Sharona, wearing the finery she *almost* won in the Solstmas gift exchange

recently sent me a flock of photos she took at our 14-hour-long Solstmas open house a few weeks ago. I plan to post many of them here in the next week or so, but in the meantime, I just wanted to give you a glimpse into the mind of the Cocktail Host.

Our friend Michael and the Cocktail Host, who seems to be having some sort of epiphany. Photo by Sharona Gottlieb.

While I was running around on Christmas morning decorating ice rings for the punch bowl and figuring out what glassware we should use for the keg of home-brewed pumpkin porter our friend Matthew was bringing …

Matthew and his home-brewed pumpkin porter. Photo by Sharona Gottlieb.

… Dave decided that we needed a diagram of where all the various drinks were, so he wouldn’t have to “keep explaining to everyone where the wine glasses are.” (Click on it to see it in its full glory.) After an hour of fiddling around with his computer (while I stewed about how he wasn’t doing something useful, damnit!), he came up with this 3D graphic, which we posted in a few different places in the house. I’m not sure anyone noticed them without being prompted (at which point we could have just told them where the wine glasses were), but once they saw it they were pretty impressed.

Dave's Powerpoint diagram for Solstmas

At the time he was working on it, I confess I would have rather he were reorganizing the living room or helping me clean the kitchen. But I also think it shows how he’s the yin to my yang, the Abbott to my Costello, the peanut butter to my jelly, the wax to my wane, the mad to my sane (but who is who in this case?).

Without me, our parties would be less obsessively planned, with less homemade food and fewer fancy cocktails. Without him, however, we wouldn’t have synced wireless streaming audio in every room, firewood schlepped and stacked, and “stadium lighting” brightly illuminating the ping-pong table in the backyard at midnight. And there would certainly be no Powerpoint slides, of that I am sure.

It might be easier to plan a party with someone who has priorities similar to my own, but the I suspect the parties would also be a lot less fun.

The Cocktail Hostess and Host. Photo by Sharona Gottlieb. Silly Mrs. Claus apron courtesy of my mom.

For the last few months I’ve been channeling my love of good food away from pork butt and toward fish and fennel, which keeps me from feeling too deprived. Though butter and cream undoubtedly make everything taste better, I’m enjoying exploring the whole universe of food that won’t result in a coronary at age 55, and I’m having fun testing the limits of quinoa and kale. (Note: This doesn’t mean that  I’ve completely given up on the occasional decadent treat or a few fun cocktails, mind you, lest you think that from now on this blog will be about nothing but vegan lettuce wraps and flaxseed-infused smoothies. Everything in moderation—even moderation.)

I’m also super-psyched that right now I’m working on not one but two great cookbooks that are offering me lots of great ideas and inspiration. The first is a copyediting job for The Sprouted Kitchen: A Tastier Take on Whole Foods, which will be published by Ten Speed Press later this year. The author, Sara Forte, has been blogging about healthy cooking at Sprouted Kitchen for years, and the blog is full of stunning photos taken by her husband, Hugh. I hadn’t seen it before I started working on this book, but I’ve become an instant fan, and if you love food blogs, you’d be hard-pressed to find one as beautiful as this. Based on the photos on the blog, I think it’s going to be really lovely (some early design layouts are here). Better than that, it’s in the sweet spot of how I’m cooking right now. Lots of whole grains and vegetables, but not strictly vegetarian. Salads galore. Interesting combinations of unusual ingredients. I haven’t actually cooked any of the recipes yet—I just received the manuscript about a week ago—but there are several I plan to make in the next few weeks.

The second project I’m working on that makes me really happy that I do what I do is proofreading The Davis Farmers Market Cookbook, by Georgeanne Brennan and Ann Evans. I’ve barely cracked the cover on this one—I just got it today—but after a quick look  I’m already marking pages with recipes I want to try.

Sometimes the cookbooks I edit don’t have a lot to do with the way I like to eat, whether they’re about vegan desserts or instructions for making baby food. Other times the books I work on are about something I dearly love but have a blinking “danger” sign attached to them. For example, about six months ago I spent a few weeks copyediting Sweet Cream and Sugar Cones, which will come out in April of this year. Since the ice cream shop where the recipes come from, Bi-Rite Creamery, is only three blocks from my house, I was well aware how dreamy their desserts were before I started working on it, and I spent last August churning out buckets of Strawberry-Balsamic Vinegar and Salted Caramel ice creams, much to the Cocktail Host’s delight. It was a great project, but right now I’m glad I don’t have those recipes for popsicles and ice cream pies staring me in the face each morning when I turn on my computer.

