Here's the Easter Ice project from a couple years ago that I'm reposting. Go here to learn how to make it.
Category: garnish
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The Olive Centipede: The Frightening New Release in the Torture Garnish Genre
(this post is a joke about this movie)
The Olive Centipede was created by Dr. Heiner, a disturbed German bartender formerly famous for his flair garnishing techniques. The evil Dr. Heiner decided to create a garnish centipede, made from sewing three olives together along the olives' digestive tracts, pit-to-pimento.
Unfortunately for the olives, the surgery was a success. A hideous, hideous success.
The poor olives tried to escape Dr. Heiner's laboratory/ultra-lounge.
But were unsuccessful.
And now Dr. Heiner wants to create an even more hideous centipede garnish made from twelve olives.
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Curing Olives at Home, Part II
This post is a continuation of this one on how to brine olives at home.
My olives went from this:
To this:
To see the process, keep reading by selecting the link below.
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Brining Olives at Home
For the past couple years I've been wanting to try curing my own olives after reading about it on a food blogger's website. Then when Karen Solomon's awesome book Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It
came out I had instructions.I carefully searched the news for ripe olive time, and noticed that the Sonoma Valley Olive Festival runs in December through February. So I planned to hunt for olives in December at the farmer's markets.
But it turns out there was a problem with that logic. Smartly they throw an olive festival after all the olives have ripened and had weeks or months to cure in brine solution. So when I started looking around at farmer's markets in December the olives were already all gone. Curses!
But wait!
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Bartenders Hitting Their Hoes
For some reason, the San Francisco Chronicle didn't choose the above title for my story that comes out Sunday August 30th. I can't think of why.
More bars growing own cocktail ingredients
Camper English, Special to The Chronicle
Friday, August 28, 2009
Victoria D'Amato-Moran grows tomatoes, Asian pears, Fuji apples, blackberries, roses and many herbs in her South San Francisco garden. Sooner or later, everything in it winds up in her cocktails."Except the zucchinis," she says. "I haven't figured out how to use those yet."
The Bay Area has long been home to the farm-forward cocktail movement – initially personified by Scott Beattie, then of Cyrus restaurant, who sourced produce from neighbors' fruit trees for his bar. Lately, more bartenders are doing the gardening work themselves, for the same reason that backyard gardeners seem to have appeared everywhere.
The extra effort may not save money, and the drinks may not taste noticeably fresher to the customer, but you can bet they do to the proud garden tender who grew part of your gimlet from seed.
Read the rest of my story in this Sunday's Chronicle about bartenders who also tend to gardens, including Duggan McDonnell, H. Joseph Ehrmann, Daniel Hyatt, Scott Stewart, Thad Vogler, and Lane Ford, and the bars Fairway Cocktail Lounge, Cyrus, Elixir, Alembic, Cantina, Fifth Floor, Bar Agricole, Starbelly, Sprcue, Brix, and Etoile. Gosh I'm thorough.
Also: there's a recipe for Jacques Bezuidenhout's Sagerac, a version of the Sazerac made with fresh picked sage, and Scott Stewart's Lonsdale No. 3 made with fresh basil.
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Best Garnish Evar
Cachacagora spotted this quote from the Sydney Morning Herald's interview with Max Warner of Chivas:
Q What's the strangest drink you've ever been served?
A In South America, there are large and sleepy bees and the kids wrap cotton threads around them while they're asleep so they end up on a leash. I was served a drink that consisted of cachaca and champagne poured over honeycomb. One end of the string was tied around the honeycomb; on the other end was a live garnish. As the honeycomb slowly dissolves, the string releases and the bee flies away.
That is amazing, though I don't know how close I'd want bees to my face while drinking cocktails. I would try that at home, but all I have to work with is large spiders.
