Category Archives: Potent potables

Sorta Kinda Chinese Tea Series Entry One: Taro

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I’m not sure how far bubble tea has made it out of our big cities.  In case it hasn’t made it to your locality: bubble tea, invented in Taiwan in the ‘80s, is tea (sometimes kinda maybe) that is filled with tapioca balls, which are little gelatinous spheres approximately a quarter inch in diameter.  Bubble tea is thus usually served, whether hot or cold, with oversized straws that can accommodate the “bubbles.”  These straws are typically whimsical shades of purple or pink or green.  The cups are frequently adorned with cartoon creatures that defy classification except to say that, by virtue of including features like a single eye or a blob shape or the power to bounce and blink without the use of any limbs, they are distinctly Contemporary Asian.  The only Western cartoon counterpart I can think of is the blob that used to bounce unhappily beneath a rain cloud in that Zoloft commercial.

Bubble tea, in short, is meant to be fun.  It is to tea what a Frappaccino is to coffee.

And it is just one kind of many tea drinks I have discovered living in a city with a large East Asian population.  Bubble tea seems to frequently contains no real tea.  Other “tea” drinks served either at tea shops or Chinese bakeries contain only milk or something called “creme” or water mixed with assorted powders the color of Willy Wonka products.

One of my favorites is sesame black milk tea.  It involves steeping a black tea bag in a cup of hot water and milk and stirring in some kind of magic sesame powder.  I had that again the other day while eating a Chinese cream bun that immediately made me feel as if I had swallowed half of a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon. Continue reading →

My Three-Day Juice Cleanse Experiment

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I’ll try anything once. (It’s true, ask my high school boyfriend.) So when my friend suggested I take part in a juice cleanse at her yoga studio, I said, Sure! I said, Sounds like fun! It took a week for the realization to sink in: No food. For 3 days.

I like to eat. As a kid I would go to parties just for the cake. I’d take my piece to a spot in the corner and eat it alone, like I wanted to give it my undivided attention. I once convinced a bouncer I was hypoglycemic so I could bring a bag of cookies into a club. But I’d heard a lot about juicing, and I was curious. I’d just never been brave or motivated enough to try it.

I knew I couldn’t trust myself to get in the kitchen and make juices everyday and not eat, so I went with a prepackaged cleanse from Juice Hugger in Brooklyn. For $45 a day, you get six juices per day (one for every 2 hours), already bottled and numbered for you. Each day includes a mixture of juiced greens, fruits, and veggies. The juices were surprisingly tasty and varied enough to keep it interesting. The second day—usually the most difficult for people—featured a tomato soup, sweet potato juice, and a lentil mixture, all of which could be heated and placed in a bowl to simulate the act of eating. (I personally found sipping juice from a spoon to be even more depressing than drinking something called “Lean Lentils.”) Below is a day-by-day blow of my experience.

Day 1

All I think about is food. Not because I’m hungry, but because I know I won’t eat for days. I try to read a book but the main character is painstakingly describing his mother’s job at a bakery, where the doughnuts “roil” to life in grease. I mark the next time I can have a juice, 2 hours from now, on my bookmark.

My neighbor burns toast and my mouth salivates like Pavlov’s dog.

Two hours crawl by. I take small sips of the juice, wanting it to last. I cross out the hour I’d jotted down on the bookmark and write the time for my next feeding. I’m reminded of a prisoner counting down his days.

I clear my fridge of anything chewable and put away the dishes on the dish rack, as if to rid myself of the notion that cooking can and has happened in my kitchen.

My stomach snarls at me. I can’t help it; I start seeping gas. I make a note to leave the house as little as possible. Continue reading →

The “It Could Really Be Much Worse” Valentine’s Day Beer Tasting

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Celebrate true love

Happy Valentine’s Day Eve, everybody! I intended to review chocolate beers today and was eagerly anticipating Southern Tier’s Choklat, Heavy Seas’ Siren Noire, and Brooklyn’s Black Chocolate Stout. But there were none to be found at the beer store this weekend! Apparently all the people who like to drink their way through the holiday have good taste in beer. Fortunately another related theme quickly appeared. In the same way Christmas is not really all about giving, Valentine’s Day is not really all about heart-shaped truffles.

Doggie Style Pale Ale, Flying Dog Brewery, 5.5%
Initially we’d grabbed some of Flying Dog’s Raging Bitch, but then discovered this even more appropriately-named brew. It’s an English style pale ale, and therefore more bitter than I am used to; it reminds me of an ESB. There has to be some joke about being bitter and bent over, and Ben and I struggle to be the first to make it. No one wins.
B: It starts out fun but has a harrumph of a finish.
L: A harrumph?
B: There’s a sour downturn. Overall unsatisfying.
L: Don’t try too hard.
B: …Yeah, I’m going to sprain something.
At one point Ben actually says “If you close your eyes and sip it you could imagine it as the best Bud ever. This really could be much worse” Oof. We each finish our halves without serious injury, but were both left wishing we’d grabbed the Bitch after all.

