I have a policy of not apologizing for not posting, but just so you’re all clear, yes we’re still drinking. The bar is simply still in utter basics mode as we’re still working on a kitchen where I can house my bar.

This may well not be new, I have no idea, but I love it: Drinkify.

You type in a band you’re listening to and the site gives you a drink. I think it has a good sense of humor, and it respects the fact that not every drinking experience needs to be complicated.

Many thanks to Jedder and whatever blog this is on which he found Drinkify for us.

Hello Tessin fans,

Many appreciaters of TR cocktails have been asking for updates from the homefront…. We are doing our very best to make our Houston home as cool as we possibly can. And rest assured, in the meantime we are absolutely welcoming visitors and serving cocktails of many sorts.

Some of the moving process is kind of glamorous and exciting, at least for those of us who enjoy domestic adventures: choosing wallpaper, hanging artwork, planting herbs.

Some of it is not glamorous or exciting at all: fixing broken toilets, replacing 1930s electricity, installing insulation, & painting, painting, painting. Luckily we are not doing all of this ourselves, but we’ve done our fair share. The guy who loads large purchases at Home Depot recognizes me, R, both our cars, and says the next time he sees me he’s “giving me an apron.”

When we first toured the house, I saw everything I liked about it (still like). The symmetry, the clean proportions, the beautiful light. The location. I loved the things that are really hard to change, which is why we bought it. The second time I toured the house, I saw all the issues, and there were many of them. It seemed everything was filthy; everything was broken; 87,000 things needed to be fixed/replaced/improved. Between buying the house and now, I’d say we fixed about 70,000 of those 87,000 issues.

In the first installment of Before and Mostly-Afters, I present: the laundry room.

The laundry room (I guess you could also call it a mudroom?) of our house was a major selling point, despite its relatively decrepit state under the house’s former neglectful owners. I think lots of people can appreciate the convenience of a big utility sink and full-sized washer/dryer right off the kitchen, but for us, moving from Manhattan….. this felt like a HUGE luxury.

Here’s what we toured when we first visited the house. I wonder what it looked like before all the cleaning and staging to put the house on the market? Eek.

And here’s what it looks like now:

(pardon photos from iphone b/c we can’t find our camera charger, weekend t0-do list on the chalkboard)

The key improvements:

• Refinished the hardwood floors (we did the whole house, but the laundry room was in  especially bad shape)
• Found the original cabinet doors that had been ripped off to make room for the wine fridge and reinstalled them
• Built a counter over the washer/dryer
• Put in marble countertops. You can’t see in the photos, but the bizarre Formica, faux-butcher block counter that was around the sink was split and rotten, because the faucet was also broken/leaking all under and through those cabinets. 
• Painted everything
• Installed new hardware/faucet/chandelier, put down new rug, etc.

I am thrilled with it. After years of shared laundry machines in freaky Manhattan basements with maybe the occasional dead roach in the corner, taking laundry out of my own dryer and folding it on a clean, marble counter in a sunny room feels like a miracle.

Right now the utility sink is doing double (triple? quadruple?) duty since we ripped out our kitchen and we wash our dishes there. But it is also perfect for the main activities I originally envisioned: arranging flowers, washing Dahlia’s paws, and rinsing out paint brushes. And I’ve been doing a lot of painting.

Other rooms soon…

We made it to Houston! We promptly had a cocktail!

The picture is a bit misleading at this point. First, we worked on an empty house for a week (cocktails and lodging on the parents, thank you parents) and then our stuff arrived on schedule. Nope, just kidding! Actually, we went back to work and then our stuff arrived late and we stayed at the house two weeks after we got to town (thank you again Mama for meeting the moving van).

The picture was taken that first night and we have since improved a great deal. I’m not willing to post all kinds of house pics without EE approval, though, and she’s off being a consultant.

I will leave you with a thought on cocktails. Specifically, the margarita. The pervasiveness of the Margarita in Texas is amazing and wonderful. It just opens everyone up to the fact that someone might drink something other than beer or wine. My more important insight is that Mandarine Napoleon is a poor substitute for Cointreau. I read some article that made me think it would be more like my homemade orange liqueur, but it’s just not right.

