photo thanks to Spiked Punch

A while back, I challenged AJ Rathbun of Spiked Punch to create a basil-based drink that would satiate and entice my herbal-loving palette.  Initally, he suggested marrying some crushed basil with grappa.  To which I very maturely replied, “Ew.  Gross.”  Grappa and I just don’t get along.  Though my family breaks out a bottle most every special occasion, I’m convinced this traditional Italian drink is nothing but souped-up petrol oil.  I don’t know how my relatives manage to pull shots of the stuff, it stings my throat just thinking about it.  However, AJ assured me he could come up with something that would make me see grappa in a whole new light.  And now, a mere few weeks later, he’s done it: I present to you, Tareva’s Tipple.

The drink combines gin, grappa, basil, and simple syrup to create a delicious potion that is sure to make even the staunchest of grappa nay-sayers spellbound.  An interesting proposition, uniting English gin with Italian grappa.  Though I imagine the lovely juniper-scented liquor will offset the grappa nicely.  I will be ordering this while touring the North End, this weekend.  Salute and Cheers to everyone this gray Boston Friday!

Sometimes my best ideas come out of pure desperation.  Last week, I went out to a fabulous dinner at Orinoco in Brookline Village.  The restaurant serves delectable Venezuelan dishes that range from simple arepas and empanadas to slow-braised beef loin and an amazing heart of palms salad.  I ordered the Pollo Adobo, a chicken slow-roasted in spices and oregano oil served with gnocchi-like dumplings in a truffle cream sauce.  Absolutely incredible.  In an uncharacteristic bout of foresight, I decided to wrap half my dinner up to take home.

Lo and behold, Friday night I arrived home late from work, exhausted.  Completely lacking the energy to grocery shop, I found the to-go container full of chicken.  After a brief victory dance, I then plowed around in the fridge trying to figure out what to pair with it.  And this is what I came up with:

Chicken, Peach, and Romaine Salad in an Ahi Pepper Vinaigrette:

For the salad…

One roasted chicken breast (make your own Oregano Chicken)

One medium peach

2 cups romaine lettuce

1/2 bell pepper (I used 1/4 red and 1/4 orange)

1/2 cup grape tomatoes

1/2 cup white mushrooms

1/4 vidalia onion

Olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

For the vinaigrette…

2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

3 tbsp red wine vinegar

1/2 tsp ahi pepper puree

1/4 tsp dijon mustard

Salt and pepper to taste

Shred the chicken and mix up the vinaigrette.  In a frying pan, add a little bit of olive oil and saute chopped onion and mushrooms.  Place on salad when caramelized.  Chop remaining veggies and peach, put the salad together and serve.  Add crumbled feta on top, if you so choose.  Serve with bread and cheese (like I did!) if you ultimately decide to leave out the feta.

very close replica of my own cookie-goodness by esthereggy via flickr

I can, at times, be a cookie snob.  I like my cookies just so: a little crunch on the outside with a nice gooey, chewy center.  Most recipes I’ve tried have turned out agreeable results, but never have I found a recipe that just oozes cookie-ness.  Until now.

Exploring the Not Without Salt website, I came across a recipe for what the blog’s writer, Ashley, touts as “The Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie.”  Pretty lofty title for such a humble confection.  However, she could not possibly be more correct.  The dough tastes of a classic brown sugar cookie dough; it’s light but with some heft, so neither do you feel like you’re biting into a biscuit, nor does it cook into some wafer-thin cracker (two problems I’ve had with previous recipes).  The chocolate is, in one word, abundant.  And spread throughout the cookie so that every bite contains its melty bits.

I’ve adapted Ashley’s recipe for my own time and budget, cutting out the Turbinado sugar (and just using granulated sugar) and using Trader Joe’s milk chocolate chips (which I ran, semi-successfully, through a food processor to chop up a bit) instead of fancy chocolate.  Also, I forgot to sprinkle on the sea salt, which was probably to my detriment, because I can only imagine how amazing these must be with a little crunch of saltiness on top.  Regardless, despite my ommissions and additions, these were by far the best cookies I’ve ever made.  Enjoy!

The Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookie by Ashley at notwithoutsalt.com

2 sticks butter

1/4 cup white sugar

1/4 cup Turbinado sugar

1 3/4 cup light brown sugar, packed

2  eggs

2 tsp vanilla

3 1/2 cup All Purpose flour

1 1/2 tsp Baking soda

3/4 tsp salt

1 lb. chocolate (use the best quality chocolate you can afford. With a serrated knife cut chocolate chunks roughly 1/2 inch)

Cream the butter and the sugars until light. Scrape down the side of the bowl. Continue mixing while adding the eggs one at time. Make sure each egg is incorporated before adding the next. Add the vanilla. Scrape down the bowl with a spatula. Combine the flour, soda and salt in another bowl. With a whisk, stir to combine. With the machine on low, slowly add the flour. Mix until just combined, taking care not to over mix. With a spatula fold in the chocolate.

If you so choose, and I do recommend that you do, sprinkle a very fine dusting of good quality sea salt. Fleur de Sel or Murray River Pink Salt are my recommendations.

Bake at 360* for 12 minutes. They should be lightly golden on the outside but still look gooey on the inside.

photo by ashley at notwithoutsalt.com

In more recent years, I’ve become a salt fiend.  I don’t know why the sudden change, and didn’t realize it until every margarita order was specified with, “Please make it heavy on the salt.”  I used to chastise my father for adding salt to everything, making sour/grossed-out faces every time he added his favorite seasoning to a dish.  Salt, to me, was something that tasted “icky.”  What can I say, I had (and have) a perpetual sweet tooth in my youth.

