party.

This evening I decided to mix it with a martini; maybe other tastes will blunt the sickly sweet cotton candy flavor?

I started with a recipe from Aerobleu Martini Diaries:

The Last Worthless Evening Martini
4 ounces dry English gin
dash of dry vermouth
dash of bitters
shake in an iced shaker

I wasn’t willing to trust my entire martini to this sweet gin, so I used half Tanqueray and half New Amsterdam. I’m happy to say it’s a hit! Andrea and I both like it, though I admit with two young kids, it’s been so long since I’ve had or made a martini, I don’t have a recent basis for comparison. 3 stars! I’d definitely do this one again.

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The Annual Dove Hunt

Last year I went on my first dove hunt at my uncle David’s place near St. Matthews, SC. No one told me what to bring, so I just showed up with my shotgun, a bottle of water and a box of shells. There were twenty people spaced around a few disused fields, and plenty of doves for anyone with a little patience to shoot the limit of twelve doves.

Today was my second dove hunt, and there were no doves, but I didn’t realize it at first. There were birds zipping around, maybe it seemed they were a little faster than last year because despite the half box of shells I shot at them in the first half hour I was out in the fields, and I couldn’t hit a single one. I wondered to myself, ‘why is this so much harder than last year?’ when my cousin’s husband, John, walked over and politely told me I could shoot at those birds all day if I wanted to, but it was unlikely I’d hit one because they’re sparrows, which are much smaller and faster than doves.

So I stopped shooting and watched the birds flit around, and sure enough, the three doves I saw looked and behaved much differently from the sparrows. There were also a bunch of blackbirds but luckily even my city boy’s eye didn’t get THOSE confused.

Next year I’m going to take my camera as well as my shotgun.

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Relativistic cooking with Rachel Ray

Rachel Ray is one of those Food Network hosts who always seems to have a couple of shows on the TiVo. I first remember seeing her show $40 a Day, about the Sedona, AZ, the town where my mother lived at the time. In my experience visiting Sedona, most of the food available there was both expensive and crappy, so the show had a good hook for me. The meals she chooses typically look pretty far from filling, but our typical portion sizes are much too big anyway, and her on-screen persona is so preternaturally cheery it makes anything she does look like fun.

Recently Andrea picked a menu from Rachel Ray 30-Minute Meals 2. The premise is that she’s designed these scrumptious menus that can be prepared in 30 minutes. The’re usually good but I don’t buy the time limit — she lists her ingredients in their prepared state, and both Andrea and I suspect she starts her timer from this state — the mise en place is in place so to speak.

Here’s our menu:

Chicken Fried Steak with Creamed Pan Gravy and Biscuits
Southern Green Beans
Quick Chocolate Banana Cream Pie

When her timer starts, the green beans have already been trimmed and chopped, the bacon has been chopped, and the small onion has been minced. I don’t really object to this practice, but it means the menus in her book can be cooked in 30 minutes, if you’ve already done all the prep work and are experienced enough in the kitchen to manage multiple recipes on a tight schedule.

As for the mise en place, in the Introduction for this book, Ms. Ray admits she doesn’t precisely measure ingredients, either: “A tablespoon is a palmful to me, or for liquids, once around the pan in a slow stream.” That has to save some time! And speaking of time, she seems to know something about space and time that I must have missed: “Begin the first recipe, then, as you create pockets of time, begin the next recipe.”

These 30-Minute Meals also involve shortcuts, so if you have more time to cook and you spot a shortcut, it can be worthwhile to omit it in the name of better flavor.

I’m sure Rachel would agree and I doubt she’d mind — I do wonder how long it would take her to simmer my favorite mushroom risotto.

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NIM goes Trashifarian

No Impact Man (NIM) goes dumpster diving with the Freegans, or as I prefer to call them, the “Trashifarians.” If this term takes hold everyone, starting with the almighty Google, should know I thought of it first:

No results for Trashifarians found on Google as of 2007-08-27

I first used the term in conversation with my in-laws as early as Thanksgiving 2006. NIM’s recent article has compelled me to use it online, but I digress. Of course, the term’s similarity to “trustifarian” is completely intentional. The Trashifarians enjoy remarkable social advantages that afford them the freedom and flexibility to dumpster dive for their free pain au chocolat from Pain Quotidien on 8th Street in New York City, not least of which is living close enough to 8th Street and being under-employed enough to forage there for food.

Check out the Freegan Philosophy, the URL of which asks the question, “Why buy?” Well, let’s see, I’ll take a swing at that one: Without me and many others like me, “devote to waged labor” and buying food “using funds from jobs where we either are exploited or exploit others,” there would be no dumpsters for you to dive, let alone proverbial cake for you to fish out of them.

Sure, a few priveleged 20-somethings can forage a livable existence pulling scraps from dumpsters in big, rich cities, but try scaling that to feed the world’s rural poor, and I think you’ll find your philosophy isn’t up to the reality of the task.

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Elena starts cruising

Elena Pulls Up

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