holiday tipples

After last weekend, I think I've realized why politicians repealed Prohibition in December; can you imagine the holidays without drinks?

FRIDAY 8:00 pm

Hot buttered rum and a movie.

Hot Buttered Rum Batter adapted from Lance Mayhew
1 stick butter, room temp
¾ c brown sugar
¼ cup agave nectar
½ tsp cinnamon
pinch salt
1/8 tsp nutmeg
1/8 tsp allspice
1/8 tsp clove

Cream the butter in a stand mixer and, with the mixer running, add all additional ingredients and beat at a medium speed until incorporated. Scoop the butter out onto parchment or wax paper and roll into a well-wrapped log. Put it back in the refrigerator to chill until needed.

To make a hot buttered rum, simply slice a good dollop off of the batter, add to a mug with 2 oz of good, aged rum (Mayhew likes Bacardi 8), fill with hot water, stir to incorporate, and enjoy.

SATURDAY 1:30 pm

House Spirits Annual Holiday Booze Bazaar, with tastings of Marteau Absinthe, Ransom Grappas and Old Tom Gin, Sub Rosa Tarragon and Saffron Vodkas, and House's own Aviation gin, Krogstad Aquavit, Medoyeff Vodka and Apothecary Ouzo. A yearly excuse to eat an ungodly amount of free cheese and chocolates while sipping some the best artisan booze in the city.

SATURDAY 4:00 pm

Anchor 2008 Christmas Ale at the Bye & Bye. The beer and the company was better than our friend's unwittingly vegan grilled-cheese.

SATURDAY 7:30 pm

Table-side Spanish coffees at Huber's - Portland's oldest restaurant, specializing in "turkey-based meals." We'd never been and friends of ours thought it'd be fun for the holidays. I wanted to ask the bartender so many silly questions. Do you ever spill? Do you ever burn yourself? Is this why you guys have a carpeted floor? How do you light that match with one hand? Did you have to shave your head for this job?

SUNDAY 10:00 am

House-made eggnog from Moxie Rx. Gathered from around-the-corner in a snow storm, doctored at home with Buffalo Trace.

WEDNESDAY 8:30 pm

Looking at the forecast, tonight feels like a hot toddy evening

why an English mansion would be better than Portland in a blizzard

As the snow whips past the windows outside, we're just thankful for the internet. As long as the power holds out, we'll still have entertainment:

Seriously, though - who dreamed this collaboration up?

Thanks to Monitor Mix.

double-edged sword

All Songs Considered just ran their staff picks for best-of-the-year music. Good banter, a few great picks, and a couple really mediocre selections. Such is the life of a "Best Of" list.

Variations on these lists pop up every month (Best Cheap Eats, Best New Bands, Best Scarves You've Never Heard Of), but they only really come into their own at the year-end. The New York Times Book Review has put forth their top ten books of the year. Too many magazines to count have already compiled their '08 music picks and Pitchfork will post theirs this week.

For editors, I think lists can become addictive - a crutch to rely on for a space-filling fall-back article. Just look at the glossies on grocery store checkout lines. "42 Resolutions for a New You." "9 Wonder Foods to Eat Now." "73 Worst Confessions." You'd think the staff for these places had forgotten how to write headlines that don't include numbers.

I'll provide an exception for year-end lists. "Best-ofs" and "top-tens" are a definite guilty pleasure. I have to admit that I completely understand the love of categorizing things and making lists - I think it fills a human impulse to collect and organize. There is something in declaring "bests" and "favorites" that gives you a sense of ownership over your preferences. With this act, what were simply a group of books or albums become your books or your albums, because you gave them status.

But this also opens you up to deflation. Usually, these sorts of lists are written up by critics and taste-makers, or else by people with too much time on their hands; in short, a group of people with pompous confidence in their own opinions. Consider them a sort of annual, territorial pissing-match, when geeks can assert their dominance by criticizing what others think is cool. Epicurious.com recently declared their ten choices for food trends in '09, which the Portland Mercury readily mocked. And seriously, it's demanding all of my self-control to hold myself back from weighing in on those stupid predictions. Portland, Maine will be the new Portland, Oregon?! Who came up with that gem?

So with the perils in mind, we're going to run the whole gamut of '08 awesomeness and declare our best of everything from the year.

