Thursday Drink Night happens, more or less, once a week on...um, lemme check. Yep. Thursday. Celebrants sometimes gather in person, but it's more of an online deal in which cocktail bloggers, spirits writers, bartenders, and drinks enthusiasts fire up their computers, chat with each other, and mix cocktails based on a theme or a particular spirit. This week, the theme is tiki...with a twist.
From the Mixoloseum blog regarding tonight's Thursday Drink Night:
[The] theme will be “Nuku Hiva” based on recent events on that tropical Polynesian island. A little back story:
In early October, the charred remains of a German adventurer were discovered at a campfire site on a South Pacific island. The tabloid media were quick to portray the slaying as a possible case of cannibalism on Nuku Hiva, an island historically known for human sacrifice. But locals are offended and experts say such killings are a thing of the very distant past. (read more)
Therefore, in honor of this darkly exotic mystery, the goal of the night is to create tiki drinks with at least one German ingredient! Bonus if you use fire! Stop in to the chatroom after 8pm EST for all the fun and frivolity.
Now, what's a German ingredient? Kirsch? Yes. Bärenjäger? Yes. Jägermeister? Yes. Jägertee? Sure. Speckklöße? Not so fast...
Goes well with:
A bit I wrote a few years ago on Santa Maria tri-tip, bringing together The Smiths, Mr Gay UK, a taste for human flesh, and the inestimable Jeffery Jones in the 1999 film Ravenous.
On Licking a Human Skull. I have, certainly. What? You haven't? Savage.
As the Smiths song has it, meat is murder. According to a recent verdict in a British court case from Yorkshire, it is apparently delicious, cannibalistic murder. It seems that a former Mr. Gay UK had been convicted on charges of murder, and of cooking and eating at least a portion of another man. One can't be too careful about those offers to come for dinner.
I do my part to keep human flesh consumption to a minimum. Even so, we don’t eat as much meat as I did growing up in Kansas City—where any meal without a bit of flesh seemed like we got stiffed—but we are far from vegan.
Since moving to California, one of the area’s dishes I’ve come to appreciate is Santa Maria barbecue. This variety from the central coast between Los Angeles and San Francisco uses tri-tip, a vaguely triangular piece of beef cut of beef that is infrequently found in the US beyond the state's borders. Cooked Santa Maria style, tri-tip is bathed in a marinade of salt, pepper, garlic, and occasionally other spices, and then slowly grilled over red oak.
Now, because it’s grilled and not smoked slowly for hours, it’s not barbecue as we understand it when we eat in places such as Kansas City, Memphis, Texas, or nearly anywhere in the Carolinas. California is far enough away from those other places, though, that those living there shouldn’t get their backs up about it.
The seasoning I use when grilling tri-tips is your standard Santa Maria spice mixture, except that because lemon trees are so common here, I include dried, powdered lemon peel that I make myself once a year when concocting my annual batch of fish house punch (that calls for a quart of fresh, strained lemon juice).
If you don’t have tri-tip, you’re not out of luck. It turns out that the seasoning works very well with flank steaks, tenderloins, and other beef cuts as well as pork cuts you would normally grill.
As for manflesh? I shall leave that and its preparation to your discretion. As with moonshine and home-distilled liquor, it is prudent to obey local laws.
Santa Maria Tri-tip
For this, I used a mild canola oil because an assertive olive oil taste would throw off the flavors of some great beef, but do as you will. The beef itself should not come very fatty, but trim off any huge hunks of fat, leaving enough to help the marinade along as it slowly cooks over the coals.
1 small handful of garlic, peeled ½ cup canola oil 2 Tbl coarse sea salt 1 Tbl whole black peppercorns 2 tsp powdered dry lemon peel 3.5 lbs tri-tip, trimmed of outrageously excess fat
Put the ingredients (except the beef) in a food processor or blender and blend until the mixture is emulsified and fairly smooth. It is not necessary to make a completely smooth and homogenous mixture. Smear the mixture all over the tri-tip. Place the meat in a zip lock bag or a nonreactive bowl and let marinate in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight.
About an hour before grilling, let the meat come to room temperature.
Sear the fatty side over direct heat, then the other side, about 3-4 minutes per side.
Cook over indirect heat about 20-25 minutes (it’s to an internal temperature of 120-25 Fahrenheit). Let the tri-tip rest 10 minutes and slice thinly against the grain.
Note that the traditional accompaniment to this is a small dish of the small ruddy pinquito beans one finds up the coast. I'm lucky since I can get them at our local farmers market. But they can be tricky to find outside California. As you can see in the photograph here, sometimes I just throw some vegetables on the grill for the last several minutes of cooking.
Goes well with:
Rancho Gordo's pinquito beans. Check out their website and if you like the look of these little buggers, order a few pounds. They also sell Christmas lima beans, vaqueros, borlottis, red nightfalls, and other tricky-to-find beans.
