Pumpkins And Egg Nog And Bourbon, Oh My

The holidays are coming up, which means it is time to figure out all the wonderful things you can do with egg nog and alcohol. Last year, I cultivated the mixture of egg nog and brandy or bourbon, occasionally cutting the egg nog with a little non-fat milk, which served both to make the egg nog last longer, and also to make it a little healthier. I would also sprinkle some ground nutmeg on the top, and I would sometimes make a version of a Brandy Alexander--1 oz Brandy, 1 oz Brown Creme de Cacao or Kahlua, 1 oz Half and Half, and 1/4 tsp of nutmeg--substituting egg nog for the Half and Half.

This year, I've ramped it up a little with some pumpkin liqueur, a wonderful concoction that I did not know existed. Trust Marina's unerring eye for strange and wonderful new sideboard candidates.

The liqueur can be enjoyed alone, over ice or neat. When mixed with egg nog, brandy, and maybe a dash of organic cream, it adds a tasty spice to a gentle, sweet and full-bodied drink which is perfect for a nightcap on an chilly evening by the ocean.

What are your favorite liquid treats for this time of year, alcoholic or non?

To Bean Or Not To Bean, That Is The Question

Last night's dinner marked several firsts: the first dinner I've cooked in Santa Cruz that merits a blog; the first time I've cooked green beans; and the first time I've set off a smoke alarm. I would say they are all important milestones.

You would think that green beans would be easy to cook. And you would probably be right. But all the recipes I looked up on Epicurious were very complicated, seating the green beans in the midst of a bunch of other ingredients, and last night, I was too tired for ingredients. I just wanted to cook something healthy that was not pasta, so I made a run to the local New Leaf grocery store, which is essentially a Whole Foods, or, for those of you in Montana, a Good Food Store. At New Leaf, I bought a boneless, skinless chicken breast, and asked them to cut it in half (note to self: next time, be sure to ask the butcher to cut it in half horizontally; cutting in half the other way doesn't give any advantages in terms of making the breast thinner for faster cooking time). I also picked up half a pound of fresh green beans--okay, I don't know that it was half a pound, but who's going to check?

In other New Leaf notes, egg nog is now available, which is the first sign of the holidays. I'm currently on my second egg nog and bourbon of the evening. Okay, okay, so it's my third.

Google mentioned sauteeing green beans, so I decided to wing it. However, it did mention trimming the strings from the beans, so I set to doing so. That took a while. And then it took a while more. It took me so long, in fact, that I realized that cutting green beans belongs in a French movie, perhaps featuring Marion Cotillard and Gerard Depardieu, chopping green beans and drinking melancholy glasses of red wine and brooding philosophically. After I finished trimming the beans, the couscous and chicken breasts were starting to cook rapidly, so I chose a haphazard strategy of piling up all the beans and slicing at them at random, which worked surprisingly well, probably better than I deserved.

It was one of my more chaotic cooking experiments, and that says a lot. Here's the evidence of chaos:





Pretty chaotic, considering all I had the energy to do was throw instant couscous in a pan and cook chicken in olive oil with salt and pepper, and cook green beans in olive oil. So chaotic that the smoke from the chicken set off the smoke alarm, which was a first. I think that means I've earned my stripes as a cook now, right?

I reckon this hasn't happened before because our old stove at the SF apartment had built-in fans for ventilation, while the new stove does not. Next time, I will open windows first.

Somehow, some way, order appeared from chaos.





All in all, not my best effort. I put too much water in the couscous, which caused absorption problems, and I had to drain and fluff and do some remedial heating to bring it up to the right consistency. The chicken was tasty and tender on the inside, but was perhaps excessively crispy. Still, it wasn't bad for being exhausted.

But short of baking green beans into a casserole, does anyone have good, simple ideas for spicing up their preparation?