BEST OF AUGHT-EIGHT!
Dove Vivi pizza
Bon Iver
Homemade pickles and jams!
Hot Chip
Cabinet magazine
Doughnut Plant in NYC
The Magnetic Fields in Seattle
Infinite Regress Collective Mix Tape
Discovering Ayer's Creek Farm at the Hillsdale Market
Slow Food Nation
Lykke Li at the Doug Fir
The Chef Studio
O
Mike Daisey
North Portland
Chest freezer (A's choice)
Bike commuting
Murakami at the Brooklyn Museum

repeal day

Last night, I realized that it's been a few months since A and I have made a good drink. For my birthday last year, she took me to a cocktail workshop at Mint/820, which set us off on a heavy-drinking phase that meant lots of sugar syrups and sticky counters and cracked ice. I'm not saying that our heavy-drinking phase ended, just that we got lazier about it. While there's a lot to recommend a chilled cocktail on a hot summer day, a cold beer or a glass of rose wine can be just as refreshing, without all of the fruit-squeezing, measuring and shaking. Not to mention that our liquor cabinet was getting really out of hand.

Frankly, cocktails can be a boozy rabbit hole to fall down; once you get started, the ingredients and demands grow more and more esoteric. You start out learning how to make a simple, slightly embarrassing drink-or-two, like a cosmopolitan or a lemon drop, and soon you're mixing gin flips and scouring your liquor store for batavia arrack to make a 19th-century punch. It didn't take long before I was trying to mist an orange peel through a lit match to burn the citrus esters that would land atop my drink.

With most drinks, I've gotten over this baroque tendency, realizing that Portland has enough good ol' booze experts that it's worth leaving the mixing to more capable hands, with their libraries of tinctures and tonics and obscure liqueurs. But whether A and I go out for a drink or we try to pour one at home, none of this geekery would be possible had time stood still in 1933 and Prohibition remained.


Which is why it is our duty to celebrate Repeal Day on December 5. Maybe it just seems like something that was dreamed up by the Dewar's marketing department, but a lot of good holidays were originally just corporate sales ploys; at least this one provides a better-than-average excuse for a drink. The true beauty of Repeal Day is that while we may recognize it on the 5th of December, it can't be bound by a specific "day" or a "historic moment" - it is a holiday that resides deep inside each of us. In fact, I'll be celebrating Repeal tonight with a manhattan and tomorrow night at the Holiday Ale Fest. I may even celebrate Repeal Day after Friday with a few drinks over the weekend. You see? Repeal Day is only as much of a holiday as we make it.

So nowadays, if I reach for something besides beer or wine, it's normally just a good spirit, neat or on the rocks. But Repeal Day seems to call for something fittingly classy and old-school. Maybe it's time to dust off the cocktail shaker and bust out those brandied cherries we put up this summer. Tis the season.

the raw and the cooked

If two years ago you asked me for a run-down of my favorite foods, sushi would definitely have made the cut. That rich flavor and unctuous texture of the raw fish was enough to make me drool. Like I'm doing right now thinking about it. You can call me a hypocrite for mocking "living" fudge or raw bread, but some things are meant to be cooked and some aren't. Fish demands a gentle hand at the stove, making it an excellent candidate for being served raw. Bread, on the other hand, should be baked; not dehydrated.

But I'm getting off-topic - the point is just how much A and I used to love sushi. Today? That's a different story. It sure sucks to get a conscience. Maybe you can chalk it up to to reading too much when daily reminders of doom-and-gloom, social and environmental collapse leave you morally paralyzed. The more and more we read and heard, the worse we felt about eating seafood. For a sense of the kind of laugh parade that is modern seafood writing, read Mark Bittman's excellent New York Times editorial on the future of fish.

Recently, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch group released a new sushi-centric version of their great sustainable seafood guide (download PDF). Helpfully, it lists all of the Japanese names for the best fish choices. Unhelpfully, you've probably never seen any of the best choices in a sushi restaurant. On top of that, the few choices you have heard of get pretty specific about fishing practices. I'd wager that if you ask most sushi chefs in America if their tuna is US troll/pole caught rather than longline, you'll get a blank stare. Here in Portland, almost all sushi passes through a bizarrely infamous international cult. Hey, maybe they're a sustainable cult, but with only one supplier for most restaurants, there isn't a lot of choice in terms of fish sourcing.