Finally, while I’m on the subject of healthy recipes, here’s a quick little something I’ve been making left and right for the last few weeks. (My apologies for the unappetizing photos. A few posts ago I think I warned you that photos of muddy brown lentils and hippie glop might be making an appearance here.)

Peanut-lime dressing

The Cocktail Host and I love both Thai and Vietnamese food, and we especially adore nuoc cham, the tart-salty-sweet dipping sauce that is typically made with fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, and chiles. It’s a bit too thin to use as a salad dressing or to cling to most foods, so I played around with adding vegetable oil. It was good, but I prefer this version, with ground peanuts. I’ve been making it in double batches lately and storing it in the fridge, where it keeps well, as long as you shake it to recombine the ingredients. I couldn’t say exactly how long, because no matter how much I make, I seem to dump it all on salad greens or tofu  before the week is over. I have yet to meet a vegetable that isn’t tasty with a spoonful of this on top.

Here are the ingredients you need. I like to use Thai bird’s eye chiles, but the market was out of them, so here I’ve used Sriracha sauce instead.

peanut-lime dressing ingredients

And here’s the recipe …

Peanut-Lime Dressing

3/4 cup dry roasted peanuts
3/4 cup freshly squeezed lime juice
1/2 cup coarsely chopped shallots
1/2 cup agave nectar
5 tablespoons fish sauce
3 bird’s eye chiles, stemmed and seeded, or 4 teaspoons Sriracha sauce

Combine all the ingredients in food processor or blender and pulse until the peanuts are finely chopped and the ingredients are thoroughly combined. Taste and adjust the ingredients, adding more agave nectar if you prefer a less tart dressing, more chiles if you like a hotter one.

A Sazerac

I’ve hit the wall that I seem to smack into every January and I’m feeling the need to take a step back from entertaining for a while. And by “a while,” I mean maybe a week or so, since inevitably I’ll have the itch to organize some other celebration, or maybe just have a few folks over for dinner, in a couple of days.

This time of year is always the tail end of an entertaining marathon at our house. In the last month we’ve hosted a daylong afterparty that started at 8 am (following an all-night dance event elsewhere), a Christmas Day open house for 70, a very small surprise party for the Cocktail Host’s birthday, and a larger get-together for my birthday last weekend. A few weeks before that it was Thanksgiving dinner for 11.

The Cocktail Host and Jacob set the table

Add in hosting three bridge games, having a houseguest for five days last week, and various friends dropping by for drinks or dinner every few days, and I’m pooped.

I’m sure this burnout is mostly the result of the party I hosted last Friday, where I went a little bonkers with the menu, making homemade cheese straws, and candied spiced walnuts, and Marcona almonds with lavender and sea salt, and crudités with four (!) kinds of dip, and homemade caramel corn with almonds and pecans, and homemade hummus with za’atar and pita chips baked by yours truly, and cumin-mint chicken satay with a peanut dipping sauce … and that’s not counting the menu of five different cocktails and mocktails.

I have to admit there was a moment last Thursday when I wondered why I was spending my birthday lugging a backpack with 20 pounds of veggies, crackers, and tahini up the hill to my house instead of putting my feet up, but I knew the feeling would pass before long. And when the power went out at our house the morning of the party, I briefly wondered how I would go about canceling the party before I started inventorying my candles and firewood and figuring out which dishes I would have to strike from the menu since I couldn’t use my Cuisinart. (The power came back on an hour or two later.)

In the end, though, I enjoyed this party more than almost any other I’ve hosted, in part because the Cocktail Host insisted that I not work nonstop during my own birthday party, even though I reminded him that it would mean that he would have to spend the whole party on his feet. Though I love making food and drinks for folks at my parties, it was a revelation to have more than 90 seconds to chat with my guests in between shaking up drinks.

