I've been totally obsessed with this liqueur since my first taste of it about a month ago at Nisei Lounge in Chicago. I'm actually going to start flying bottles of it back to Houston since it isn't possible to obtain malört in Texas.

For those who don't know, check the wikipedia entry:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malört

and the flickr pool:
www.flickr.com/groups/malortface/pool

It's actually a very interesting herbal liqueur. Taken straight, it sort of coats your mouth and the taste lingers forever which could be a good or bad thing, depending on your tastes. I quite like it.

The cocktail on the left is 1 part malört, 1 part Cointreau, and 1 part grapefruit juice. Boozy, and definitely bitter, but good. Some might find it more palatable with a different, sweeter triple sec in place of the Cointreau. I'm searching for a name for this one.

The pink cocktail is 1 part malört, 1 part gin, 1 part maraschino, 1 part lemon juice, and 1/2 part grenadine. Sweeter on the palate initially due to the maraschino and grenadine, it fades into the herbal bitterness of the malört which lingers on the palate. My working name for this cocktail is "Jeppson's Kiss."

Update, 9 Oct 2009: To be clear for the non-cocktail drinkers, that's maraschino liqueur (I think in this case I used Luxardo), not maraschino cherries, or cherry juice.

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Latest crazy food - the dumpling burger. I think Colleen or Will came up with the idea outside of Dumpling Man in NYC. The patty is a pork dumpling filling (ground pork, napa cabbage, ginger, green onion). I enhanced the idea with green onion pancakes for buns. There's a little soy-rice vinegar-ginger dipping sauce on the side.

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While on an excursion to an Asian supermarket, Colleen and I found the candy aisle and saw some interesting ad copy on some packages of gummy candy. I encourage you to click through and read the amazingly evocative writing of the packaging for these Kasugai gummy candies. Interestingly, only about half of the varieties had good copy - the rest were of the bland sort like "This is a strawberry gummy" or "Litchi is a popular fruit in Asian culture, enjoy this litchi gummy." It's as if the copywriter got bored after writing the first four.

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I took Colleen to Charlie Trotter's in Chicago for Valentine's Day. I finally got around to posting the photos. Sorry for the poor quality - my little point and shoot doesn't really take great low-light photos, and I didn't want to use the flash in the middle of the restaurant. The meal was fantastic and the wine pairings were brilliant, but it definitely isn't something that I can afford to do on a regular basis. I think my favorite dishes were the squab, pictured above, and the saffron risotto that Colleen had.

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Haven't had much opportunity lately to do any sort of interesting cooking, with the exception of Valentine's Day. The salad with pan-seared scallops shown above is probably the prettiest thing I've done in a while. Click the picture to see the other things served for that meal. The chocolate marquise was a big hit (I made a few extra and fed them to my friends).

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You've all heard of not-dogs, soyrizo, and tofurkey; now meet (pun intended) bolono and wham. I've never been more disturbed, especially since they look like virtually identical products. I mean, the only difference appears to be what variety of bread you serve them with.

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Apparently someone rediscovered the fact that when you drop candy into soda, you can get a geyser effect, and it's been making the rounds on the internet (see this video or this video). It was even featured on NPR.

People are billing it as an "explosion" but it's really not. Wikipedia claims that it's a result of adding gum arabic and lowering surface tension of the soda, but that doesn't wash with me - lots of sodas already have gum arabic, and the amount you're adding is going to be minimal (and in solid form). In fact, if anything, since gum arabic is a mixture of carbohydrates and proteins, I would actually expect that it would increase surface tension slightly. What's probably going on is that by dropping candies (Mentos, in this case - I used Nerds when I was a kid) into a bottle of fresh soda, you suddenly and dramatically increase the number of potential nucleation points for the carbon dioxide in solution to come out of solution as bubbles. Those bubbles of gas take up more space than dissolved gas would (example: when divers get "the bends") causing the liquid to be ejected forcefully from the neck of the bottle.

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I finally went out and bought a deep fryer, and last Friday I held the seventh Houston "Fryday" event. Pictured above is my deep frying rig. On the left is the fryer, a Philips HD6161 fryer. It's pretty nice, as budget fryers go. Vented lid (with window) to prevent spattering but allow the escape of steam, the basket is maneuverable with the lid on, stainless steel modular construction for easy cleanup, and a digitally controlled heating element. On the right, the draining rig - a cookie sheet with a cooling rack set on top. I practiced using easy stuff - zucchini, potatoes, mushrooms - and then gradually started frying more interesting things, like battered scallops (fresh from J & R Seafood). My brilliant idea for this time around was fried chili. Not fried chilies, but chili - the stew-like substance that we all love on cold winter days. I put small dollops on wax paper and froze them, and then when I pulled them, dipped them in egg wash and rolled them in crushed Fritos twice. Then I threw them in the oil. They were pretty fantastic. We also fried various cookies, ice cream, sausages, pickles, and more. Clean up was not fun - frying sweet stuff generally makes the oil go bad really, really quickly, especially when people have been drinking and are no longer paying attention to the fryer. What began as light golden oil ended up a dark brown syrup, and there was a blackened sludge at the bottom of the fryer. Surprisingly enough, it was all very easy to clean - I poured the oil back into its original bottle using an improvised funnel of aluminum foil and the rest of the fryer disassembled into the component parts for easy cleaning.

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I know this is a couple of weeks after the fact, but this was only the third Valentine's Day ever that I had actually been dating anyone, and only the second time that it wasn't long distance. In general, I feel that Valentine's Day is big load of crap invented by corporations to get us to buy more stuff, but these last couple of years it has given me a chance to exercise some creativity in the kitchen. This year dinner turned out particularly well, if a bit expensive. A couple of photos and some details on the dishes are posted after the jump.

Continue reading "valentine's day" »

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