However, my love of salt has become recently apparent, and I am always searching out savory-sweet recipes that incorporate a little sel in their making.  A recent recipe hunt caused me to stumble upon Not Without Salt, a blog by a pastry chef named Ashley, which celebrates all things salt-ified.  Her photography (which is always what draws me into any blog) is exquisite, and her recipes, inspiring.  A recent post about Bacon Caramels made its rounds through my office, where co-workers and I equally drooled and marveled at the combination.  Knowing how much I love Salted Caramels, I just might have to give these a shot…

photo via the al dente blog

I was searching the blogosphere to find a tantalizing drink recipe, when I found this post by Braiden Rex-Johnson (who has one of the best names ever!) on Amazon’s Al Dente blog, which I’ve talked about before.  And lo and behold, the recipe is by my favorite drink author/expert AJ Rathbun!  I can’t get away from this guy if I tried… then again, why would I even try in the first place?  Besides being a fabulous person, AJ is by far the supreme knower-of-all-things-alcoholic, and the pages of his books are more dog-earred than my copy of Eliot’s The Wasteland from junior year of college.  I still swear by his recipe for sangria from Good Spirits as the best I have ever tasted.

The drink featured on Al Dente is called the Rosé Squirt.  The name makes me giggle each time… perfect for a light-hearted summer evening.  What I like most about the recipe is the anticipation of the maraschino liqueur, which undoubtedly will offset the dryness of the white wine.  Wine cocktails are making a comeback, people!  Guaranteed.

Rosé Squirt
Serves 2

Ingredients:
Ice cubes
2 ounces maraschino liqueur
6 ounces dry rosé
Chilled club soda
2 maraschino cherries, for garnish

Directions:
1. Take two glasses (highball) and fill with ice cubes until 3/4 full.  To each, add one ounce maraschino liqueur and three ounces rosé.  Stir

2. Top with club soda. Give it a swirl, top with a cherry, and sip away!

photo by still burning via flickr

Inspired by summer’s sweetest fruit, I’ve come up with a quick list of delicious (and unexpected!) things you can do with watermelon.  I’m thinking, beyond the traditional fruit salad and watermelon carving.  Mmm, I think I’ll pick one up at my local farmer’s market.  

What Can You Do With Your Watermelon?

1.  Salt It.  I hadn’t seen this before, but some people like to add a hefty dose of salt to tease out the juiciness of their watermelon.

2.  Swill It.  Try a watermelon mojito, a cool twist on this warm-weather classic (or every-weather if you’re anything like me).  For the margarita lovers out there (here, here!), try the Watermelon Basil Margarita.  Salted rim entirely NOT optional.

3.  Cook It.  Poonam over at Cooking Adventures got creative and made a “burger” patty out of her leftover watermelon rind.  Talk bout innovation!  Serve these patties with a side of fresh melon juice.

4.  Greek It.  Watermelon always makes a nice addition to salad– best with feta cheese.

5.  Wear It.  Okay, I don’t actually recommend this, but these pictures were just too weird to pass up.

This Fourth of July, I decided to honor our nation by tackling a hefty physical challenge: riding my bike from Boston to Cape Cod.  Two friends and I packed up our bikes with clothes, camping gear, fuel (aka trail mix), and various other necessities.  Last Friday morning, we set off on the Claire Saltonstall Bike Trail.  The CSBT runs from Boston to Provincetown, over 140 miles.  Sometimes you’re on quiet back roads, sometimes you’re neck and neck with zooming traffic.  There are killer hills and awesome straightaways.  Basically, it’s whatever the ol’ trail decides to throw at you.

We spent the first day biking from my house in Brookline to a friend’s father’s beach in Sagamore/Sandwich (the part before the Sagamore Bridge).  We went through Dorchester, Mattapan, Quincy, Hanover, Duxbury, Tinkertown, Kingston, Plymouth… an endless assortment of Massachusetts towns that all blend into one another after spending that much time on a bike.  That was a good 68-70 in one day, mind you.  Plus, we ended the day clustered in a tent on the beach.  Not exactly luxurious, but there is no other sound I’d rather fall asleep to than the rolling ocean waves.

Day Two took us across the Bridge and up to Brewster, where my aunt and uncle graciously took in the two remaining travelers (we lost one along the way… he’d had enough adventure after Day One), fed us, let us use the hot tub, and gave us deliriously comfortable beds to sleep in.  The last day was a 40-mile race to the tip of the Cape, right up to Herring Beach in Provincetown.  A victory lap around the rotary and we were done!

Why put myself through this, you might ask?  Especially when we launched into this with absolutely no training and/or concrete plan?  Because it was an adventure.  The very same philosophy I use with food applies to my entire life in general: you have to try it once.  I think it goes back to my mother’s “no thank you” helpings.  At dinner, if we were ever served something new or something we didn’t think we’d like, we’d have to take a small, “no thank you” portion, just to try it.  And so, this bike trip was my “no thank you” helping of long-haul adventures.  And, come to find out (much like with eggplant and brussel sprouts), I loved it.  Sure, I was s.o.r.e.  SORE.  But in the end, swollen knees and gridlocked quads can’t outweigh seeing stretches of ocean and forest from the seat of your bicycle.  It took a lot of motivation, but we made it (well, two out of the original three).  

I think a lot of our “making it” had to do with food motivation: bagels in Hanover, lobster rolls in Yarmouth, ice cream in Orleans, fresh fish in Provincetown.  One thing that kept me going, however, was good ol’ fashioned Trail Mix.

The (Un)Official CSBT Trail Mix:

1 cup almonds

1 cup cashews

1/2 cup peanuts

1 cup walnuts

1 cup raisins

1/2 cup dried cranberries

1/2 cup peanut butter chips

1/2 cup chocolate-covered pretzel bits

1/2 dark chocolate covered coffee beans

Mix it all together, and hit those trails!