Perpetual Carouse

Everybody needs an I Like Bacon T-shirt, right?

Photo by pbody

Some recipes call for muddled mint, Mojito style (like the excellent julep in this picture from Farmer Brown), but my favorite juleps take a bit of extra work.

Mint Julep

• 3 parts whiskey or bourbon, preferably Woodford Reserve, or Maker's Mark
• 1 part mint syrup
• Finely crushed ice
• Mint for garnish

Fill a glass with ice. Add whiskey and syrup, give a quick stir, and garnish with a mint leaf.

Mint Syrup

• 2 cups water
• 2 cups sugar
• 1 handfull of fresh mint

Heat the water and sugar in a saucepan over a medium flame, stirring until sugar is completely dissolved. Add mint, and let cool. Place syrup mixture in refrigerator for 24 hours to allow the mint to infuse into the syrup. Strain out the mint and discard.

Syrup will keep, refrigerated, for 10 days.

Via Philadelphia Inquirer, a recipe for Bourbon Ball Milkshakes, from Lynn's Paradise Cafe in Louisville. The Paradise Cafe was the site of the breakfast episode of Bobby Flay's Throwdown.

• 1/3 cup chocolate chips
• 1/3 cup walnuts
• 6 to 8 scoops vanilla ice cream
• 1 oz. good bourbon
  (Woodford Reserve or Maker's Mark)
• 1 tablespoon cream
• whipped cream & whole walnuts, for garnish

Whip all the (non-garnish) ingredients in a blender and pour into a tall parfait glass.
Serve topped with whipped cream and walnuts.

Sammy Hagar still can't drive 55, but he can sell his Cabo Wabo-brand tequila for 80.

$80 Million, that is.

I recently did an interview with Kara Zuaro, author of I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen With Your Favorite Bands. If you're unfamilliar, it's a collection of recipes from mostly indie-rock bands including Death Cab For Cutie, Camera Obscura, Calexico, Belle and Sebastian, The Violent Femmes and a ton of others. The interview is pending publication elsewhere, but look for an extended version-- plus a special bonus recipe straight from Kara's grandma-- here at Perpetual Carouse soon.

In the meantime, pick up a copy here. Where else are you going to find The Decemberists' pork loin recipe (the preparation of which does not involve wearing pantaloons, by the way)?

The other day I was at the supermarket, and I couldn't help but pick up this strange fruit, apparently called a horny melon. I haven't tasted it yet, but some Googling tells me that it's supposed to taste like a cross between kiwi and cucumber.

I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around that particular flavor combo, but I'm certainly curious to see how it all works out.

[TasteSpotting #1621]

Kool-Aid pickles violate tradition, maybe even propriety. Depending on your palate and perspective, they are either the worst thing to happen to pickles since plastic brining barrels or a brave new taste sensation to be celebrated.
-NY Times, on Kool-Aid pickles

The article is definitely worth a click, especially for the photos. Even though it sounds utterly disgusting, I'm fascinated by the idea of a Kool-Aid pickle. I haven't encountered them in the wild, so something tells me I may have to do a little experiment.

According to the Times, pickles made with "the red flavor family" of Kool-Aid are the most popular.

Bravo's third installment of Top Chef gets going June 13th at 10 PM. Based on the early press materials, Bravo has finally realized that Padma is more interesting when she doesn't say much. They've brought on Queer Eye's Ted Allen as a judge, and Padma is now credited simply as "host," so here's hoping she's absent from the judges' table this season.

The 15 chefs will be hunkered down at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, and it appears that there aren't any local dogs in this fight. Bummer!

It looks like a pretty standard field of contestants: some caterers, several working chefs, a C.I.A. grad, a few self-taught folks, and a cheesemaker. Already, I'm pulling for her (Sara M.) because cheesemakers are bad-ass, and because of that whole "Blessed are the cheesemakers" thing in The Life of Brian.

Looking over the bios, a few things jumped out at me. Dale gets cool points for basically naming a grilled cheese sandwich as his signature dish, but then they get taken away when he mentions "flavor math." But wait! Cool points reinstated for having the balls to say so early in the game that the other contenstants are going to get "outcooked by a queer."

Howie gets a big question mark for "scallops with chorizo and corn emulsion" as a favorite simple recipe. First of all it doesn't sound simple, and secondly, I know what an emulsion is, and I also know that "emulsion" sounds incredibly unappetizing as the name of a dish. No doubt the word has a technical purpose, but that ain't exactly sounding like yum, you know?