A NYC scene I’ll miss – firehouse on our block, dalmatian and all

Bertessa is leaving Manhattan (EE and Dahlia are coming too), and the time has come to close the bar. Actually, the bar is the last piece of the apartment getting shutdown, but it is looking pretty picked over:

Yeah, there are bottles left, but note how low they’re running

EE’s beautiful living room, obliterated

We’re decamping for Houston where the bar will be re-born bigger and better than ever, in a customized area of the kitchen. Just as soon as we get around to installing a kitchen, anyway:

No more cabinets, but the floors are purdy

The old one wouldn’t do, so it had to go while we were getting the floors re-done. We figure it won’t matter much since we’ve gotten in the habit of not cooking anyway. We’ll have a microwave and fridge; what more could one need?

I’ll let EE glory in the details of design, remodeling, etc. I’ve come here to lament my bar.

The bar started as a little cart with some bottles, but the cart couldn’t handle the expanding load. I customized the utility closet/pantry and got a stunning amount of bar space in the deal. EE made it look spiffy with some paint and good light. It’s a special space. Hidden behind the seemingly mundane door. Still a bit rough around the edges. Cozy. My first bar.

Originally designed to share space with a cat, the bar outlived the cat and presided over a motley collection of toiletries, laundry supplies, dog food, and tools. It enabled grand visions of cocktail making and dabbling with infusions and liqueurs that were critical to allowing this blog’s development.

The final days of a developed bar are strange times. Open liquor doesn’t do so well in such a hot truck for such a long time. Plus, many of the bottles are stoppered with re-used corks or other innovations. The challenge of consuming the remainder is in the variety. It’s all well and good to make a margarita with the remaining tequila, but what happens when the Cointreau runs dry before the tequila? The bar quickly fell all out of whack, and the whole goal was to avoid replenishing it. This led to some odd drinks (trying to do summer coolers with a surfeit of whiskeys) and to one great realization: make the missing ingredients myself.

This realization of self-creation shall be the First Principle of the new bar. In order to handle the Cointreau dilemma, I bought a bag of juice oranges for $1.50 and used excess brandy to make my own. It is fresh, light on the tongue and amazing. Even better is the orange-ginger liqueur I made at the same time. I used the peels and moonshine to make wicked orange bitters. We still can’t drink everything, but I’m inspired to buy only the bases that I need and certain specialties I can’t infuse or distill myself.

There is not currently a Second Principle. I’m just not very principled.

Ouch – this will equal some serious trash stink in NYC

It’s been a long while, but I wrote this right after Memorial day and it seems like the world could use some more hot weather drinks as it goes over 100 degrees here in Manhattan…

As always, a visit to the Virginia countryside tends to inspire cocktail creation. Maybe the area’s history of moonshine has a role, but I think it is more about having lots of fresh ingredients and weather that dictates what one should drink.

Kate and Andy Spade, at home, today.  Photographed by The Selby - the full set of images is here.

And now I feel much better about the piles of books multiplying all over our apartment. 

On a somewhat related note:
Kate Spade popularized her trademark brunette, teased updo long before Sarah Palin entered the scene.  Are Spade’s thick, round glasses an intentional effort to differentiate?  I think I like them, but it’s hard to be sure.

Unfortunately, I do not partake of all my meals in fabulous surroundings. Nor are all my snacks cashews and wasabi peas set next to my Gibson on a polished bar. A great many of bothm sadly take place where I spend most of my waking hours:

Fortunately, my employer provides snacks, including string cheese.  Unfortunately, cubicles do not provide protection from other people’s snack habits, which led me to conclude the following:

String cheese should be consumed in strings, not by biting chunks off. The whole point is to make the notion of eating some random, sub-par quality cheese by itself palatable. If it were ok to just eat chunks of disgusting barely worthy of the name cheese, then they’d just sell chunks. They don’t sell that because it’s gross. Maybe the world will come to that shortly, but I hope not.

If you think it’s ridiculous and time consuming to tear off the strings, well, of course it is, but by adding a silly ritual we make the otherwise unpalatable palatable again. We transform it from eating something that is really marginal food into eating a unique form of something that is not so bad, given that it comes off in strings.

Many foods are like this (twisting Oreos, putting lime in Coronas, Robert Burns and Haggis), but for most examples it isn’t really offensive to watch someone skip the ritual – the consumer simply misses some happiness. With string cheese, the rest of us have to watch you chomp on a limp cylinder of leftover milk products. Eww.

Now add batter and a deep frier…

I’m sorry but sometimes I think my blog is a bit much. I have poked around the internet a bit at this point, and there are quite a few blogs about making drinks. I like mine, EE made it very pretty as she has so many things in my life, but frankly I’m hard pressed to say the world needs this.