A Relocation Of My Hunger For Knowledge (Pun Intended)

So we have moved from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, which changes the venue for the blog, but not the overall purpose. There are eateries to try, meals to cook, and beers to drink (and the local market stocks Moose Drool, my Montana friends! This makes me very happy).

The big news is that our bungalow, two blocks from the ocean, comes with a yard and vegetable beds! In the months ahead, we will be plotting--so to speak--a strategy for what to plant and when. In the meantime, we inherited a few small, delicious, sweet tomatoes, and some vaguely yellow things which I am calling squash, for want of a more precise knowledge. Here are photos; could someone please confirm for me if these are squash, and if so, what kind?




And how does one cook a squash? I have vague notions that one slices and roasts or sautees it. Or one blends it up and magically converts it to soup or a stew. Anyone have any good recipes to try?

INTERLUDE IN THE NORMALLY SCHEDULED BLOG WHILE I COOK MAC AND CHEESE AND CHICKEN SAUSAGE FOR LUNCH: I just learned that I have tendency, when slicing chicken sausage, to pull the knife to the left. This means that when I am cutting four sausages at a time, if I want the sections to come out roughly even, I need to have the sausages furthest away from me lined up indented to the right compared to the others, which I argue is a great image to use when writing about food. I cook in paragraphs. Maybe that should be the new blog motto.

As far as our Santa Cruz dining goes, we've had some good experiences. Lots to talk about, but I'll start with the two places we've tried since we've been here that we had never tried before.

The Parish Publick House

You might not expect much from a pub located in a shopping center that includes, among other merchants, Panda Express, Chase, ACE Hardware, and Safeway. But let me just say that this is no ordinary shopping center. The Safeway is the most advanced and glamorous Safeway I can remember, with a huge wine selection and an olive bar. Let's just say it makes the Safeway on Mission Street in SF seem even more sketchy than it is, which is saying a lot.

The Parish is a Sharks bar, with lots of TVs for watching sports, particularly hockey. The decor is quite good, full of the dark lighting and dark wood paneling one would expect from an authentic pub, and featuring a pool table with red felt at the back. They also have an extremely strong beer selection, including Moose Drool, and they recommend pairings with their menu items. They are apparently famous for their shepherd's pie, and I have it on good authority that this dish is quite tasty. The salmon fish and chips are also thoroughly satisfying; if the onion rings are a bit too greasy, that can be forgiven. All in all, a good pub to have as the local pub.

Burger.

Sunday night, when The Parish was too crowded, we headed instead for the nearby and grammatically-interesting Burger.. See, already the extra period has thrown me off. It also leads to the grammatically-dubious quote on the website, "At Burger. ingredients matter."

You would think that a place so hip as to recklessly use extraneous punctuation would appeal only to the college students from UCSC, but there was a good cross-section of humanity on hand. Burger. also uses random celebrity mugshots instead of numbers; when we placed our orders, we got pictures of Mischa Barton and an unrecognizable dreadlocked guy whom we later learned was Tommy Lee. Clever, but like so many hip things, problematic when you think about it, because how are the servers supposed to see who you have from a distance?

It is definitely a popular establishment. We had to stake a claim to a single table and chair and send forays to the counter to order, until a couple nearby left and we were able to swoop like vultures on the additional seats. The place was lively, with big screens showing sports and a hefty beer selection that looked quite promising. They even offer beer-shakes, which seems good in theory but which I did not find appealing on the night.

As for beer, Marina tried a can of Fat Cat beer, but didn't like it much and passed it on to me. Clever name aside, I will probably not try this again, because it seems to be a hip version of Bud, Coors, Miller, etc. In other words, it tasted like mildly flavored water. We also shared a pint of Retribution beer, which was better, but a little too sweet for my taste. However, the Pink Burger that I ordered--a salmon burger with aioli and dill, was light and flavorful and satisfying, although the serving size of the burger and fries seemed slightly San Franciscan, which is to say, small for $9. Still, it was good enough that I would certainly go again.