The Holiday Sachet: I Like The Ginger! I Like The Creamsicle!

Because I am a really dedicated, serious worker, I spent an hour-long strategy meeting at work this past Friday contemplating my emergency grocery list and what I was going to do with the items on it. You see, I’d spent the morning, being the dedicated employee I am, perusing recipes on epicurious and ended [...]

Just Like When We Were Kids

Pookie and I took a trip into New York City last month on assignment for my job, and during our down time we had a very hurried lunch at Caffe Grazie on the Upper East Side. We really wished we’d had more time, because they had a really impressive assortment of drinks on the [...]

Wherein Liz Improves Our Lives Immeasurably

Around Christmastime, our good friend Liz suggested we needed to acquire some Domaine de Canton ginger liquor. She especially suggested we acquire it to add to hot chocolate. We were intrigued, but for reasons far beyond our understanding, we couldn’t find it at any of our regular purveyors of booze.
Now, two months later, [...]

Partying Like It’s 1939

So the other day at work, there I was killing time, listlessly visiting my usual round of interesting interweb stops, when I decided out of desperation to check out the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. There I found a lively discussion of a cocktail I’d been circling warily for the last few [...]

Wait, The Devils Signed WHO?

So there we were yesterday enjoying a loooooong day of hockey, all ready to break up our monotony by making cocktails, with an eye toward a certain recipe I’d dug up on Absolut’s website, and all of a sudden the news comes down the wire: The Devils have signed Brendan Shanahan.
Yeah, Brendan Shanahan. I [...]

Maple Hoo Gets Its Tiki On

The November “Food & Wine” magazine showed up this past Wednesday, and it was one of those rare times when a cooking magazine and I are on the same wavelength; I flipped through it lovingly, stopping on almost every page to exclaim, “This sounds so good!” and then reading a recipe aloud to Boomer. [...]

Vanilla-Basil Gimlet

I recently had some leftover vanilla pods, after scraping the seeds out for baking. The obvious thing to do with them, of course, was to make vanilla syrup, and then use it in cocktails. So I dropped the seeds into some simple syrup while it was still hot, let it steep for a [...]

Restocking The Stash: On The Road With IPB Living, Chapter 2

Day Two of our stash-restocking adventure dawned bright and early, around 11:30 in the morning. Yes, that’s 2:30 in the afternoon back home, but back home can suck it. We hit the ground running, lolling around in our pajamas and stitching for about an hour, then headed out into the blinding desert heat [...]

Ice Cream Byproducts, In Cocktail Form

So we’re working on making ice cream this weekend, using the blackberries from the farm (a pint) and the raspberries we’ve picked off our own canes in the last few days (about a half a pint). To ready the berries to be put into ice cream, we stirred them with a bit of sugar, [...]

A Blushing Pinko

We’ve been drawing a rather steady harvest of a handful of raspberries a day from our wee raspberry canes in the backyard. It’s been pretty remarkable, actually, how these scraggly plants — which we thought we killed in the car on the drive home from the co-op, by the way — have been churning [...]