Tag: food & wine

Death After Dusk and other drinks

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The other thing we did on Friday night (besides the holiday party) was visit the Bookstore Speakeasy. This charming purveyor of food and drinks on Bethlehem’s South Side is a fairly faithful recreation of a 1920’s speakeasy.

No external sign shows the Bookstore’s location. You step down a couple of darkened steps to a door stenciled with “THE BOOKSTORE.” Inside is a small room with shelves of books on three walls and a black curtain separating the room from the back. The clerk behind the desk will show you beyond the curtain to your table. (Make sure to have a reservation on weekend nights!)

The tables are lit with small oil lamps. Books are everywhere, and if you’re lucky, there’s a piano player at the instrument in the corner. When we were there, he was accompanied by a clarinetist/saxophonist, which makes perfect sense — jazz being a key feature of the Roaring Twenties, after all.

In keeping with the theme of a speakeasy, the menus on the table are only for food — open the book set on your table to find the drinks — a pull-out list of beers (I wasn’t certain whether the one described as “jaw-dropping” was because of its taste or its price; $42!) and a several page cocktail menu pasted onto the pages of the book.

The cocktails are incredible, and an effort is made to be faithful to the replicated era. The Bookstore notes in its overall description, for example, that vodka was not widely available until the 1950s. There are drinks with egg white, drinks on the rocks (actually, rock — a single hand-chipped cube of ice), drinks with absinthe, bartender’s choice, and make your own.

I had the “Death After Dusk” and was rather disappointed that I couldn’t pick out the violet or champagne notes over the heavy licorice of the absinthe, although I did occasionally catch a hint of the cherry garnish. (The effervescence of the champagne did come through, of course.) After that, I switched to the Knickerbocker — again, the lime juice and rum overwhelmed the Grand Marnier, but the raspberry component was perfect.

If you want to try this place out — and I really recommend it — look at the strongest flavor listed for the cocktail because the odds are good the flavors won’t be balanced enough for you to pick out the accents, which is a shame. Other than that, high marks all around.

Chocolate chip cookies Q & A

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Chocolate chip cookies? Goodness, what is there to ask about them? Is this really worth a blog post?

Why not? It’s a topic I know.

In college, I was required to take a class in public speaking. I’m so not into talking to a group of people, but I did it. One of the class assignments was to give an informative talk — how-to, something like that — with appropriate visual aids. I did baking chocolate chip cookies, and I passed around samples of the dough at the various stages of preparation, with plenty of chocolate chip cookies for everyone to demonstrate that I knew what I was talking about.

On to the questions:

Q: Do you have a favorite chocolate chip recipe?

A: For the longest time, I used a modified version of the Tollhouse Cookie recipe (half-melted butter), and then for a while, I tried the one that comes with butter-flavored Crisco sticks. These days, I glance at the recipe on the back of the chocolate chip package, use a mix of butter and shortening, and occasionally even add baking powder for a more “puffy” cookie.

Q: Do you have any favorite brands that you use?

A: King Arthur flour. For the chips, not as much, although I’ve stopped using Nestle — they don’t melt properly for other recipes, so I don’t buy them. (Love oatmeal fudge bars, must be able to melt the chips!) For vanilla, not a brand, but a condition: No sweetener added.

Q: Cookie dough or cookies?

A: Both! I usually bake a couple dozen cookies and keep the rest as dough for people to munch on.

Any other questions? Leave them in the comments! As always, thanks for reading!

Wine Q & A

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The only response I had last week on my ideas for various Q & A topics was Nicki‘s question about chocolate wine, so I’m just going to do a brief run-down on tastes in wine today, then leave it open for questions.

The taste of wine encompasses different things, including:

  • mouthfeel (how heavy or light the wine is, whether it clings to your tongue or just flows through; carbonation could be considered part of this)
  • acidity (exactly what it sounds like; generally, the more acidic a wine, the stronger the flavor of the food it should be paired with
  • flavors (what do you think the wine tastes like?)

I’m going to concentrate on that last one. The flavors of wine are why you never (or rarely, anyway) hear someone sip and say, “That tastes just like Welch’s grape juice!” Different grapes generally have different undertones common to them. The darker grapes often have berry or other fruit flavors, such as plum. White wines might be described as tasting like apple or grass (Sauvignon blanc is often described as grassy.). “Floral” is used to describe wines that remind people (oddly enough) of flowers (Viognier, for example). Cigars, chocolate, mushrooms, slate — anything the wine tastes like to you can be used to describe it. There are no wrong answers!

(Note that, unlike in beers, these items are not generally present in the wine itself, except in certain spiced wines. Coffee porters are brewed with coffee; some brewers add cocoa to their chocolate porters. Winemakers do not add either to their vats.)

Mind you, there are some descriptions that leave me leery of trying a certain wine myself, particularly pipi du chat — another term used to describe some sauvignon blancs’ mix of asparagus, grass, and other herbs. It can be all in how you sell it. If you want a bit more explanation of what causes this and why these terms are used, a good beginner’s guide was posted on the San Francisco Chronicle‘s Website back in 2005 (“Here, kitty kitty“).

Your turn: what’s the strangest thing you’ve tasted in a wine? What flavor would you like to find?