Lucky U IPA, Breckenridge Brewery, 6.2%
We are both encouraged by this IPA’s brilliant orange color, but immediately disappointed by the taste. As I learned the hard way, handsome things are not necessarily worth your time. Continue reading →

36 Hours in Baltimore: Part I

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Baltimore.  I love Baltimore.  It’s got that cozy, quasi-beat down feel I dig in East Coast Cities, a good smattering of galleries and museums, and an idiosyncratic funkiness that appreciates the weird.  While there for a birthday weekend earlier in the month, Shannon and I and my best friends, Rachel, Tim, and Reece went to the American Visionary Arts Museum, a place dedicated to self-trained artists, heavy on the work of mental patients, and able to encompass both this haunting applewood sculpture carved by a TB patient soon to commit suicide and a gift shop in which Reece could buy a whoopy cushion for his twin five-year-olds.

And since we like to eat—and since Tim in particular loves food more than most any other product of human civilization—restaurants factored heavily into the birthday plans.  Each establishment we patronized ended up, as if by magic, to be exactly what we needed at exactly the moments in which we patronized them.

Friday night, Rae and Tim were eager to take us to a spot called Ten Ten.  We were planning on going dancing later and Ten Ten boasts “handcrafted cocktails” that proved excellent primers for the club, as well as the reason that my memories of Ten Ten are limited primarily to them.

Pretty. Lethal.

Okay, that’s not totally accurate.  Tim’s lamb shank came on the bone and looked like both a Viking’s dinner and his mace.  And the Fried Brussels Sprouts with Chili Vinaigrette were superb.  As best as I can deduce now, they’d been steamed to the perfect shade of Late Spring Green and then pan fried briefly at very high heat, giving them those caramelized-charcoal spots that make for the best Brussels.

At the time, however, I’d had, as best as I can recall, two Electric Relaxations, composed of gin, Sloe Gin, honey, Pernod, and lime, as well as a nice glass of Talisker (identified by taste alone, I might add) before leaving the house, leading me to declare authoritatively to the table that after the steaming, the Brussels had probably been subjected to a blow torch ordinarily relegated to Crème brûlée. Continue reading →

A Matter of Taste II: Pairing Music and Beer

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Beck and Jack vie for my heart!

“What beer should I drink while listening to this band?” This is a question I run into nearly every night around 7:30 when Ben’s about to start cooking dinner and I’m doing yesterday’s dishes. I turn up the stereo in the other room so we can hear the music over running water and sizzling butter. After pairing beer with authors, setting my evening drink to music seemed the natural next step.

Let’s start by having a ball and a biscuit, baby. Jack White often screams along to our grilled cheese-making, usually in White Stripes form. I suppose it is no surprise that I’m secretly in love with Mr. White, considering he resembles my Mister a good bit. (He’s pretty good looking for a boy.) How easy it would be to suggest a Red Stripe for my White Stripe? How easy, indeed. Here’s what matches White: a black IPA. Try a 21st Amendment Back in Black or a Fade to Black from Left Hand Brewing or even an Iniquity from Southern Tier (an imperial). All strong, bitter and dark as nightmares–same way I like my rock stars.

The Black Keys, while also one of my favorite driving-around-Ohio sing-along bands, is also a great cook-along band. While Ben is slicing potatoes and beets onto a cooking sheet, I’ll be wagging my butt along to the El Camino album, which naturally has a van on the cover. The beer in my hand? A rye ale. It tastes like the bright green fields of winter crops you pass on your drive up to Akron, and it tastes like the rubber processing plants you pass on your way out of Akron. Founders Red’s Rye P.A., mentioned earlier, and Sierra Nevada’s Ruthless Rye IPA. Not for the faint of heart.

When we’re cooking up some particularly sensual meal, like guacamole or something, we turn to Lana Del Rey, whose voice will never break glass, but could maybe glue it back together. Continue reading →

LF & SN Forever!

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Good Beer is Born Here

After I took stock of my year’s best beers, I concluded that I am really infatuated with Sierra Nevada. When I admtted to myself what a crush I had on them I did what any mature adult would do and stalked them on the Internet. What follows is a selection of what makes this particular brewery so dreamy.

Sierra Nevada’s business plan is easily compatible with my life philosophy, something I can’t say for many other for-profit institutions. (I’m scared of making money.) For example, they believe in living sustainably and try to run a business that leaves as small a footprint on our planet as possible. Their brewery in Chico, California runs in part on solar energy collected from their land through one of the country’s largest privately-owned solar arrays. They also collect excess energy to reuse through heat recovery devices on brew kettles and boilers and even recycle the CO2 created during the brewing process.

The brewery also knows the importance of community. Though Sierra Nevada is one of the largest breweries still considered “craft,” they maintain a presence in the town of Chico. At their Taproom and Restaurant you can find meals cooked with vegetables from their farm and quaff an Estate Homegrown Ale brewed with the organic hops and barley harvested from their back 40. In 2000 they opened The Big Room, an auditorium that seats 350 live-music lovers. I’m thinking of moving to Chico. Continue reading →

Sunday Beer Ramble: Biscotti Break Stout, AC/DC, and the Legacy of Good Chief Powhatan

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I am currently drinking something called Evil Twin Imperial Biscotti Break at our local after writing Christmas Thank You Notes to family, a habit that I have contentedly allowed to fall to the wayside along with a raft of other Proper Southern Manners, but which I have now had cause to take back up after marrying Shannon, a Midwesterner.