Lia gets props for naming guac as her favorite simple recipe, although I can already tell you that my guacamole is better, and Micah's signature guava-chili glazed lamb chop with passion fruit-mint sauce sounds awesome. Notice how she didn't say "emulsion?"

Full contestant bios after the jump, if you're that kind of person.

There's an interesting post about the 2007 James Beard Awards over at Serious Eats, specifically about the conspicuous lack of non-white people in attendance. Given that the restaurant industry on virtually every level pretty much lives and dies by the the labor of immigrants and people of color, it does seem at least noteworthy that the crowd at such an event skews so Caucasian. Ed Levine described the event thusly: "It was like being at a hockey game, only everyone was wearing tuxes."

It seems this self-segregation-- some might say racism-- isn't going unnoticed, but what's really being done? If Bourdain's blog post from a few weeks back tells us anything, it's that the Beard Foundation isn't doing a whole lot to help matters, and underrepresentation of non-white people in the food world is certainly not exclusive to them.

I live in one of the most racially diverse cities in America, but whenever I go anywhere that isn't fast-food, the racial makeup certainly doesn't match the demographics of the area. Socioeconomics certainly plays a role, but that isn't the whole story. Perhaps it's time to start thinking a bit about what other forces are at work, especially in an industry where people of color perform the bulk of the work for a tiny slice of the proverbial pie. It's not my intent to get too political here, but the situation certainly is hard to ignore, especially when the photographic evidence is so teling.

Via Instructables: Make your own chocolate Han Solo in carbonite. Totally awesome. The technique can be applied to just about anything, but seeing as I don't have Han Solo in carbonite laying around, I might have to settle for chocolate dog toys or chocolate house keys or chocolate half-empty bottles of Maker's Mark.

Well, not me thankfully.

Over at Applesauce, there's a post about a woman accidentally eating a $62 burger at Laurent Tourondel's joint in NYC. Bummer! Apparently she ordered the American Kobe burger ($12) and received (and was billed for) the $62 Japanese Kobe version. If she was indeed served the Japanese version, I figure it's the restaurant's problem. If you've got two items with nearly identical names and vastly different prices on your menu, your staff better be making damn sure they're getting the orders correct.

I've never had Japanese Kobe, but I can't imagine it would be that much better than any decent local beef, Kobe-style or not. I'm guessing that whole point-of-diminishing-returns thing probably kicks in at around $10 for a burger. I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong; if you've got some Kobe to send me, get in touch.

In honor of my sister-in-law's birthday today, my kick-ass margarita recipe:

Old-School Scratch Margaritas

• 1 part tequila (Get the good stuff. I'm a Herradura man, myself, but the S-I-L is a Patron woman.)
• 1 part Cointreau
• 1 part margarita mix, from scratch

Shake with lots of ice, pour into a glass (salted, if you like), add a squeeze of lime, enjoy! They're really potent.
You've been warned.

Margarita Mix

• 1 part fresh lime juice
• 1 part fresh lemon juice
• 1-2 Oranges
• Zest of your lemons and limes
• Sugar
• Salt

Juice your limes and lemons into separate containers.

Mix equal parts lemon and lime juices in an large airtight container.
Add the orange juice, lemon and lime zest, and sugar to taste. You're shooting for the mix to be a touch on the sweet side, since it will be diluted somewhat in the final drink. Not too sweet, though. We're making cocktails here, not Slurpees.
Add a heavy pinch of kosher salt. Maybe two if you're making a big batch of mix.
Seal your container, and store in the fridge for 24 hours, shaking vigorously every now and then.
Strain out the zest, and start making cocktails!

Leftover mix can be stored in the fridge for a few days, or frozen for next time.

Next week is San Francisco Cocktail Week. Bars all over town will be serving up special drinks,in honor of the 201st birthday of the cocktail. Yay!

If you need a few drink ideas, check out this week's edition of The Onion, where myself and a few others picked our local favorites. If you just can't wait until next week for the festivities to begin, you can always make your own Margarita, Mint Julep, or even a Bourbon Ball Milkshake.

I've started reading Julie & Julia, the book that came from The Julie/Julia Project blog.

The idea was that Julie Powell was going to cook every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in one year... in her small New York apartment kitchen.

So far, I'm not too impressed with the book. The original blog is pretty entertaining, but in book form it's just not working for me. There are these fictionalized accounts of Julia Child's life that completely break the flow, and I'm not really sure why anyone would be interested in Julia Child fiction anyway. I suspect that the book deal might have been based on creating a certain amount of new material that hadn't appeared in the blog or something.

