Tag Archives: cinnamon

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 →

Cinnamon Girl

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cinnamon tea

Boiling some smaller pieces of the bark

“People think cinnamon, it is like a little twig, but this is not true. Do you know?”

“Sure,” I said, because I was pretty sure I knew what cinnamon looked like.

“No, you do not know,” Veronica said, sighing heavily, because she was pretty sure I didn’t.

As it turned out, she was right, but let’s back up a step or two. Veronica is one of my students at the Bedford Learning Center, a doggedly determined woman who is a few decades older than me and likes to pepper our conversations with bits of wisdom, usually about the differences between men and women. But that evening, she had turned away from gender problems in favor of the flora of her homeland, St. Lucia. A friend visiting from the island had just brought her a new supply of herbal tea-fixings, including the bark of the native cinnamon tree.

“You will see,” she said, and I did, because at our next meeting, she brought me a big Ziploc bag of leaves and nuts and the bark of what looked like a very large tree. In fact, it looked like someone had hacked off a chunk of a sizable oak tree or something and dyed it a more reddish color. It definitely did not look like what passes for cinnamon at any grocery store in America. Continue reading →

Pump up the Jam: Cranberry Orange

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canningAs favors for our wedding last year, Jason and I decided to make a bunch of different homemade jams and give each guest a jar. Why this occurred to me, when I had little to no experience making jam, I have no idea. But aside from some bad pre-wedding dreams of giving botulism to everyone I loved on the same day, the plan went miraculously well.

So when I realized a couple weeks ago that I didn’t know how to bake, I resolved to make some jam for the Havemeyer Sugar Sweets Festival rather than botching a pie or cake. Jam, to me, is easier to deal with than baked goods because you can taste it and make adjustments before you’re done. Plus, the process of sealing the cans is a little like a mad science experiment. I am always inordinately pleased by that little sucking sound that the lids make when a vacuum forms inside the cooling jars.

For those of you who find the idea of preserving something intimidating, here are the basics: you put some sweet or sour stuff in a jar, you wipe off the rim and screw one of those two-piece canning lids on it, you put the whole thing in boiling water for a while, and then it pretty much takes care of itself. (Okay, there are a few more details you should probably mind, but not many. If you find yourself having botulism nightmares, check out Putting Food By by Janet Greene, Ruth Hertzberg and Beatrice Vaughan as a good resource book.)

Anyway, the fun part is making the jam itself, and for the festival, I went with an autumn theme: apple pie jam and cranberry orange jam. Here’s the recipe for the cranberry variety, which has a yummy sweet-tart thing going and a beautiful ruby hue: Continue reading →