Meet Bamboo Sushi. Brainchild of a former owner of the indie-chic Masu, it couples hip design with focused sustainability. Not only do they espouse green principles and focus on responsible sourcing, they are actually the first Marine Stewardship Council certified restaurant in the US. I think A and I almost wept when we ate there on Wednesday evening - for the first time in over a year, we went out for sushi. Everything was incredibly fresh and their preparations were really inventive. We swooned over each bite of the rolls and awkwardly sawed our nigiri selections in half with our chopsticks to make sure we all got a taste of everything.

To tide us over between visits to Bamboo, maybe we'll have to branch out into other Japanese foods (it's either that or we make miniature gunkan maki rolls with bay shrimp). Luckily for us, Bamboo offers some inspiration - one of their best offerings is a tsukemono plate of pickled eggplant, cabbage, daikon, onion, ginger, peppers, and squash. Over the weekend, we tried out a Japanese-style quick cabbage pickle, piecing together our own recipe from a mix of different books and websites. The results were great, but pickled cabbage just isn't the same as sushi. At least Bamboo has a happy hour, but is "low priced sushi" really a valid excuse to cut out of work early? It should be.
__________

Simple Cabbage Tsukemono
Adapted from Justhungy.com and Dorothy Lesem's Preserving in Today's Kitchen

1 head of napa cabbage
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon chile flakes
zest of one lemon
1 teaspoon rice vinegar
1 teaspoon fish sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil

Clean and core the cabbage, chopping the leaves into 1-to-2 inch pieces. Place the cabbage in a large glass bowl and toss with the salt, chile flakes and lemon zest. Cover with a weighted plate that fits inside the bowl and leave to sit in the refrigerator for about an hour. A lot of moisture will be drawn out of the cabbage - drain off the liquid and toss the remaining cabbage with the vinegar, fish sauce and sesame oil. Serve with rice and broth simmered-tofu.

chef crush

I love Dan Barber and I don't care who knows it. Maybe I identify with something about his geeky demeanor, but I swear, the guy could put dirt on a plate and I'd probably think it was clever cooking. A, loving wife that she is, is indulgent (and I have a hunch she finds him pretty cool, too). I think it probably all started with this story about a girl he once dated:



Or maybe it began with seeing him at Slow Food Nation when he recounted his visit to a Spanish farmer who raises "natural" foie gras geese without the use of gauvage (watch this video of the same speech at a different conference).

Then again, my fascination could have stemmed from this review of a dinner at his restaurant, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, which claimed the breathtakingly fresh courses made it the "most important Restaurant in America."

Actually, it could just be his dedication to forging a new relationship between farmers and chefs. As the Creative Director for the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Barber helps guide the educational efforts on the working farm that supplies the majority of produce to his two restaurants. Not only that, but one of his restaurants is directly on the farm, allowing his chefs to pick their own greens and work directly with the animal husbands. The Blue Hill website features video profiles of some of their providers and the story of Barber's efforts to restore his family's farm.

And he's an keen thinker and polished writer, to boot.

Cooking is just about the most macho thing I do. In spite of being a pretty slight, geeky guy, I'm still drawn to the knives and heat and swagger of the kitchen. That's not to say I'm running six flame burners at home every night, just that kitchen manliness is one of the few places I'll throw down and jump at the chance to consult on grilling or carve something with a big knife. (Truth be told, I've got some chef crushes on the ladies, too.)

Still, I'm probably not kidding anyone with my kitchen posturing. And I think that is what attracts me to Barber's cooking - there is an intellect behind his efforts and something very gentle about what he's doing with food. At the Stone Barns Restaurant, there are two menu choices: five-course or more courses. In place of a list of dishes, they offer a chart of what is in season, from which the chefs will create the nightly meals. The results, from what I've seen and read, are really stunning, like this salad of a hazelnut-crusted poached egg with matsutake mushrooms, pistachios and garden gazpacho:


For a sense of the kinds of simple, clear flavors Barber coaxes out of his ingredients, just have a look at this fennel soup from New York Magazine. Now we only need to figure out how to get up the Hudson Valley the next time we visit New York...

historically awesome

HELL YES.