So the lesson I took away from this season of entertaining—other than enlisting my husband to make drinks during a party—is the virtue of simplicity. Of streamlining. The wisdom of making four types of cocktails instead of six. The sanity I would gain from serving a cheese plate alone rather than a cheese plate and homemade cheese straws, which had me ripping apart my cabinets looking for my missing rolling pin and sweeping up a flurry of flour an hour before my guests arrived.

You wouldn’t think it would take hosting so many parties to figure this out, but apparently it does. I feel like the bride-to-be who stresses about party favors and the color of the table linens and whether her niece should wear the same type of wrist corsage as the bridesmaids. You can tell her to chill the bleep out, but she’s not going to listen to you. She has to learn for herself.

Speaking of simplicity … one of the cocktails I made last Friday was the Sazerac, by some accounts the first American cocktail. Though I don’t drink a ton of Sazeracs myself at home, I wanted to put something on the menu that didn’t include citrus, as did all the other drinks on the menu, and I like the ritual of assembling a Sazerac. And though I expected this drink to be a hard sell considering the competition, it surprised me by being one of the most popular drinks of the night.

But just because it’s a “simple” drink doesn’t mean that everyone agrees about how it should be made, and many knowledgeable bartenders vehemently disagree about the technique for making it. Some serve it in an old-fashioned glass while others prefer using a cocktail glass. Traditionalists use a sugar cube, but some use simple syrup instead. Some use a combination of a few different types of bitters, while others insist a Sazerac should only be made with Peychaud’s. Some rinse the glass with absinthe, but others use Herbsaint, the New Orleanean anise-flavored liqueur that became popular when it was illegal to sell absinthe in the United States. And finally, and perhaps most contentiously, some like to drop the lemon twist into the drink, while others insist it should only be twisted over the drink and should never, ever see the inside of the glass.

I’m not at all doctrinaire about my Sazeracs and am of the opinion that as long as the drink is quite cold, it’s probably going to taste great. Cocktail nerds will already have their own firmly held opinion about how to assemble this drink, but for the rest of you, here’s the way I put them together.

You’ll need some rye (I’m very fond of Rittenhouse and Michter’s, but Bulleit is perfectly acceptable and a bargain to boot), some Peychaud’s bitters, and some Herbsaint. Even if you’re starting from zero, it shouldn’t cost you more than $50 or so to buy all the ingredients if you use Bulleit.

Sazerac ingredients

Put an ice cube in the bottom of a pint glass and shake about three dashes of Peychaud’s bitters on top. Use a muddler to mash it all up.

Adding the Peychaud's bitters

Add 2 ounces of rye to the glass, add ice, and stir to dissolve the sugar and chill the drink.

Stirring the Sazerac

Now remove a small cocktail glass from your freezer (you do keep cocktail glasses of various sizes in your freezer at all times, don’t you? Good!). Add a small amount of Herbsaint to the glass. Some people like to use an atomizer or an eyedropper, but I typically use a small squeeze bottle. Tilt the glass so the Herbsaint coats the interior of the glass, then dump out the extra liquid.

Adding the Herbsaint

Strain the rye mixture into the glass, squeeze a lemon twist over the drink, and drop the peel into the glass. Voilà! You’ve just made a classic cocktail that’s been around for about 150 years. Now don’t you feel sophisticated?

Voila! A Sazerac.

Michael McIlroy's Right Hand cocktail

Last November I was thrilled to have the chance to go to New York City for some meetings with a client. I hadn’t been to the city in more than ten (!) years, since long before I became a serious cocktail geek, so I was especially excited to check out as many of the city’s famous speakeasies as my liver—and my busy work schedule—allowed.

I was only able to make it to three of places on my long list (PDT, the Raines Law Room, and Milk & Honey), but Milk & Honey was the one I was most excited about, and it didn’t disappoint.

After making reservations online, I met up with my friend AnneLise Sorensen, who took all of the pictures in this post (thanks, AnneLise!). We walked down a gritty little alleyway on the Lower East Side and knocked on the door to get into this retro cocktail fantasyland, a tiny, dimly lit speakeasy where instead of looking at a menu you tell the bartender what you’re hankering for and something ineffably delicious shows up in front of you.

We sat at the bar, of course, so we could see the bartender in action as he worked his magic.

