Vintage cocktails: Brandy Daisy

This weekend we went to Delaware for the first time. One of my friends from college was getting married on Saturday, so we drove down on Friday, and met up with other college friends from St. Louis and Baltimore. Our friend getting married had a "rehearsal" dinner for the out of towners, which was lovely, and allowed my children to gorge on Shirley Temples and raspberry lemonades. It was actually the weekend writ small, as we spent pretty much all of our time eating, drinking, looking fabulous, and sometimes swimming. It was excellent (except for the drive there, when and 8 car pile up + Google's poor directions added a full hour to what should have been a 3 hour drive).

We did forget a number of things, however. Robert forgot his razor, so was slightly scruffy (which really just made him look more dangerous). We also forgot Zion's hair gel, for putting up his mohawk, and his tie. He hardly ever spikes his mohawk, so the omission of gel is understandable. His tie wasn't with his suit, however, and since we were packing right before we left I forgot to ask Robert if he knew where it was and we just left without it. As it turns out Robert had no idea where it was, but Zion actually knew, and was most unhappy that he didn't have it. He was quite mopey, and hoped fervently that no other little boys at the wedding would be wearing suits and ties, so that he wouldn't be out-dressed. Our assurances that the tie-less look was totally hip fell on deaf ears, but in the end he had to go the wedding in something, and he knew a tie-less suit was the best he had. And he did look fabulous!

But, getting back to my main point from the last paragraph, we forgot our camera. So almost no pictures, except for this one that Sara's guy took. L to R: Sara, me, Mira, Eleanor. We all lived in the same dorm our freshman year. Aren't we cute??

I also have a picture of today's vintage cocktail! It's all about improving by baby steps, right?

Here she is, the Brandy Daisy.

Brandy Daisy:
2 oz brandy
1/2 oz grenadine
juice of one lemon
Shake over ice. If you're hardcore you can strain out the ice, or you can drink it on ice, like me!

Thoughts: This drink is delicious, and very, very girly. Or, put in Robert's words, "This tastes kind of like alcoholic kool-ade." You can decide for yourself if that's a good thing or a bad thing. You can also adjust the proportions somewhat, adding less grenadine or more lemon for a less sweet drink. I'm not a big brandy drinker, but I think it gives this drink a rich, slightly caramel-y flavor.

A keeper!

Knees and other parts

I dislocated my knee today. This isn't a new thing for me, but it has been a few years since I last did it. It hurts (of course) but worse than that is the frustration of healing the injury. I want to be well now! I feel this particularly keenly at the moment because we're going to a wedding this weekend, and weddings are one of the few chances Robert and I have to dance together. But no dancing on this knee!

At any rate, I was thinking about bodies today, after injuring mine. My friend Madge, over at Be Less Crazy, encourages all of us to appreciate our bodies for how awesome they are, and to count the things they do well for us every day, rather than focusing on our perceived flaws. Like most of us, I tend to take the function of my body for granted, right up until something isn't working! And, as a tall, relatively slender woman, virtually all of the positive feedback I get from the general public about my body is about how it looks, rather than how it functions. And that's how I think about it too, more often than not. For instance, because of my history of dislocating my knees, I have stretch marks on both of them from times when my knee caps have suddenly and violently shot inches away from where they generally hang out. The older I get the more these stretch marks are visible, giving me a kind of fat knee look. Just days ago I was looking in the mirror and sighing (quietly, in my head) about my knees. Or rather, about how my knees look. But knees aren't really for looks, you know?

So today I'm trying, again, to learn to appreciate my function over form. I'll try to remember this when my knees are working perfectly again, bending, stretching and moving easily. I'll love my knees for carrying me around every day, and not sigh at them for bearing some of those scars.

Vintage cocktails: Palisades Cocktail

Ok, here we go! Tonight we tried the first recipe from the Professional Mixing Guide, the Palisades Cocktail. We chose it because we actually had all of the ingredients on hand, and it used bitters which we got in the mail today. The fact that we live near the palisades of the Hudson Valley was just a happy coincidence!

The recipe is as follows:

2 dashes Angostura aromatic bitters, 1/2 dry gin, 1/2 cider. Shake well with cracked ice, strain into cocktail glass.

We used a local hard cider, from Warwick Valley. Just the plain apple stuff (though they told us they'll have a currant cider this week at the farmer's market! I love the seasonal ciders they've recently started; the cherry one was excellent).

