Cocktail of the Day: The Grinch

Yes, I'm back, after way too long an absence. I'll write more about that soon, but for the moment, a quick cocktail post, based on this very cool gift I got for Christmas.

In my very first foray into molecular gastronomy¹, I have tonight made for my family...

The Grinch
Ingredients:

• 400 ml + 15 ml per drink melon liqueur (Midori, in my case)
• 2g sodium alginate
• 4 cups water
• 5g calcium lactate
• Ginger ale
• Honeydew melon (optional garnish)

Tools:

• Immersion blender (or similar)
• Plastic pipette (or syringe or similar)
• Pierced spoon

Procedure: Dissolve sodium alginate in 400 ml of melon liqueur, mix with immersion blender and set aside for 5 min.; dissolve 5g calcium lactate in water (sorry 'bout the mixed units, but that's how the kit recipe specified it); drip (from pipette or similar) liqueur mixture into calcium lactate bath to form "caviar"; put ice cubes and 15 ml melon liqueur into rocks glasses; fish out "caviar" with pierced spoon and spoon over ice; top with ginger ale. Optionally, garnish with honeydew melon slice (I didn't have a honeydew melon on hand, and couldn't wait to play with my new toy).











I actually halved the liqueur/sodium alginate mixture and still got enough yield of "caviar" for four drinks, each with the equivalent of about 2 oz of alcohol. When you see the finished drink (which I found tasty, even though Midori is not usually my thing), you'll see where the name came from:



Back soon (and often) with more; I plan to keep this blog much more active in the coming year!

¹I know, I know... that's so last year, and even the term molecular gastronomy is out of fashion; what can I say? I live on the bleedingtrailing edge!

More on Craft... and a Bit of a Cheat

My post from yesterday about the Top Chef: All Stars Quickfire Challenge featuring Justo Thomas spilled over into a conversation at Pharyngula, and since I'm never one to let my mindless natteringsbrilliant ruminations go to waste, I thought I'd shamelessly recycleadapt what I wrote there for a follow-on post here.

A friend wondered if there was more to Thomas' story than the show hinted at, since she thought it was more a matter of highly developed skill than craft, which she thought of as more creative. I said it was possible we were working from slightly different definitions of craft (subtle differences in working definitions are frequent there), but in any case, yeah, there was much more to Bourdain's description than you got on the show.

What I called craft involves a great deal of creativity, but it's more of a functional, problem-solving kind of creativity that what I associate with art. But whether you call it craft or merely (merely?) skill, I'm in awe of what Bourdain described.

Pressed for details — perhaps an anecdote from the book — I had to admit that I actually "read" it on audio, and while Bourdain is one of the authors whose reading/speaking style definitely makes the audiobook a value-added experience, one thing about audio is that it's hard to just grab the book and look up a specific passage.

But I had actually been thinking about this distinction between skill, craft, and art. The short answer is that I see craft as a kind of creative mastery of skills, and art as the creative expression of intellectual, emotional, and aesthetic ideas. In my mind, you can be an artist without being an accomplished craftsperson, and vice versa.

Doonesbury author Garry Trudeau, for instance, was always an artist (assuming you agree with me that satirical cartooning is within the realm of art), but in the middle of his career he made a conscious effort to improve his craft, when he took a year's sabbatical to work on his drawing.

In the case of Justo Thomas, I can remember one item: In Medium Raw, Bourdain notices that Thomas doesn't sharpen his knives as obsessively as many chefs, and asks him about it. Thomas says that if the knives are too sharp, they'll cut through soft fish bones without him being able to feel it, and thus bones will evade his notice and end up in the portioned fish. He has a very specific level of sharpness he maintains that's perfectly matched to the task he's performing. Now that might be simply a matter of skill... but to me, it's a level of mastery that transcends mere skills competence, a kind of zen genius for the task at hand. OTOH, no matter how perfect his output is, it's still just portions of fish, not Guernica.

Emerging Foodie? Emerging Idiot!

So I'm typing this with a rubber glove covering the bandage on the middle finger of my left hand. Remember when I said my one knife skill was not chopping my own self up? Not so much: Today while chopping peppers for another batch of jalapeno jelly, I took a bit of a divot out of my fingertip. It's not serious, but it hurts a bit, and will probably leave a scar.

I watch all these cooking shows and I'm invariably surprised to see chefs cut themselves, but I shouldn't really be surprised that I do. The idiot part of this deal is that sitting on my counter was a perfectly good kevlar cut-resistant glove, which I bought after the last time I cut myself (on a mandolin slicer)... but which I didn't bother to use today! <sigh>