I don’t want to make really weird drinks. I’ll obviously put more effort into mixology than most, but thinking up new drinks shouldn’t be a grind. Worse than the creation of these drinks is their potential impact on the world.

People started apologizing to me at some point for ordering classic/simple/”boring” drinks. WTF?! When was the last time you had a few martinis, gin & tonics, mojitos, margaritas, or whiskeys on the rocks and were BORED? If that’s your problem: DETOX.

I don’t want to infuse that angst into the world! It’s like cheese infused rye, only spiritual. Paradoxically, I worry my mixology blog may have created bad karma in the world of drink!

There is value to people reporting on the world out there. Like this blog from a college classmate. It tells us what’s going on and where to go, but I’m a really bad reporter. I just like to experience my moment and move on, or keep it in my heart or whatever. Reporting is not for me.

No, we’re not killin Tessin is not dead, but for the love of all that’s good, just drink whatever you want. Please.

I’ll have a Crying Rye:

1 cucumber infused rye
1/2 Sweet Vermouth
3 drops Angostura bitters
1/4 Fernet Branca

1/4 maraschino liqueur

salt the rim

What’re you having?

EE and I had the great fortune to take a week of vacation in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia.  We did not encounter any spectacular new fronts in mixology, but there were more than a few capable bartenders.  More importantly, we encountered a brilliant gin: Myriad View Distillery’s Straight Gin.

This stuff is clean, crisp, made by a gin drinker because, well, he wanted his martini to be just so.  Sadly, Myriad is only available in PEI at the moment, not even in the rest of Canada.  I don’t feel too bad for the folks at Myriad though, because they have just about the most awesome life set-up I can imagine:

That’s the owners house in front, looking across his vineyards and out across Rollo Bay on Eastern PEI.  The distillery is in back after some gardens and more vineyard.

If you ever get up to PEI, Myriad is well worth the trip.  Really, any excuse to drive around such a gorgeous island should be welcomed.  And at the end of each day you can settle in for fresh oysters.  No better way to enjoy your gin.

EE’s favorite oysters were from Raspberry Point, which we happened across on our way to Green Gables…

And in one of the craziest infusions I’ve ever seen, this river in Nova Scotia is red and a little foamy from all the tannic acid in the peat that it filters through upstream!  We did a bit of swimming, but it was super cold.  Better to stay in the kayak.

EE on the Napier River in the Tobeatic Wilderness of Nova Scotia

Our dear friend Becky has posted a comment so wonderful that it deserves to be its own post!  Way to go Becky, you are Tessin’s first guest-poster!  My response will go in the comments, natch.

Here’s what Becky has to say:

Your excellent Negroni post reminded me that I had been meaning to describe a recent (anti)cocktail experience I had with a friend.

He took me to the annual summer T-Market–which started a few years ago as an outdoor bazaar where Tel Aviv silk-screeners, street artists, and independent designers would sell (you guessed it) t-shirts showcasing their graphics/art/logos/whatever. It’s now become something of an institution for the insufferable hipster set, and has expanded to include visual art, men and women’s apparel, booth outposts from a lot of the coolest new boutiques, live music, DJs, food, and, naturally, alcohol.

Seems like these shirts would about some up Becky’s experience

It’s a young, energetic, but eminently polished, stylishly curated event, with clipboard-toting PR flacks at every entrance talking into bluetooth headsets, security, funky outdoor lighting, corporate sponosorship, the works.

AND THIS IS WHAT WAS BEING SERVED AT THE “BARS” on either end of the outdoor market:
–Goldstar (undistinguished Israeli beer)
–Tubourg (another undistinguished Israeli beer)
–”Red Bull and Vodka” which is both incredibly foul and also indisputably the most popular mixed-drink (I refuse to call it a cocktail) in all of Israel. Also, to make it more confounding, “Red Bull and Vodka” is *never* made with Red Bull, but instead with one of two local “energy drink” brands, the most common one of which is called XL.
–And Campari. In Negronis? No. Americanos? No. Maybe, just, Campari and soda? No. And not on the rocks either. Just 1 inch of lukewarm, incadescently red-orange Campari, lonesome and bereft in a flimsy plastic SOLO cup. Served during the height of a sizzling-hot Israeli summer afternoon.

WHO DOES SOMETHING LIKE THAT? AND WHY?