Midwestern Manners are not all that different from Southern Manners, I now realize.  They share an emphasis on maintaining the propriety of presentation even, perhaps especially, if the meat & potatoes of a situation, interaction, etc. is spoiled and everyone would truly be happiest if that situation, interaction, etc. were just pulled out of the crisper, bagged up, and tossed in the can.  Midwestern Manners, however, are far more stubborn.  Midwesterners are going to send their Christmas Thank You Notes even if the cow has died and the tobacco crop had caught worms and the four youngest caught chills on the prairie and died in January but couldn’t be buried until the land thawed in March. Continue reading →

Nogging in the New Year

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egg nog

Never mind the taste; few words are so pleasing as "nog."

After days of consuming rich holiday treats, Jason and I were pretty sure we didn’t need to add to the load. Yet there was one recipe that we hadn’t gotten a chance to try over Christmas, and we couldn’t resist giving it a whirl on New Year’s Day. The New York Times had run a recipe for Nog, the Hard Way in December, and we have a known weakness for things that are a) alcoholic and b) more difficult than they really should be. And so we put the black-eyed peas on to boil and got down to the business of nogging.

The NYT recipe is broken, rather arbitrarily, into five steps, but let me assure you, there are more than five steps. In fact, reading the thing beforehand made Jason (a wee bit hungover) threaten to wave the white flag. But once we got going, it wasn’t so hard after all, and despite a small disagreement over how fast a whisk should be moving before the action can be considered whisking, it made for an excellent tag-team cooking experience. For instance, Jason could stir in the heavy cream while I was preoccupied with cursing the fact that we only had three ice cubes left in the freezer with which to create an ice-water bath for the pan. (We ended up improvising by using an ice pack.)

ice water

Sometimes, you just have to improvise.

Jason was a tad skeptical of the raw egg factor, and we’d splurged on the freshest, most pristine eggs we could find. But regardless, it was amazing to witness how thorough of a transformation the eggs go through. After all of that whisking and beating, it seemed a chemical impossibility that they would be at all slimy or unpalatable.

Would all this intrepid nog determination turn out to be worth it? Continue reading →

Top 12 Beers of 2012!

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Cheers!

We’ve entered that dead man’s zone between Christmas and New Year’s; a week long sugar- and family-hangover that floats heavy over the couch while you sit and watch sequels of Christmas movies and ponder the impending death of another year-full of dreams. Hm. So to distract you, here’s another arbitrary end-of-the-year list! Llalan’s Top 12 Beers of 2012:

12. Edmund Fitzgerald Porter from Great Lakes Brewing. Since I’ve moved back to Ohio, this brewery has played a large role in my evening imbibing. Last January I was reminded that even the coldest Midwestern storms can be warmed by this beer — itself a tribute the power of The Lakes’ fury. One of the best porters on the market, which I continue to buy regularly despite the risk of having the Gordon Lightfoot song pop into my head.

11. Left Hand experienced a brief flurry of attention when their Milk Stout came out in Nitro bottles. At a favorite bar, the manager passed around a pint of freshly poured Nitro, which rolled and cascaded like a draft Guinness. I overcame my unease at sharing a glass with eight virtual strangers and decided yes, it was worth it.

10. Flying Dog has long been one of my favorite breweries, and not just for Ralph Steadman’s inexplicably terrifying label art. Their biting Raging Bitch Belgian IPA has clawed its way to the top of the pack, despite the gaping wide comic opening it allows my sweet mother. Continue reading →

The Spruce Goose (and Other, Less Risky Infusions)

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tiny bottlesA few years ago, when Jason and I were trying to think of a fun theme for a holiday party, our friend Ethan told us of a longtime dream of his: to bust open a piñata full of tiny bottles of booze rather than candy. And how often, really, do you get to make someone’s dream come true? Realizing Ethan’s vision, however, put us up against a few obstacles.

The first was that the only bottles we could find that were plastic rather than glass contained vodka, and we worried that having only a single kind of alcohol would dampen the fun of the enterprise. We solved this by infusing the vodka with whole a range of ingredients (ginger, chili pepper, rosemary, etc) to give them more variety. It worked like a charm, because such a tiny amount of liquid infused very quickly. The second stumbling block was that a piñata full of bottles is very heavy indeed, and the poor thing strained and sagged under the weight so much that I was certain it was going to burst onto some unsuspecting partygoer’s head at any moment. Thankfully, it didn’t, though unleashing a piñata full of candy-colored booze on a roomful of people who’ve already been drinking for hours did its own kind of damage.

Though the piñata may have been a one-time only affair, some of the infusions were so good that we’ve made them many times since. Cinnamon is a personal favorite: a beautiful red color and, mixed with tonic, it tastes pleasantly like Big Red gum. Give it a try. This year I decided to experiment with a few other wintery flavors as well, and when I read a recent snippet in the Atlantic about someone making a cocktail syrup out of pine resin, I knew I had to try making a spruce-flavored vodka. Continue reading →