Broke a toe today. Maybe two. Meh. The last time I did that, I was playing volleyball. Got a splattery, smashed nose and a black eye in the same match when a buddy spiked my face instead of the ball. But we won. What's a toe compared to victory? Better it should be someone else's toe, but still...
About six years back, relatives (including a judge and a state senator who should have known something about casing the competition) challenged us Rowley kids to a water polo match. I forget whether it was a timeout they called or an outright truce, but the consensus among opposing counsel was never to have all Rowleys on one team, for what my brother-in-law once called Mrs. Rowley's debating squad snatches up gauntlets with glee.
Because blood's been on my mind, I cracked open the shaker and whipped up a cocktail using some blood orange marmalade I put up a few months back. Jamie Boudreau provided the backbone of this recipe with his own Marmalade Sour, but I like this sanguine version. My guess is that you will, too.
Don't like eggs in your drink? Whatsamatter?Chicken?
Ah, crap. Now I have to find my notes and post the marmalade recipe.
Blood Orange Marmalade Sour
3 oz cachaca (Leblon) 1 oz lemon juice 2 dashes Fee Bros orange bitters 1 egg white* 2 tablespoons of blood orange marmalade (or use grapefruit or other citrus)
Shake vigorously with ice until the egg white disappears into a soft, billowy foam that mutes the sound of the clinking ice, then strain into a cocktail glass. Quaff it cold.
I doubled the recipe, using only one egg white; it's just fine. No worries that it will be slimy or taste like a farmyard (something I like in cheese, but not necessarily booze). The white provides a smoothly velvet mouthfeel to the thing. You could even swap out some ginger preserves for a portion of the marmalade.
And if your mind works like mine, the answer is yes, Virginia: rye whiskey does stand up well to the sweetness of a marmalade sour.
*There should probably be some sort of disclaimer here that if you're elderly, or an infant, or have a compromised immune system, you should avoid raw egg whites. The truth is, that's not my bag. If you have concerns, consult your physician and read this eGullet thread, but many people I know consume raw eggs with no problems and microbiologists tell me that our fears of salmonella are wildly out of proportion to any real risk.
And if you're an infant reading up on sours, keep my number. I don't usually go for babies at parties, but you're a keeper.
We were drinking and what doesn't happen when you're drunk?
~ Yuri Lyalin Feisty yet pragmatic electrician
Every time I think one of my friends might have issues with drinking, I think back to my encounters with Russians. There was the Russian bookseller who mixed martinis by the pitcher, drank the contents before they lost their chill, and could still stand after three pitchers. Then there was the pair of former Soviet tank drivers in Kirksville, Missouri; these hard-drinking comrades commandeered the liquor at a party while trying to outdo each other by determining (a) how many Afghans each had killed and (b) how many illegitimate children each had. One claimed seventeen. The other said he lost track at thirty. Deaths or births didn't matter. Numbers did—including the vodka, Bärenjäger, and beer empties they accumulated. As a precaution, I sat on my case of beer, doling it out to friends as needed. I'd rather have it warm than see those goons claim it from the fridge.
I'd almost forgotten the sheer volume Russians can pack away until I read a BBC article today about Yuri Lyalin, a 53-year-old electrician in Vologda who came home from a night of drinking, made breakfast, and went to sleep. After a few hours, his wife noticed the handle of kitchen knife sticking out of his back. Went to the hospital, turned out the knife had missed vital organs, and was sent away with a pragmatic attitude.
Makes my bellyaching about cutting off parts of my hand seem particularly whiny. I suppose it's time to start writing again.
Goes well with:
Shane McGowan, a man of many words, few teeth, and a penchant for a drop of spirits
My knives are sharp and my hand steady. Outside a few burns, I've never hurt myself in the kitchen. Yesterday I made up for it in spades when, with the well-steeled heel of an 8" Wustof chef's knife, I crunched through my thumb and took off a chunk of my middle finger.
Yep; it's sharp.
Never in my life have I put my Anglo-Saxon linguistic heritage through such a rigorous pacing. If something other than four-letter words, their derivatives, and cognates spewed from my mouth, it was quite unintentional.
I was dicing a few slices of Allan Benton's amazing country ham with plans to prepare some American bitterballen to go with tasting notes for Anchor's American genever. Don't know bitterballen? They are deep-fried ping-pong ball-sized croquettes (not all that unlike cajun-style boudin balls for that matter) that are classic accompaniments to genever in Dutch bars. I figured an American take on one deserved another.
The bleeding's (mostly) stopped, but the insane pain of typing and occasional waves of nausea mean I'm taking a brief hiatus on both typing and knife-wrangling. Stay tuned for tasting notes, a bitterballen recipe, moonshine videos, and a review of C. Anne Wilson'sWater of Life: A History of Wine-Distilling And Spirits; 500 BC - AD 2000.