I also wish the book would talk more about the food. The book seems focused on the personal dramas surrounding such a huge undertaking, but somehow I just haven't gotten drawn in enough to care about the author's brother, or her friend Sally, or the fact that Julie and her husband aren't having sex all that often. I would be interested in the trials and tribulations of classic French cuisine in a shitty apartment kitchen, though.

I'm sticking with it, for now. Maybe it'll grow on me, but my first impression is that the blog was more interesting than the book. But what do I know? She did score a six-figure advance on Julie & Julia, and I read somewhere that the advance on her next book was significantly larger, although of course I can't find a source now that I'm looking for it.

Last night, I was slogging my way through Julie & Julia in an attempt to at least finish the book. My dog was laying on my chest, as he's wont to do when we're up late reading on the couch. As I skimmed past yet another scattered anecdote trying to get to get to the cooking part, the dog poked the book out of the way with his nose, looked me in the eye, and let out this exasperated sigh. Then he put his head back down.

I took that as a sign. Even the dog wasn't engaged in the book.

So I skipped to the end.

Yeah, she cooked all the recipes. Hope I didn't just ruin it for you.

I cracked open Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, which I had just picked up at the library on Saturday. I'm only a few pages in, but it's far more compelling reading.

Over the weekend, I finally enjoyed one of my local food-items-of-lust: a Guinness Stout/ espresso/ chocolate milkshake over at Rudy's Can't Fail Cafe. Rudy's took over the venerable Eugene's a few years back, and has turned the space into a retro style (sort-of) punk rock diner.

Food: Good
Atmosphere: Good
Prices: A wee bit expensive, considering that it's diner food. A burger, some pancakes, and the shake were almost $40 with tip. Burger was good, although Rudy's does commit the sin of not using Heinz ketchup.

Anyway, the shake. It was really good, though sadly a 16oz glass is all you get. No tin with the leftover shake or anything. It's mostly sweet, but there is a certain beery bitterness to it that gives it great depth of flavor. It's the kind of thing that's there if you know what you're looking for, but you could probably pass it off as a regular coffee/chocolate shake to someone who didn't know the taste of Guinness. That would be an utter waste of Guinness though, so keep the shake for yourself.

My only suggestion would be to forgo the Hershey's syrup and use some sort of really dark chocolate instead. The stout gives it a deep roasty flavor that would be awesome playing off some dark chocolate notes. Except if they did that, I'd never be able to drive by the restaurant without stopping. Perhaps it's better as-is.

Chow is reporting that at least one of Top Chef loser Foam Boy's Marcel Vigneron's recipes for a recent Wired article is cribbed from a nearly identical preparation by Wylie Dufresne at WD-50. Marcel of course added a foam...an innovation pioneered by Ferran Adria years ago. Dufresne is reportedly not amused.

In other Top Chef news, season one winner Harold Dieterle finally opened Perilla this month.

Come on. You know you've always wanted to try Dwight Yoakam's Chicken Lickin's Buffalo Style Bites.

Thankfully, Biggles over at Meathenge sacrificed himself to the bites, so nobody else has to.

Do the Buffalo Style Bites belong to Chicken Lickin, or does Dwight Yoakam just have apostrophe-abusing copywriters?

132 people waited overnight in the parking lot of Phoenix Chick-fil-A restaurant for the chance to win 52 free meals at the restaurant. The first 100 customers through the door at 6:30 the next morning got the goods, and the other 32 people got...a chance to win 52 free meals.

If you missed out, don't worry. The restaurant does a similar promotion every time a new outpost opens, and ChickenPack keeps tabs on new store openings (although curiously the site doesn't mention the Phoenix opening).

And by the way... Chick-fil-A is a big supporter of Focus on the Family, James Dobson's ultra-conservative, gay-bashing, right-wing Christian "nonprofit," so depending on which way you swing, you shouldn't eat there. Or eat there a lot, I guess. Just so you know.

Went to a hole-in-the-wall Southeast Asian restaurant for dinner tonight. It was definitely the kind of place that gets by on good word-of-mouth. The storefront looks pretty desolate and run down, but the food was delicious. The glassed-in back patio was an extremely pleasant surprise, and the "Beer Chicken" was a definite winner. Papaya salad was also excellent, and the lemongrass beef was also worth another go.

