Cocktail update: The Citrine

As you may recall, I recently invented a cocktail called The Citrine. It was notable in that its ingredients were all handmade: the plum vodka from my neighbor, the simple syrup from me, and the shrub from a small company in Smyrna.

But Dale, I hear you ask, what happens when your neighbor runs out of plum vodka, and now that the small company is Smyrna has shut down, what will you do for the Peach & Cardamom shrub?

Follow along, class, and let’s fix this together.

First, the plum vodka. I am not a fan of 95% of flavored base liquors, but I am not unaware of the multitudinous abominations in that category, so I was sure I had never seen plum vodka. And I hadn’t. I was helped by a young person who was stocking the shelves, and even he had to have it looked up so he could find it. (It was on the top shelf of the vodka section, where neither he nor I had dreamed of looking because — trust me — it’s not top shelf material.)

This is Plush. It is too sweet to be a vodka, more like a liqueur, so that meant a complete rejiggering of the ingredients. In addition, rather than the original apple simple syrup, I decided to make an apple cider simple syrup for a little extra edge (recipe to follow).

The Citrine (non-handcrafted version)

  • 1 3/4 oz plum vodka (Plush)
  • 3/4 oz peach & cardamom shrub
  • 1/4 oz apple cider simple syrup

Shake with ice, strain into a Nick & Nora glass.

You will notice that we use triple the amount of shrub in this version; that’s how sweet the Plush is.

Apple Cider Simple Syrup

Boil 3 cups of apple cider with 1 cup of turbinado sugar until the sugar is dissolved and the cider has reduced to 2 cups. Cool. Add an ounce of vodka, calvados, or applejack to the mixture to help prevent mold.

We have one more variation to try: plum brandy, or slivovitz, which is marginally easier to find than plum vodka. And I may make an apple cider syrup with brown sugar to see if that adds depth to the drink or not. And I have found a peach/cardamom shrub recipe that I will be trying early next week. (I’m aiming to serve this at a holiday function where apparently I am the go-to bartender.)

Stay tuned.

New Cocktail: The Citrine

Okay, you might have a little trouble getting your hands on the ingredients for this one, since two of them are home-made and one is from a small food company in Smyrna, GA [keep reading]. But it’s worth it!

This is one of those cocktails (of more than a few!) that I came up with after sitting with the ingredients for a while before I thought, why the heck not, let’s mix these two and see what happens.

The Citrine

First we start with a plum vodka that was given to me several months ago by our incredible neighbor Lisa Lee. She gifts me with all kinds of home-made substances, like elderflower liqueur and this plum vodka, made from either things she grows in the backyard (over the fence from my labyrinth) or gets at the market.

That’s the bottle on the right. On the left is a Peach & Cardamom Shrub, which means it’s vinegar (in this case, apple cider vinegar) with infusions. It’s from a company called MarRay Foods and was given to me by a burner friend at Alchemy back in October. (My camp, 3 Old Men, is known for its craft cocktail bar.)

And in the rear is the apple simple syrup, the recipe for which is dead simple.

  • 1 3/4 oz plum vodka
  • 1/4 oz Peach & Cardamom Shrub
  • 1/3 oz apple simple syrup

Pour the ingredients into a cocktail shaker. Shake with ice, then strain into a cocktail or Nick & Nora glass.

The Citrine is fruity, not too sweet, and then finishes with that lovely acidity that vinegar brings.

Apple Simple Syrup

  • 1 cup apple juice
  • 1 cup turbinado sugar

Mix the apple juice and sugar in a small pot. Bring to a boil, then stir until the sugar has dissolved. Cool, and store in the refrigerator. If you can’t find turbinado sugar — it shouldn’t be a problem — try brown sugar.

Coming soon: a recipe for the shrub, since MarRay Foods (I just discovered) is in the process of shutting down so that its proprietor can go back for their Masters in Library Science! Huzzah!

How damn dumb are they?

The other day I received in the mail an envelope that encouraged me to claim this SPECIAL OFFER WITHIN 10 DAYS. Normally I just toss these sorts of things straight into the trash, since they are never anything I am interested in, but this time I just happened to see through the envelope window the phrase… PRESIDENT TRUMP TRAIN.

Well.

Breathlessly I tore open the envelope and was deluged with multiple forms and pieces of paper.