First I asked for a cocktail using aged rum, one of my favorite spirits, and I got a Right Hand, a sort of rum variation of a Negroni, if you want to think of it that way, made from Matusalem Gran Reserva rum, Campari, Carpano Antico vermouth, and a few dashes of Bittermen’s Xocolatl Mole Bitters. If you like, you can find the exact proportions here …

Pouring the Carpano Antico vermouth

After that I asked for another spiritous cocktails—with no fresh muddled fruit or citrus to get in the way of the other ingredients—and our bartender came up with a Greenpoint, a revelation in a glass made from rye, sweet vermouth, yellow Chartreuse, and two different types of orange bitters. Again, last I checked you could find the precise ratios here.

Pouring the yellow Chartreuse

Our bartender, Michael McIlroy, could not have been more charming, patiently answering my incessant questions about all the drinks he was making and chatting with me about cocktail geekery and the best places to drink in New York and San Francisco. And, if I’m not mistaken, he actually invented the two cocktails that I drank, which proves that his palate is as well developed as his gracious sense of hospitality.

Michael McIlroy

He even called ahead to the Raines Law Room and hooked me up with one of the bartenders, there, ensuring I got in without waiting in line with the other thirsty folks hanging around outside. He tells me that Milk & Honey will be moving to another location before too long, but a speakeasy will remain at the current location, and he and another of the M&H bartenders will be behind the stick. It will be called Attaboy, he says, and undoubtedly it will be my first cocktail stop next time I’m in town.

Toasting the New Year with 1990 Cristal

Now that—egads!—it’s 2012, I’ve been looking back at my 2011 blog posts, which is causing me to blush with shame at how little I’ve posted since last September. And by “little,” I mean “not at all.” I could come up with any number of excuses for my indolence, but here are the two greatest hits.

First, a few months ago my nurse practitioner informed me that I needed to watch my cholesterol and blood sugar. Though this was unwelcome news, it should surprise no one who has read my posts about my love of berry trifles …

Summer berry trifle

or my unwavering devotion to cheese …

Solstmas cheese platter

This means I’ve been concocting a lot fewer buttery desserts and lot more lentils and brown rice lately, shaking fewer cocktails and making more tofu curry. And when I might otherwise be photographing my latest efforts in the kitchen, I’m more likely to be playing tennis with my husband.

The second reason is that while the Cocktail Host is out of work, I’ve been working time and a half trying to keep up with paying the bills, which means less time for cooking and blogging, and less money for hosting big blowouts.

That said, neither of these is a great reason for not keeping up with my blog. Because hosting get-togethers is pretty much my favorite hobby, I find that I host parties or have people over for dinner no matter how limited my means.

In part I can do this because I’ve gotten pretty good at turning whatever odds and ends are in the pantry into a credible dinner or hors d’oeuvres platter, but it’s primarily because we have a phenomenal group of friends that bring the party with them whenever they visit. For example, if we were left to our own devices, we might have had to cancel our seventh annual daylong open house (with seventy or so guests) on Christmas Day, but thanks to friends who gave us a big stack of firewood, brought buckets of champagne, made outrageously decadent eggnog, and did a thousand and one other things, from washing up dinner plates during the party to bringing an expensive bottle of Chartreuse so I could make one of my favorite cocktails to pitching in some cash for all the booze we bought for the party, it went on as always. And for this I am truly, deeply grateful.

Also, because of my generous (and food- and drink-loving) friends, as well as my work in food and travel publishing, I often get have experiences that are well above my pay grade. I visited New York City a few months ago and, before having a decadent dinner with some other food writers and editors and Tim and Nina Zagat (yes, those Zagats) …

Dinner at Del Posto

I visited some of New York City’s swankiest speakeasies for some out-of-this-world cocktails …

Milk & Honey cocktails

And even when I’m at home, I have it better than I deserve. I go to bars where I know the mixologists, who often slip me some fun new spirit to taste. I go to Boxing Day parties where The Working Cook prepares local whole-grain polenta with a decadent ragù. I have sommelier friends who never show up to a party without a fine bottle of wine. And I attend New Year’s Eve parties where Mr. Manhattan opens a honey-colored  bottle of 1990 Louis Roederer Cristal that he’s been aging for 20 years …

Photo by Arlie Ausich

So even if it means that my newest food obsession is vegan cooking (oh dear!) rather than blood orange cocktails (my two posts of 2011 with the largest number of visitors), I’m hoping to keep up the blogging in 2012. And if the next photo I post is of a mess of delicious but ugly lentils with brown rice, well, I apologize in advance.

