Cooking Resolution #5: Reward

This rather indulgent resolution was supposed to come last...but sometimes I don't save dessert for last either, so what?  What are you going to do about it?  You're not the boss of me.

I was going to move this one up anyway as I realized the (now) last one is sort of more important to me as, like, a human.

But it also appropriate to be posting about this today as it’s about booze and I had the kind of work day that makes one think “I need a stiff drink,” even when ice cream is usually your vice of choice.

I went to bartending school, and was a bartender at a nondescript restaurant* in the Village in NYC for a little while after college.

(This is not the restaurant, this is a much cuter-looking place now inhabiting the same space and I am showing it to you just to break up the text.  Okay, vacation's over, back to words now.)

But I’ve never really been too much of a drinker myself, and when you work days at a nondescript restaurant in the Village, you don’t serve a heck of a lot of mixed drinks, so everything I learned at bartending school quickly slid out of my head.

I served shots of well vodka to some jerky artist dude who came in after being up all night painting, and whiskey shots with breakfast to a couple of young guys who worked the night shift at the 24-hour Kinko’s around the block.

I sometimes served beer and wine, but really my greatest bartender challenges centered on not humiliating myself when I tried to open a bottle of wine or trying to dredge up what's in a Greyhound from hazy bartending school flashcard sessions when some Stern School of Business student inexplicably brought some girl into the place for dinner. 

Most of the time, though, I was too busy with other activities to really work at being a Mixologist, a word I’m not sure existed in 1998. I was trying to deal with the kind of insane cheap regulars the place attracted (though some were nice, like this dude Neil Cooper, who realized it was me playing all the dub reggae all the time and brought me in a bunch of free CD’s from his label ROIR records)...

Or scrawling out a thoroughly confusing bill for the Europeans who had only ordered espresso (the place attracted them like flies to carrion) so that they wouldn’t be able to decipher that I had added on a gratuity. You know, in case they forgot...

Or attempting to figure out how to get the Easter Island-headed busboy Doro to actually bus tables.

Point being: not being much of a booze drinker, even with this bartending blip, I don’t really know much about cocktail making.

Over the past year, though, a little spark of interest has been growing

It started last winter with a couple of visits to the Oliver’s Twist up in Phinney. I’d met owner Dan Braun when he taught at the cooking school, and I loved his food and concept so much, I made sure to take a trip to his spot. I wasn’t disappointed – the food was great – and the care put into the cocktails intrigued me.(Le Petit Hiboux pic from Chow.com)

I then had a little experiment in the spring, making this recipe for Le Petit Hiboux – a wine cocktail with Lillet and apple juice – for a dinner with Sarah.

Then there were two Good Food features from earlier this year (repackaged into the New Year’s show)...

...one on the Michelada, a Mexican beer-based drink, and another on the history of cocktails evolving from punch, that also piqued my curiousity.

And Carolyn’s husband Will likes digestifs, so he’s introduced me to some interesting flavors of those (and got our server at Poppy to bring over basically the bar’s entire store of them for us to sniff).

But I think it was actually that delicious St. Germaine sexy cough drop cocktail that Carolyn ordered at Poppy that tipped the scales: I want to make some drinks like THAT.

So with this resolution, I’m prioritizing learning about cocktails – for no other reason than the fun of it.

I think cocktails appeal to me the way ice cream appeals to me: the idea that the end result is always texturally identical (frozen/liquid) and so the creativity is all in the flavoring. Much like my love of doing side-by-side tastings of various foodstuffs and beverages, I enjoy having one constant in things so that the other variations can be really highlighted.

Booze is pricey, so I don’t know how much experimenting I can do, but I do know this: I probably won’t mind mistakes in cocktail mixing as much as I do in ice cream making.

*I guess it wasn't entirely nondescript.