What do you get when you cross a stoop sale, a leaving party, and a prize-winning cocktail recipe?

the stoop set

As a long-standing fan of the gin and tonic, I am both amused and delighted that apparently this hails the resurgence of gin over vodka as the ‘it’ cocktail ingredient. I am also happy to see that James Scarito, the BLT cocktail maestro who created the Wild Blossom, uses Plymouth Gin. Plymouth’s PR/sales elves are doing a great job with them in New York recently (as did St Germain’s last year), and I’m all for it: the higher their profile in the US, the more likely I am to be able to buy their sloe gin to cook venison in. But that’s a secondary benefit; I’m also all for anything that distracts the bartenders always trying to push Tanqueray and Bombay Sapphire, which make frankly hideous G&Ts. In my opinionated…um…opinion.

Back to the matter at hand: take various friends, a surfeit of old clothes, a brownstone stoop, and a vague sense that to have gin cocktails early on a Sunday morning requires at least the semblance of a justification. I bastardized Mr Scarito’s highly lauded pretender to the Cosmo’s crown, because I felt like it, and I hope he will accept my assurance that no disrespect was intended. And the quantities are very approximate, precisely because it was early on a Sunday morning. Experiment with the original, and the remix, and enjoy a little sidewalk society of your own.

The Blooming Lovely
2 ounces gin
2 ounces seltzer water
1 ounce Belvoir elderflower cordial (available here)
1 ounce pink grapefruit juice
Lots of thin slices of lime, green apple and cucumber

Oh, and I made $5.50 from the stoop sale, thereby nicely maintaining the semblance of the justification.

When you are lucky enough to have a friend who went deep water fishing way out in the Atlantic yesterday and calls you up today and offers you fresh fish tacos for supper when the fridge is empty (or even when it’s not), what do you do?

ridiculously fresh bluefish tacos with guacamole, tomato, red onion, sour cream and cilantro

One thing you categorically don’t do is argue over the composition of an authentic fish taco. For those in doubt, cf pizza.

It’s fresh. It’s delicious. We happily followed the only authentic course of action: shut up and eat.

Shado beni (Trinidad), chadron benee (Dominica), herbe à fer (Martinique and Guadeloupe), fitweed (Guyana), koulante (Haiti), recao (Puerto Rico), ketumbar java (Malaysia), pak chi farang (Thailand), ngo gai (Vietnam), culantro, racao or recao (Central America), bhandhanya (India), long leaf or spiny or sawtooth coriander (North America)….. no wait, there’s more….

the Lamont Cranston of herbage

So one of my very favorite things about living in this city is that conversations with strangers tend to unfold like this:
stranger: Your accent is weird. Where are you from?
me: London/Scotland via Texas and Louisiana. You?
stranger: Oh! I’m (insert appropriate ethnic/geographic denomination). What are you doing here?
me: Well, I’m a cook….

…and at this point, with great glee, they share with me a special recipe, or a tip on where to buy some unusual ingredient, or the address of the ONLY place in the tri-state area that will make, just like mama used to, the-thing-with-the-name-I-have-to-ask-them-to-spell. You get the idea – it’s a universal language. Food equals home, and food equals identity, and with each of these encounters, I learn a little more about what makes the world go round.

I had never heard of “shadow benny” until the A train got stuck one day and the only other person in the car with me was a lady from Trinidad. After we got the formalities out of the way, she described her favorite sauce for grilled meat, and I grabbed my notebook. She even gave me her phone number in case I had trouble finding the herb, and I promised her if I ever wrote a cookbook, it would go in there as “Lana’s A-Train Sauce”.

more »

Oh yes. A mad busy month, including a hilarious surprise birthday/culinary class/cook your own dinner party, and a really fun evening being a “congratulations on the birth of your baby” present*. Now I’m trying to get everything organized before I leave for a 10 week contract in France. Do you like how nonchalantly I said that? I am, shall we say, a little excited at the thought of being let loose in coastal Provence with 12 to 20 people to feed every day. I should be able to post updates from there, depending on the availability of a computer and of moments in which to draw breath. And if neither are accessible, I’ll be taking plenty of notes and pictures to bring you, gentle reader, a cornucopia of French deliciousness once I get back to NYC in mid September.

In the meantime, some tid-bits from the past week will follow.

(*No, I didn’t have to tie a ribbon round my neck: friends of the new parents gave them a Particular Gift Certificate for a tasting menu with wines. It was a first for me that the object of the celebration wasn’t an active participant in the feast, but we like to make allowances for the sleep requirements of those under 6 months and we had just as good a time with her on the other end of the baby monitor. I also have no doubt, having met her parents, that she will be trying everything on the menu the minute she figures out the business end of a spoon.)