Yesterday I visited a newish vegetarian/vegan restaurant named Source. Despite the hippie-dippie vibe (their fermented tea beverages are “infused with energetic information of love”), their pizza, made in a gas-burning brick oven, was divine, dripping with so much truffle oil that it gave off that earthy pheromone scent that drives me crazy. Honestly, I didn’t know whether to eat it or to *&$#@ it. It’s odd to think that I would make a special trip to a mostly vegan restaurant to eat pizza, but I would absolutely go out of my way for one of their Magic Mushroom pies. (The restaurant’s two concessions to non-vegan food are honey, which sweetens some of the beverages, and cheese—which is not surprising, considering that one of the owners starting making homemade mozzarella in NYC more than 20 years ago).

But some of the most charming items on the menu are the vegan desserts, many of which mimic the junk food many of us ate as kids. Do you think Twinkies are gross? Well, how about a Twinkee, a vegan sponge cake filled with vanilla creme? Or maybe a Moon Pie, made with vegan chocolate chip cookies? But the dessert that really called my name was the Snowball, which came in a bajillion flavors, like lemon cake with lemon frosting and chocolate cake filled with strawberry jam and covered in thin slivers of decorative dried strawberries. After much waffling I decided on this one …

The vegan chocolate frosting covering the vegan chocolate cake may not have been as creamy as the brown sugar buttercream frosting I made last weekend to frost a birthday cake (which contained, I might add, the decidedly un-vegan ingredients of heavy cream, a bucket of egg yolks, and a whole pound of butter), but with all those well-salted crunchy peanuts coating the outside, you would never notice, and it also achieved the perfect sweet-salty balance that makes me go bonkers for chocolate-covered pretzels and salted caramel ice cream. Though I usually choose desserts that contain a healthy (or unhealthy!) dollop of cream and eggs, I’ll take  this vegan version over the original Sno Ball any day, which apparently contains the following:

Sugar, Water, Corn Syrup, Enriched Bleached Wheat Flour, Coconut (Sulfite Treated), Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable and/or Animal Shortening (Soybean, Cottonseed and/or Canola Oil, Beef Fat), High Fructose Corn Syrup. Contains 2% or Less of: Cocoa, Pork Gelatin, Modified Corn Starch, Glucose, Sweet Dairy Whey, Leavenings (Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Baking Soda, Monocalcium Phosphate), Mono and Diglycerides, Soy Flour, Polysorbate 60, Soy Lecithin, Cornstarch, Salt, Soy Protein Isolate, Calcium and Sodium Caseinate, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Dextrose, Cellulose Gum, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Potassium Sorbate and Sorbic Acid (to Retain Freshness). Coatings Contain: Blue (FD&C Blue 1 Lake, Blue 2 Lake, Green (Yellow 5 Lake, Blue 1 Lake), Lavender (Blue 2 Lake, Carmine, Red 40 Lake), Orange (Yellow 6 Lake), Red (Red 40 Lake), Pink (Carmine, Red 40 Lake), Teal (Blue 1 Lake, Yellow 5 Lake), Yellow (Yellow 5 Lake)

I can’t think of any better reason to pull out the stand mixer and do a little baking from scratch.

A few weeks ago, my parents, who live in Houston, decided at the last minute to host not one but two different parties (on consecutive nights, no less) to celebrate my father’s retirement. It’s not clear whether it was their fondest wish to have their beloved youngest daughter (ahem, that would be me!) in town for the celebrations, or whether they simply didn’t want to be bothered manning the cocktail shaker for each of the  parties. Regardless, they flew me home for a quick two-day trip to join in the festivities. Though it was undoubtedly generous of them to spring for my last-minute plane ticket from San Francisco, at least it was cheaper than hiring a bartender two nights in a row, as I frequently reminded them during my short trip home.