This opens up.

NOT AVAILABLE IN ANY STORE, KENNETH!

Notice how you don’t get your FREE TRACK SET until Shipment Two.

Of course this is a scam to separate the MAGAts from their money. How can I tell? See how that flyer opened up and there’s a foldover on the right? On the reverse:

That’s right, this crap is from 2016. They haven’t even updated the brochures.

Look, KENNETH, “gleaming gold-tone wheels.” Not gold, not gold-plated, gold-toned. Appropriate for that new President, indeed.

Then we start getting the details: You’ll get another train car every other month — but no clue as to how many this might end up being.

As for Trump’s “stirring messages of patriotism and American greatness,” I invite you to scroll back up and look at the close-up of the first three shipments. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN seems to be about it for stirring messages, but then again, the audience for this scam is easily impressed.

The audience for this scam is also easily stampeded. As amygdala-based lifeforms, they seek fear and anger to feed their brains, and so this whole pitch is designed to make their brains tingle with anxiety that they might miss out on this PART OF HISTORY.

YOU’RE SPECIAL. YOU’RE ENTITLED. DON’T WAIT! ALL THOSE OTHER SPECIAL, ENTITLED PEOPLE ARE GOING TO BEAT YOU TO IT!

And best of all: SEND NO MONEY NOW.

What’s not to like?

If you are of a suspicious mind, you might be wondering how much this costs. Does it say? Not on the big brochure. Not on the little folded note-size piece, that reiterates that YOU NEED TO HURRY IF YOU WANT THIS HISTORICAL THING. Not on the claim notice. Not on the generic Hamilton Collection flyer.

So many pieces of paper! It’s almost like they think the audience for this scam might not have the laser-like focus needed to read it all.

Ah, there it is, in the fine print:

That’s right, the charge for the first shipment is $89.99 plus $14.99, and wouldn’t you know it — you get all [redacted] pieces for the same attractive price, which is… do the math, carry the one… $104.98.

One hundred dollars for each of those HISTORIC train cars. That’s $314.94 just for the first three cars — and there is no indication of when (if ever) the shipments will stop. I’ll let you do the math for a decent-sized train set. (And The Hamilton Collection is a subset of The Bradford Exchange, which charges your credit card before each shipment. You’ll never even notice the money is gone, right?)

And HO scale?

That’s the one in front. Notice the hobbyist’s fingers at the right of frame. The gauge of the tracks, i.e., the distance between the tracks, is .625″, 5/8 of an inch. $104.98. Each.

So the Bradford Exchange has had these things sitting in a warehouse somewhere for eight years and has the chutzpah to pass them off as a fresh idea. And only someone who is too dumb to realize that if the Bradford Exchange still has these to sell after eight years, then maybe DEMAND DIDN’T ALREADY EXCEED EXPECTATIONS as might have been expected.

A Trump voter, in other words.

New Cocktail: [unnamed bourbon cocktail]

I created this back before Alchemy in October, but I still haven’t come up with a name yet.

[unnamed bourbon cocktail]

  • 1 1/2 oz bourbon
  • 1/2 oz Rivulet pecan liqueur
  • 1/2 oz salty caramel flavored whisky
  • 2–3 dashes smoke bitters

Stir with ice, strain into highball glass with ice.

You might add a little sweetener to it, but I don’t think it needs it. It is actually pretty complex for such a bougie combination.

Suggest names in the comments.

The Savoy Variations: Warday’s Cocktail

I’m bored, so I’m taking random cocktail recipes from The Savoy Cocktail Book (1930), giving them a try, and modifying/improving them if I think it’s necessary, and reporting my findings here.

Warday’s Cocktail

[p. 169]

This one was pleasant enough, but kind of lackluster. I almost splurged and used some of my very precious green chartreuse — and I am assuming they meant green, not yellow — but chickened out and used Boomsma Kloosterbitter instead. (I may make it again with one of the other not-quite-chartreuses in my cabinet to see how they work. And I may break out the actual Chartreuse.) At any rate, after a sip or two I added another teaspoon of the Kloosterbitter and that helped a lot.

You will also notice that I used Old Tom gin. I was surprised to discover that I had no actual dry gin in the cabinet. Don’t know how that happened, so I may take steps to remedy that before making this again. Also, I could play around with the sweet vermouth to see if one of the others might bump it up a bit.

