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One of the things I love about brewing my own beer is that once I got the basic techniques down I was able to brew styles that appeal to me but aren’t readily available at the liquor store (or even a really good beer store). There are dozens of IPA’s out there that are as good or better than any IPA I can brew, so it doesn’t feel like a good investment of time and effort to brew one of those. Harder to find are the British best bitters, the Belgian patersbiers, the Finnish sahtis. Its how I ended up competing with a style called roggenbier, a German rye ale. I couldn’t find a single commercial example of roggenbier in America, but when I brewed my first batch of it I fell in love with the style. I entered it in competition to see if I was getting it right, and the rest is history trivia.
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I’m a whiskey guy. And the Manhattan is a classic whiskey cocktail. A simple recipe of whiskey, vermouth, and bitters. And maybe a cherry. But within these boundaries of simplicity there is A LOT of room to get creative.
There are a couple of small challenges of creating a new Manhattan recipe. First, you need some basic barware including a good cocktail shaker with a strainer, a double jigger, and a cocktail spoon. Optionally, have a silicon ice cube tray for making large ice cubes or (even more awesome) molds for making sphere ice cubes. None of this stuff is particularly expensive, and you get kitted up with all of this bar gear for about $25 of online shopping. (Repeated disclaimer: I’m not selling anything or making any money with this website. I write here cuz I like to. Any products I mention or recommend are because I’ve used them and like them, and I receive no consideration – financial or otherwise – for mentioning them. And that’s why you’re not seeing any links to barware right now. I’m happy to make barware recommendations for any budget, just ask.)
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There’s a lot of stress in the world lately. I feel it. My family feels it. My friends and colleagues feel it. This Corona virus quarantine has been an isolating experience for nearly everyone, and it often feels like the stress of the situation is increasingly magnified by our feelings of isolation within it. Isolation feeds the stress, stress feeds the isolation, and we spiral down the existential toilet bowl. But being free to make our own choices within our circumstances hasn’t changed, and I think several philosophers living in WWII Europe wrestled with a similar question in the midst of a world also in turmoil. I believe they have a lot to teach us about freedom, choices, anxiety, and authenticity that can help us maintain a healthy version of our selves in this time of high and wide uncertainty.
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I made chili last night with some ingredients that kinda made me feel like I’d put $1000 chrome rims on a Ford Fiesta. I made a pot of Texas-style chili with one single über-rare fresh chilhuacle negro chile. And I don’t regret it, not even a little. Here’s what happened.
As I’ve posted before, I can’t source in the U.S. a lot of the Oaxacan chiles that I love to cook with, so I grow them in my backyard. This year I got a fantastic late season harvest of chilhuacle rojo and chilehuacle negro that I’ll use to make molé, a sizable haul of chile bolita, and a bunch of chile de agua. All of these varietals I first discovered in the markets down in Oaxaca, Mexico.
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A few weeks ago I stumbled across “Enchantment Stew”. There are dozens of recipes out there for this dish, all of which are various riffs on pork and green chile stew. Apparently its the brand for the State of New Mexico: “Land of Enchantment”, and this being a New Mexican dish.. well… you get the idea behind why its called “Enchantment Stew”.
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I previously posted about the chiles I’ve grown this season. As I said then there aren’t a lot of recipes out there that make use of the chile varieties I’ve grown this year, so I said I’d post any recipes I came up with. A recent twist on a personal favorite recipe was to use Oaxacan Chiles de Agua in a batch of Cowboy Beans.
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I grow six to eight varieties of chiles every summer, something different every year. I’ve got a small backyard in a big city. My outdoor space is pretty limited, so I grow my chile plants in containers on my patio. Given my space and time constraints I have only one guiding principle when deciding what chiles to grow every year: “spend your time growing chiles you can’t find anywhere at any physical/online store at any price”. I love to cook with jalapeños, serranos, poblanos and others on a regular basis, but honestly I can buy those at any local grocery store for pennies a pound. So if I’m going to invest the time I’d prefer to invest it in something that is so special that the only way I’m gonna get it is if I grow it myself.
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Circumstances lately have me finding comfort in small, familiar things. Like a cold beer on the patio. Or a hug from my amazing wife. Or a grilled cheese sandwich. Simple pleasures somehow take a little bit of the edge off of how difficult the world is lately.
I don’t know how or why I got the idea, but lately I’ve been on a creative mission to come up with the greatest grilled cheese sandwich ever. Its a thread that’s been kicking around in the back of my head for weeks, and it’s become something of a running gag with my friends and I.
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I wrote recently about how I arrived at the Blueberry-Fennel Frond Margarita recipe this summer. Thought I would share another cocktail creation I landed on recently: the Strawberry-Thai Basil Margarita.
My amazing wife, Mrs. Piehole, was at the garden nursery earlier this spring (ostensibly to buy tomato plants), and one of the things she came home with was this “combo pot” of four different basil plants. Four varieties of basil in a single pot. Before these plants got overly root bound with each other in their shared pot we split them up into their own separate containers out on the patio, where they each grew into big bushy plants that we’ve been clipping off of all summer. What we had were: sweet basil, lettuce leaf basil, purple basil, and Thai basil.
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Years ago for my 40th birthday my amazing wife took me to 10 days of cooking school down in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was probably the best vacation I’ve ever been on. I fondly recall how every morning we’d get up and the class would go to the local market for ingredients, and I have great memories of standing in awe at the sheer number and variety of dried regional chiles available at every market we went visited. Most of the chiles I encountered and fell in love with in those markets I can’t seem to source in the U.S., so I grow a few varieties in my backyard every summer that I can’t find to buy.
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