Eggplant And Fish, Happy At Last

This without rice, tofu or scallions: good; guessing hoisin and eggplant is the key combo.

Also, holy fucking shit fish rub: salt, sugar, brown sugar, black pepper, celery seed, paprika, garlic powder, cayenne pepper, onion powder, fennel seed, chili powder. We didn’t have celery seed so we used celery salt and no onion powder in the house. It was hake.

Doing The Same Thing Over And Over And Expecting A Different Result

Continuing the [blank], Lillet, lime juice variations . . .

Tequila, Lillet, Campari, lime juice: decent, though pretty sure the Lillet got totally lost.
Tequila, Lillet, lime juice, orange Angostura bitters: “one note” — probably needed simple syrup.
Rum, Lillet, lime juice: better, and probably closer to the original cachaca; might start tweaking this base instead.

Some Bourbon, Lemon Juice, And A Tilde

There’s a cocktail in The PDT Cocktail Book that uses maple syrup, maraschino and a jalapeño which is awesome. The Little Bit Country (page 167) tastes complex in a way that you’d feel happy paying $15 for: eight parts bourbon, three parts lemon juice, two parts maple syrup, one part maraschino, a small slice of jalapeño, one dash Angostura and one dash orange bitters. I suppose it’s like a complex-tasting sour or something. I’d probably avoided it in the past in part not because of the jalapeño, which we have growing out back (all the flower shops sell pepper plants of some sort and jalapeños grow well and are super useful, at least when you remember they’re out back) but rather the maraschino, which I like the taste of but Jen doesn’t. It turns out that the maraschino is actually very subtle (unlike, say, a Fancy Free). I already knew I’d like the jalapeño because every time I order a cocktail with it I end up loving the flavor.

The Old Hail Mary Never Works . . . Except When They Do!

There’s a cocktail in The PDT Cocktail Book called the “Pearl Button” (page 204) which has Cachaça, Lillet and lime juice (along with some other garnishes/additions that weren’t immediately handy). We didn’t have Cachaça, so I guessed that tequila might be good. Here’s what we did:

2 oz. tequila
3/4 oz. Lillet
1/2 oz. lime juice

It was good!

The second time we added a dash of Angostura bitters. Fine but it probably tastes better with some simple syrup, too (ours got funked the other day and I never made more).

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There’s a cocktail in the PDT book called the Nouveau Carré that’s a riff on a Vieux Carre/homage to New Orleans post Katrina. It’s six parts tequila, three parts Lillet, one part Bénédictine and three dashes Peychaud’s. I finally bought some Lillet in part (or mostly because) there are a bunch of cocktail recipes using it. This one was pretty good. What Lillet actually is is described in this unhelpful Wikipedia entry. It uses phrases like this: “The mix is then stirred in oak vats until perfectly blended. During the ageing process, Lillet is handled as attentively as any great Bordeaux wine (undergoing fining, racking, filtering etc.). Lillet belongs to a family of aperitifs known as tonic wines because of the addition of Quinine liqueur.”