  • 3/4 oz sweet vermouth
  • 3/4 oz dry gin
  • 3/4 oz Calvados/apple brandy
  • 2 tsp green chartreuse

I’m counting this one as my improvement, especially if I make more with alternate ingredients.

SAVOY VARIATIONS SCORECARD:

  • Savoy: 7
  • Dale: 3
  • Sink: 4

Choices

It’s all about choices.

Here’s a piece of music. You probably don’t even need to click on the video to hear it in your head, but give it a listen, at least a little bit.

The glorious Finale to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in d minor, “Ode to Joy.” There is very little like it in Western music. Leonard Bernstein played it with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Berlin Wall after it fell. We know what it stands for.[1]

Here’s another one. You are more than likely not familiar with it, so click and listen to maybe a minute or so.

This is the second movement to Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in e minor, the Allegro.

A little background: In 1936, Shostakovich wrote his Symphony No. 4 — my favorite of his — and it nearly got him killed. After Stalin attended a performance of Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of Mzensk and hated it, critical and official denunciations of “corrupt” “anti-Soviet” music appeared in the newspapers, and Shostakovich kept a packed bag by the door.

As an extra precaution, he canceled the premiere of No. 4, and we didn’t get to hear it until 1962. He ingratiated himself with his Symphony No. 5 (subtitled “A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism,” just in case they didn’t get it), and his wartime symphonies (No. 7 and No. 8) were huge hits.

No. 9, right after the war, was dinged for not being “patriotic” enough, but it was still passable.

So he waited to premiere No. 10 until after Stalin died — and then in 1979, Testimony was published in the West, purporting to be a biography written with Shostakovich’s input and approval. (He died in 1975.) We are still arguing over how much of the book is actually true, including this quote about Symphony No. 10:

“I did depict Stalin in my next symphony, the Tenth. I wrote it right after Stalin’s death and no one has yet guessed what the symphony is about. It’s about Stalin and the Stalin years. The second part, the scherzo, is a musical portrait of Stalin, roughly speaking. Of course, there are many other things in it, but that’s the basis.”

And so I have both of these pieces of music teed up so that I can blast one of them over the quite powerful speakers in my labyrinth, alarming and possibly angering everyone in a three-block radius.

As soon as we know the results of tomorrow’s election. It’s all about choices, innit?

—————

[1] My other choice would be the Finale to Mahler’s Symphony No. 2. This one, if you aren’t familiar with it, you should listen to the end.

New Cocktail: Thyme & the Citadel

For some reason in the last six months, I chose to make/experiment with thyme liqueur, and last summer at To The Moon I offered a Thyme & Tonic as one our cocktails. For this most recent Alchemy, I decided to step it up a bit and came up with…

Thyme & the Citadel

This intriguing name came from the French gin Citadelle, which is a bit more floral than I like gin in general — but what if we added a bit of herbal to it?

It’s quite tasty!

  • 1.5 oz Citadelle gin (or any floral, slightly sweet gin)
  • .5 oz thyme liqueur
  • tonic water
  • lemon twist

Combine in a glass with ice, add tonic water, express the twist over the drink and drop it in.

All very easy, but what about the thyme liqueur?

Infuse 3–4 tablespoons of fresh thyme sprigs in a 750 ml of neutral spirit, like vodka, for three weeks until it’s a rich olive green. Strain and set aside. Make a cup of simple syrup by boiling 1/2 cup of water with 1/2 cup of sugar until the sugar dissolves. (You might try experimenting with brown sugar, etc.) Mix simple syrup into the thyme until it’s just sweet enough. Don’t oversweeten it!

Enjoy!

A Modest Proposal redux

Six years ago I made this modest proposal, and with the most important election of our lives here in less than two weeks, I think most of us would appreciate a repost.


Voter turnout in the world’s greatest democracy[1] is, for some reason, an issue.

I have a solution.

No,  we can’t pass a law making voting mandatory because no one does that.[2]

Instead, let’s work with what we have: overwhelming campaign ads/begs/emails/commercials. Rather than trying to get money out of our elections,[3] let’s leverage the disgust and frustration most of us feel every time a new email pings our box.