I’ve written about having parties in Houston before. I like to whinge about how my parents’ suburban liquor store doesn’t stock Miclo creme de violette from France or my favorite brands of French Cognac, or about how I have to make do with my parents’ too-large tumblers instead of having access to my own collection of highball and old-fashioned glasses. The same was true this time, and so, mixologically speaking, these parties weren’t my finest moment of cocktail achievement. I tried to take advantage of the produce in my parents garden (at this point a bit wilted from weeks on end of 100+ degree heat), and I had to concede that half of the guests would rather have a Shiner Bock beer (Texas’s best brew) or vodka martini (the saddest “cocktail” ever, in my opinion) rather than take a leap with a cocktail concoction they had never heard of before. At least I turned my most loyal blog reader onto my own desert island cocktail, the Sidecar, which was initially a hard sell among the Houstonians.

Although the cocktails I made  (basil-gin gimlets, mojitos, sidecars, and the London Dry Sangria I worked out for a wedding a few weeks ago) weren’t particularly inventive, the parties were a great success … less because of the food and drink and more because of the occasion we were celebrating.

My father went to work for the U.S. space program, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, in 1966, two years before I was born. With his electrical engineering degree, he started working on the primitive computers that guided the Apollo rockets in their flight. I love these photos of my dad working for the space program during the Apollo program because in some ways they look so unlike him (he’s nearing his 70th birthday), and yet in other ways they are so clearly him.

Dad is on the right

Since Dad starting working for the space program not quite two years before I was born, it has been a part of my life all my years. My very first memory as a child is of watching one of the Apollo rockets lift off. We lived in Titusville, Florida, at the time, about 15 miles away from where the rockets launched. My father always had to be at work during the launches, which took place in the early morning, which meant that my older sister and I were always home alone with my mother. I remember our mother plucking us out of bed in our pajamas and sitting on the back of our Dodge sedan in the carport while we watched an Apollo rocket rise into the sky, looking for all the world as if it we could just reach out and touch it.

As much as the space program has been a part of my life, this was even more so for my parents. At one of my Dad’s retirement parties he mentioned that there had been 135 shuttle launches. Since he specialized, among other things, in launch support, he would always get up in the wee hours and go to work at Mission Control for each launch (actually, he was usually in the room next to Mission Control, where he and the other engineers would monitor the systems). I asked him how many of those 135 launches he had missed, and he said that he had been at Mission Control, or at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, for all but three or four of them. Add in the 15 or so Apollo launches he participated in between 1966 and 1972 and he witnessed the arc of the U.S. space program for 45 years.

So even though Dad is more of a beer drinker than a sophisticated cocktail tippler (hey, at least he graduated from Schaefer Light to Heineken some years ago!), I raise a cocktail (maybe a Blue Moon, one of the few cocktails other than Aviation to use my beloved creme de violette) to Dad. Now all I need is one of these cocktail shakers for my next party in Houston.

Yesterday I went to the wedding celebration of my friends Kristina and John. Though, sadly, I somehow managed to come away without any pictures of the beautiful blushing bride and her handsome beau, I did come home with a camera full of pictures of cocktails and food. Go figure. Suffice it to say the event was gobsmackingly beautiful, from the bride herself in her grandmother’s necklace to the garden setting to the wildflowers on each table. And did I mention the cupcakes?? Oh, the cupcakes!

The most gorgeous of the many fabulous cakelets, which were all baked by friends of the bride, were these, which, not surprisingly, were contributed by The Working Cook.

It doesn’t take long looking at this cupcake to realize that it’s a s’more cupcake, with brûléed marshmallow and graham cracker. Wow.

But back to the drinks … In addition to beer and wine, the bride and groom wanted to serve a signature cocktail, which I volunteered to make. So, after I made several different drinks for the bride to taste a few months ago, she settled on London Dry Sangria, a pitcher cocktail dreamed up by Duggan McDonnell, a genius of a San Francisco bartender who opened the neo-Latin speakeasy Cantina a handful of years ago. With a bright lemon flavor and bit of sparkle from the ginger beer, it seemed like the perfectly refreshing drink to serve during a cocktail hour that would immediately follow a warm-weather afternoon ceremony.

The recipe for his London Dry Sangria has been published in a few places, both in a book and online, but even after I found it I had a bit of work in front of me.