The waitress gave us these strange candies with the bill. They has an almost butterscotch-y creaminess, but also an earthy, fruity flavor. I can't put my finger on it. Tamarind maybe? The scan didn't come out too well, but the wrapper is metallic brown with magenta, silver and yellow.

Free yourself from the tyranny of corporate soda! Do it yourself with the open-source OpenCola.

And, uh, just in case you think OpenCola might be more... virtuous than your standard corporate soda, don't be fooled.

When you make cola, you basically end up filling a glass with sugar and then adding just enough water and ancillary ingredients to get it to dissolve.
-Cory Doctorow, on OpenCola

OpenCola

Flavoring

• 3.50 ml orange oil
• 1.00 ml lemon oil
• 1.00 ml nutmeg oil
• 1.25 ml cassia oil
• 0.25 ml coriander oil
• 0.25 ml neroli oil
• 2.75 ml lime oil
• 0.25 ml lavender oil
• 10.0 g gum arabic
• 3.00 ml water

Concentrate

• 2.00 tsp (10 ml) flavoring
• 3.50 tsp (17.5 ml) 75% phosphoric acid or citric acid
• 2.28 l water
• 2.36 kg granulated white sugar
• 0.50 tsp (2.5 ml) caffeine (optional. use caution)
• 30.0 ml caramel color

Popped into farmerbrown last night for a bite and a cocktail. They serve up one of my favorite drinks right now, the Dark & Stormy. Dark rum, house-made ginger beer, lime, and a touch of nutmeg. It's awesome.

I've eaten there several times at the bar, but this time opted for a table. We weren't in the mood for a full meal, but shared a salad of sweet potatoes and greens in a bright vinaigrette and the cheese grits. Lately, I've been having a fascination with grits and/or polenta. Being freaked out by the amount of corn in everything we eat nonwithstanding, I think I'm on something of a grits kick.

Anyway, the grits were delicious and creamy, but they could have used a good pinch of salt. I suspect that had I eaten them in their true role as a side to something else on the menu (chicken and dumplings, maybe) the salt wouldn't have been an issue.

Every time I go to farmerbrown, I like it more and more. The food is simple and well-executed, and the vibe of the place makes for a fun time out. Chef Jay Foster has a deep commitment to local, sustainable food, which allows me to put fried chicken and po' boys in the "virtuous food" category... plus those firey peanuts at the bar are addictive, man.

In the grand tradition of enbacon'd sweet things, Vanilla Garlic has a recipe for bacon maple cupcakes.

Oh yeah!

Photo: Roger Kisby

As promised, here's an extended version of my interview with Kara Zuaro, author of the new cookbook I Like Food, Food Tastes Good: In the Kitchen with Your Favorite Bands. The book's got recipes from a wide range of indie-rockers, including Death Cab for Cutie, The Hold Steady, The Decemberists, The Violent Femmes and about a jillion other awesome bands.

Dying to know which Scottish band's cuisine would reign supreme in an Iron Chef-style battle? Read on. And stay tuned in the next few days for an exclusive recipe straight from Kara's grandma.

There's an interesting article on the 20/20 website about the results of a vodka taste-test. They had a panel of vodka drinkers taste five premium vodkas neat, including Ketel One, Belvedere, Hangar One, Stoli Elit, and Grey Goose. In addition, the panelists tasted run-of-the-mill Smirnoff.

In an apparent victory for luxury marketing over taste, all six tasters uniformly hated Grey Goose, which most had claimed as their preferred vodka. Unsurprisingly (to me at least) my beloved Hangar One did well in the "neat" test. At the distillery, you taste the vodka in exactly the same way: straight and at room temperature, a perfect opportunity to pick up on the fruity tones from the Viogner grapes Hangar One is made from.

When it came to tasting vodkas in a cocktail (in this case a Sex & The City-inspired Cosmopolitan) tasters had an even tougher time picking out their proclaimed favorites. The article unfortunately doesn't offer any numeric breakdown of the results, but it's implied that none of the tasters were able to identify their preferred brand. Given that the cocktail they chose incorporates cranberry and lime juices, as well as a sticky-sweet orange liqueur, I'm not surprised by that, either.

Had they been tasting vodka & tonics, or even a classic gimlet, I'm sure the differences between vodkas would have been more noticeable, although that still doesn't mean Grey Goose would have won.

The 20/20 website suggests that the moral of the story is that well vodka is just as good as premium, but what I take from it is that most people are buying marketing hype, not a vodka that they actually appreciate for its own qualities.

Everybody's got their own favorite "weird item available via Japanese vending machine." This is a new one, though: lobsters.