Here’s how: We establish — by law — a national database. When you vote, you’re given a unique code. Using the code, you log into the database and confirm your info: any and all email accounts,  phone numbers, cable tv service, anything we can think of where we don’t want to hear from politicians. You click the box, and presto! the politicians are instructed to block their campaigns from contacting you or face a substantial penalty for each offense. (I’ll start the bidding at $1 million per offense, and I wouldn’t object if that sum were payable to the voter.)

Think about it. If you vote early, then you get to opt out for the rest of the campaign.

Turn, turn, kick, turn — yes, IT WILL WORK!

edited to add: I’m thinking the politicians will actually be in favor of this; once we’re off the table they can focus their limited resources on the people who haven’t voted yet.  It’s a perfect feedback loop: we get left alone, while the politicians will ratchet up their pressure on the nonvoters to go vote. The more people who vote, the more pressure on the remaining nonvoters. TTKT—YIWW!

edited to add also too: The law should also state that voting begins as soon as the campaign does.

—  —  —  —  —

[1] The United States, in case you were wondering.

[2] Lots of people do that.

[3]  Lots of people do that, too.

Oklahoma, are you OK?

The outrage du jour is of course the conservative Xtianists making their brains itch by deciding the Paris Olympics have besmirched their own personal religiousy beliefs by pArOdYiNg ThE lAsT sUpPeR KENNETH, but I’m not going to address that. “BUT THEY APOLOGIZED AND EVERYTHING KENNETH” no they didn’t apologize for parodying The Last Supper, because they didn’t parody The Last Supper, and I’m not going to address that. Their concerns are not legitimate.

Instead, let’s jump back a couple of weeks and consider that Oklahoma’s State School Superintendent, one Ryan Walters, issued a mandate that Oklahoma teachers would all be given a Bible and that every teacher “will be teaching from the Bible in the classroom.”

The state’s Attorney General raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips on that one, and more than one school system has politely but firmly told the Superintendent to shove it, but Walters is adamant that Oklahoma’s madrassas will do his bidding.

It is in that spirit that I offer the following lesson plan to Oklahoma’s teachers.

One of the weirdest shibboleths of the Xtianist world is that the Ten Commandments were an integral part of the founding of this nation, and that we are therefore a Xtian nation even though Moses and Mt. Sinai can in no way thought of as “Christian.” To be clear, they push the idea that requiring the Decalogue to be posted in every classroom is not religious in the least because the Commandments are part of the founding documents of the United States of America. They want students to be taught that without the Ten Commandments we wouldn’t have the Constitution.

—————

So, class, today we are going to look at how the Ten Commandments informed our nation’s governing document. Bobby, can you pass out the Commandments, and Alice, give everyone a copy of the Constitution…

Does everyone have their packet of ten different highlighters? You’ll need a different color for each Commandment, of course. And you all have a black marker, right? Good, let’s get started.

Let’s start with your pink highlighter. Highlight the first commandment: “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Okay, good. Now work with your partner to look through the Constitution and find where James Madison and those other guys used the first commandment as a source for their ideas, and highlight that passage with the pink highlighter.  I’ll set a timer for five minutes. Don’t worry, the Constitution is short, not quite four pages, so you’ve got plenty of time.

::five minutes pass — ding!::

Okay, what did you find?

Well, okay, maybe that commandment wasn’t a primary source for the founding fathers. Just strike through that one with your black marker and we’ll just keep using the pink highlighter. Go ahead and highlight the second commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Let’s look for where Madison & co. used that commandment in the Constitution.

Let’s put five minutes back on the timer, and… go!

::five minutes — ding!::

[Since we can all guess how this is going to go, we will now cut to the end of the exercise]

So class, what did you discover?

Sonia, I don’t think it’s fair to say that the Commandments played no role in the creation of the U.S. Constitution. No, I know that we couldn’t find a trace of any of them anywhere in it — and good catch, Clarence, that the right to a fair trial actually comes from the Magna Carta and English common law and not the Ninth Commandment — but maybe we just missed the references. Here’s what we’ll do: Work with your partner and write a letter to Superintendent Walters asking if him to come to our class and show us how we missed it. I bet he’d be delighted to do that!

And class, my apologies for asking you to buy ten different highlighters when only one would have been enough.

Here endeth the lesson.