You see, most recipes are published without mentioning specific brands of food or spirits. Most of the cookbooks I edit—whether for food or for cocktails—specifically discourage mentioning brand names  of ingredients. This is generally for very good reasons. First, you don’t want to discourage a reader from making a recipe if they don’t have access to the specific brand specified in a recipe. And second, recipes that specify brands often seem as if they’re shilling for that brand. If you see a recipe that indicates, for example, Kraft grated Parmesan cheese or Grey Goose vodka, you might guess that the recipe was engineered by the corporate flacks at the respective company rather than crafted by a dispassionate foodie. This is why most recipes you’ll find in cookbooks don’t mention specific brand names except for in a few rare instances (Tabasco sauce and Campari are a few exceptions that come to mind).

I think that this is generally a good policy, but it’s less compelling when applied to cocktails. If I were just throwing together a pitcher of Duggan’s London Dry Sangria for a run-of-the-mill cocktail party, I wouldn’t have been thrown off by his ingredients list, which calls for gin, white wine (actually, he specifies a grüner veltliner), orange bitters, and ginger beer, among other ingredients, without specifying the type. But, when you think about it, there is such a huge amount of variation between those ingredients that it can result in various versions of the drink that are quite different.

Do you use Barritts Ginger Beer (which I hear is Duggan’s go-to ginger beer), which is a fairly sweet drink that contains high-fructose corn syrup? Or do you go with Bundaberg, or the intensely flavored Fever-Tree, loved by cocktail aficionados but considerably more expensive? For the gin do you use Hendrick’s, which is delicate and floral, with more cucumber than juniper, or do you go with Junipero Gin, which smacks you upside the head with its spicy juniper quality? Even the orange bitters in the original recipe are up for interpretation. I started with my go-to orange bitters, Reagan’s Orange Bitters No. 6, my favorite to use in a gin gimlet, before I decided that the drink benefitted from a dose of the beefier and spicier Angostura Orange Bitters.

Since I needed to prepare 176 servings of the drink for the wedding, I really wanted to dial in the right combo of ingredients in the recipe, but I also needed to use ingredients at a reasonable price. This, unfortunately, eliminated using Martin Miller’s Westbourne Strength Gin, a delightful 90-proof gin (most gins are about 80 proof) with a strong undercurrent of juniper and citrus that I thought would marry well with the lemon juice. But if I scrimped on the gin, that meant I would have more money to spend on the ginger beer, an important ingredient since the bride had originally suggested a drink that incorporated fresh ginger.

In the end, I decided on this refreshing cocktail, which the bride charmingly called “The Main Squeeze.” So, with several tweaks to Duggan’s original ratios, and the addition of recommended brands, this is what we drank at the wedding …

The Main Squeeze, after Duggan McDonnell’s London Dry Sangria

Makes 8 servings

12 ounces gruner veltliner or other zesty dry white wine, like a sauvignon blanc
7 ounces Tanqueray gin
8 oz freshly squeezed lemon juice
5 ounces simple syrup
10 dashes Angostura orange bitters
10 dashes Reagan’s Orange Bitters
12 ounces Cock & Bull ginger beer
16 thin lemon slices, for garnish

Combine the wine, gin, lemon juice, simple syrup, and both bitters in a pitcher and stir to combine. Chill in the refrigerator for at least two hours. Pour into an old-fashioned glass filled with ice. Top each serving with 1 1/2 ounces of ginger beer and garnish with two thin lemon slices, each pressed against the side of the glass using the handle end of a barspoon or a chopstick. Serve at once.

The drink seemed supremely popular, and I’d drink it any day, but as always there are a dozen different directions you could take this drink in. Use the ingredients I’ve suggested here, or substitute what you have on hand. I’d be curious to hear your results.

Last night I went to Chile Pies & Ice Cream, the cutest little restaurant/dessert cafe I could imagine, where there were about 10 kinds of house-baked pie.

This, however, is what truly blew my mind …

This, my friends, is a pie shake. You pick your pie, you pick your ice cream, and then you watch them mash them up with some milk and top it with an outrageous quantity of whipped cream.

You want a slice of green chile apple pie swirled with Strawberry Je Ne Sais Quoi ice cream? That’s your prerogative. Apple chai pie with golden raisins mixed with a scoop of milk coffee? I don’t mind if I do! Just remember that you’re going to have to eat it with a spoon to get at the chunks of crust that are floating in the creamy substrate.

I wasn’t completely sold on the idea, so I asked for an entry-level combo: a slice of chocolate-peanut butter pie mixed with vanilla ice cream. And dang if the Cocktail Host and I didn’t polish it right off.