Saturday, November 30, 2013

Following the fete.

(Bottles L-R) Limoncello, plum bourbon, Rainier cherry bump. © Ryan Schierling
We kind of skipped the ever-inundating pre-Thanksgiving food-blog blast this year, instead opting to toast to some post-feast palliatives. You already know what to do with your turkey, you know how to make the classic sides and the not-so-classic sides, you know how to crank out handcrafted heirloom sweet potato ice cream with back-woods small-batch maple syrup and homemade marshmallows, obviously.

Obviously

Get started on a few of these tipples now and you'll have plenty of practice time before next season's holiday haze begins. 

There are menu pages of before-dinner drinks available. Some people just call those drinks. The French have a couple of words that have become synonymous with the intake of specific alcoholic beverages before and after dinner – apĆ©ritif and digestif – which basically mean "to open" and "a digestive." In America, we call apĆ©ritifs "happy hour," and that's unfortunate, because it literally translates to "half-price well drinks and non-import draft beers, cheapskate."

Apertifs are usually herbal recipes meant to stimulate the appetite. I don't typically need a reason to be hungry, so here at home we occasionally like to sip on the after-dinner beverage – the digestif

Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Old school brownies.


Brownies with black raspberries and Chambord whipped cream. © Ryan Schierling
Who doesn't love brownies? 

Granted, there are a few of you who would trade one for a lemon bar any day of the week, but I'm a chocolate-lover, and brownies – with their gooey-cake middles and crusty tops – are about as delightful a thing as I can ever imagine happening to chocolate in the span of thirty minutes. 

When it comes to old, familiar foods, the goodness is always going to come in equal part with nostalgia around here. For me, there is one brownie recipe, and that is this one

Brownies are one of two desserts that I recall being quintessentially attributable to my dad. The other is the Fruit Cocktail Cake I wrote about last year. Both recipes share the qualities of being expedient to make and requiring very few ingredients. But, while the Fruit Cocktail Cake was usually a planned dessert, brownies always seemed a spontaneous gesture of joy and decadence conjured from ingredients already in the pantry. I know my mom made them too, but I've forever associated these brownies with him because "Dad in the kitchen" was always something of an event.

A few months ago, my folks surprised us by sending the actual cookbook these were always baked from – the Grand Diplome Cooking Course, Vol. 1. There might have been a couple of other recipes or instructions in there that were referenced over the years, but it's clear from the stains on the page that brownies were the purpose of this book's existence in our household. It's a working document, as manifest by the notes in my mom's handwriting for quick reference when using cocoa powder instead of squares.
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