Notes: What the hell is a dash, anyway? The Guide insists, rather sanctimoniously, that its instructions should be followed precisely, and that "When it says DASHES, use dashes not drops", however, it fails to actually explain what a dash is. So we just guessed. The first try didn't seem to have enough bitters, but a second try at least gave the drink a noticeable flavor.

Overall: A good, not great drink. As written it was too strong for my taste (Robert wonders if my super smeller status makes me that much more sensitive to stiff drinks), but Robert sipped his way through one. He add more cider to mine, which made it at least acceptable to drink if not actually delicious. Robert reports that as written the recipe produces something similar to straight Calvados, though "not as good".

More vintage cocktails!

I just inherited a small blue book (about 3"x5"). Its titled Professional Mixing Guide and it was published by the Angostura Bitters company in 1947. My copy belonged to my grandmother, and includes a few recipes that she wrote onto the back cover of the book. About half the recipes call for bitters (shocking!), and we didn't have any, so I bought a bottle of them, and tonight we're going to try our first bitters drink.

Unfortunately this book demonstrates how very sparse our liquor cabinet is! I figure we need brandy, vermouth and some type of scotch or whiskey at a minimum to round things out.

I'll be posting when I try a recipe from this book and giving my oh-so-exciting opinion of the drinks. The world needs more vintage cocktails, right?

Baby Watermelons!

I know that, given the prevalence of critters around here, these babies might not ever become adults. But aren't they just the cutest things??

In other garden news, my Isis Candy Shop tomato plants have been hit with what I believe to be fusarium wilt :( I've had to remove two plants so far, and will likely have to pull the remaining one. Sadz.

Gluten free pie crust guesses

I've been fiddling with my GF pie crust recipe for months now. I can make a pretty good GF crust, but not one that was so good I was willing to stop trying something new.

Today I made an amazing GF pie crust. Trouble is, I can't entirely remember what I did! Still, I'm writing down what I think I did now, before I forget that too.

1 c GF flour
4 T unsalted butter
2-3T cream cheese
pinch of salt
some sugar
some xanthan gum (1/4-1/2 tsp? Liel had spilled some on the counter and I just swept that into the bowl. I probably shouldn't admit that)

Pre-baked at 350 (on bottom rack) for 30-ish min. Cooled, wrapped in saran and used the next day.

Zucchini reproduction

Or, what the hell is wrong with my zucchinis?

We grew zucchini (among many other things) back in Goleta. There wasn't much too it- you planted some seeds, a plant or two grew, they produced delicious zucchini. But when I finally planted zucchini here in New York last year, the results were highly disappointing. The plant would blossom, produce a baby zucchini, and everything would look awesome. But then the baby zucchini would stop growing, wither, and rot on the vine. I thought maybe it was because we had a damp, cool summer and hoped this year would be better.

And at first it looked like it would be. My oldest zucchini plant was HUGE, much bigger than last year. It had gorgeous enormous flowers, and then baby zucchinis! They looked bigger than last year's, and I relaxed. Everything would be fine.

But everything wasn't fine. The first baby zucchini stopped growing and shriveled up. Panicked I searched the internet again, and this time found suggestions that my plant might not be getting pollinated. This surprised me a bit, because we have bees around here. Big fat black and yellow bees and little golden honey bees (one even stung Liel the other night). Nonetheless I decided to take the internet's advice and help my zucchini plant have sex, since the bees apparently weren't doing so and I was desperate to have the thing actually produce. It takes up a lot of room in my garden, you know?

First thing I had to learn was the difference between male and female flowers. This, it turns out, is ridiculously easy as the females are attached to a small zucchini and the males aren't. They're only open for a little while each morning, but when they are you're supposed to take a paint brush, dip it in the pollen from a male flower and then brush the pollen off into a female flower. Easy. Sadly, I found this information too late to save one of the two zucchinis currently on my plant, but I did save the other! Their flowers only give you a couple of days in which to pollinate them and then they shut down and the zucchini dies. Here's a picture of the one I saved and the one I didn't. There are other baby zucchinis on the plant (as well as on one of my other zucchini plants) but none of them are big enough to be pollinated yet.

The rest of the garden is looking awesome, especially since my gladiolas started blooming.

I've been pollinating the cucumbers too (on the left side of this picture, behind the smaller zucchini plants) and they seem to love it as they're really trying to take over everything!