Grand Canyon 2024

Yes, we traveled once again to Grand Canyon. It was our fifth trip to our favorite place, and this time we started out with a two-night stay at the North Rim, a 4.5 hour drive from Las Vegas.

And yes, I usually live-blog our travels. But how many photos of the Canyon do you need to see? You can always use the dropdown menu of categories over there on the left to find our previous Canyon jaunts.

I do have some thoughts, and with that…

PRO TIPS

  • If you’re going to the North Rim, fly to Vegas. If you’re going to the South Rim, fly to Phoenix.
    • If you have the time and money, spend a night in St. George, UT, on the way to the North Rim, and in Flagstaff, AZ, on the way to the South Rim.
  • If you have a SoLight or two, bring them with you to light your way back to your cabin/campsite.
  • Do you have dirty shoes from hiking/tripping over elk? Bring some cheap shower caps to put them in when you pack!
  • North Rim Lodge: Try to get in one of the cabins numbered 300 or 400. They are a little more modern and a little more spacious than the originals.
  • The restaurants claim to expect “business casual” attire. Pfft. I saw no one turned away for shorts and t-shirts.
  • Pack your jigger and your bitters, then buy a small bottle of gin, either on the way out of Vegas or Phoenix or at the General Store in the park. Presto: your first pre-dinner cocktail is now a lot cheaper than the one in the restaurant. (I snagged a 750ml bottle of Bombay Sapphire our second day there, and even though I left half the bottle for the cleaning staff it was still cheaper than my having the same cocktail up at El Tovar or Bright Angel.)
    • Empty your ice bucket somewhere it can pool so the chipmunks and ravens have a little water in that heat.
  • Stick to the speed limit. Wildlife will be right there in the road when you least expect it.
  • Watch for stopped traffic, too: It usually means there are elk or deer or something to look at. Similarly, in the Village, if you see a bunch of tourists facing away from the Canyon, they’re more than likely watching a wild animal or two.
  • “Where are you from?” always works as a conversation starter, followed by “Is this your first time at the Canyon?”

 

RANDOM THOUGHTS

  • The North Rim is very much more wilderness than the South Rim, a lot less accommodating to the casual tourist. The ponderosa forests, flecked here and there with stands of aspen, are gorgeous, and even the fallen giants are beautiful, serving their cyclical purpose in death.
  • Reservations are required at the North Rim Lodge restaurant. It’s the only restaurant there (with a small deli and one coffee shop) and seating is tight.
  • The elk on the South Rim are quite habituated to humans, but are nonetheless wild animals. After all, they’ve had us around for over 100 years now, and the three babies we saw — like their mothers — have never known a landscape without those weird human things in the way.
    • As a comparison, the only elk we saw at the North Rim was on our way out,  a youngish male who was thinking about crossing the road but when he saw our car went sproinging away into the woods. At the South Rim, they just stroll on out across the road.
    • In the same vein, we watched two baby elk play-fight in front of us, then race each other up and down the “revegetation area” there at the rim. No adults in sight. A third baby, smaller, chirped at being left alone.
  • Spanish and Eastern Asian languages were the predominant languages I heard there. English was maybe 30% of what I heard.
  • We went into Tusayan to check out the pizza place (right there at the roundabout), and it was good! As we left the park, we realized there was a very very long line of cars waiting to get through the gate, so I did a little map quest and discovered that there is indeed an “authorized vehicles only” road that zips around the gate and deposits you right there in the Village. So, shouldn’t guests at the Lodges, who hold senior citizen National Parks passes and who are sustaining members of the Grand Canyon Conservancy, be authorized to skip the line??
  • We had literally cloudless skies the entire week we were there. For the past five years we’ve tried to catch a summer lightning storm over the Canyon, and every single trip, the weather has been flawless. I registered a complaint at the front desk and was told with a laugh that I should have been there the week before. Hrmph.
  • We saw our first Tesla Cybertruck in the wild, and yes, it’s as ugly as you think. I now describe them as looking like a police artist sketch of a Rivian.
  • I had a Scathingly Brilliant Idea for a t-shirt, which seemed to tickle the folk at the Grand Canyon Conservancy when I emailed them about it, but I doubt they’ll have the courage to produce it:

What’s not to like? They’d sell a million of them.