Hello world, Tessin is re-engaging the blog.

I had my time sucked away by work and the CFA for a while, and I’ve been catching up on having fun since.  Writing about the fun would have detracted too much from having the fun…

Anyway, what do I have to share after this hiatus?

1) Cucumbers.  Want to bring wintery drinks into the summer vibe?  Infuse things with cucumber.  Warning: not all drinks work well.  Rye works very well.  Bourbon would not.

2) Watch the World Cup; it’s great.  The World Cup offered me these two lessons:

  a) Rum.  You can do a lot with rum.  Seems like a stupidly obvious statement, but I get asked what to do with rum other than add it to Coke…  Adding it to Coke is a fine option at many a beachfront-type scenario, but one can also add ginger beer (like a Dark n Stormy), or lime juice and sugar (it’s a daquiri!).  If you’ve got time to plan ahead, add mint, or some fruit, or anything else, and let sit overnight.  Rum does really well with infusions.  Ultimately, the most recent version of this request had a simple answer, as the drinker was whiling away the opening rounds at a French bar on Mauritius: drink it straight.

  b) Micheladas.  Beer, lime, spices, they vary a lot, but that’s part of the joy - so long as they’re cold and spicy.  Even if it’s not on the menu (in fact, it’ll probably be better if it isn’t), ask for one at your favorite Mexican place.  With Tecate.  Don’t ask for this if it’s less than 80 degrees or after 5.

3) Go surfing.  Seriously, it’s fun and not actually that hard.

Bertessa’s first surfing lesson.  Cowabunga.

A couple of weeks ago I went to Bermuda (sans TR, who had to work – a common theme).  Actually being in Bermuda made me:

1) Love Bermuda pink even more

2) Think maybe I’d had enough of it on the walls of my Manhattan living room

So, introducing the newest incarnation of the Tessin Rinpoche habitat:

The concept is more clubby, more Central Park-y. 

It is a pure experiment, putting a dark color on the walls.  But so far, we like it.

Happy 4th of July.   With luck, the enigmatic Tessin himself will be inspired to post some holiday cocktails.

Infusion is the key to making home mixology sparkle.  Half the fun is making drinks that I can’t get in a restaurant or bar.  My home drinks are mostly distinguished by quality: most bars use mixes and shortcuts.  But increasingly, they are also distinguished by unique ingredients.

I’ve made mention of using various infusions already, but some questions I’ve received suggest that other home mixologists are still suffering from a crisis of confidence when it comes to infusing things on their own.

How to infuse?  Simply take some liquor and put something that provides a new flavor into the liquor.  Leave it overnight.  Strain out the non-liquid item.  DONE!

There are methods of hot infusion that some bars use for consistency.  I don’t have the inclination to bother.  I kind of like each infusion to be different.  It changes my drink-making inspiration.  That said, some infusions are simple and reliable:

1) Lavender and gin – Buy lavender at the store in the herb section.  Pick it fresh; don’t use the dried kind

2) Jalapeno and tequila – need I elaborate?  But watch out, because this can get VERY HOT.  It’s ok if it does… I just put in a little and use uninfused tequila for most of the drink

3) Dill and vodka – this is fantastic for bloody mary’s, or even a simple vodka-tonic.

And taking it to the next level, keep in mind the potential of infusions for:

• Ice.  Not even an infusion really, but you don’t risk a bottle of liquor being wasted.  Last year we hosted a Kentucky Derby event, and EE had the excellent idea of making mint-infused tea and turning it into ice cubes.  Just pour boiling water over whatever you want the ice to taste like, then freeze the water in ice cube trays.  This was great for the party, because it easily enabled guests to make themselves truly minty mint juleps.
• Gifts.  A shout-out to some of my Texan kin, who gave pineapple-infused vodka to various family members (including me, of course) for Christmas.  It was a very charming and obviously useful present.  Tessa loves a practical gift.  I shared mine with the crowd in the form of brunch blood  mary’s, and later, a refreshing evening cocktail involving tonic, lemon, and an ancient Galliano-like liqueur I found in my grandparents’ bar.

If you really want to go to the next level, you can start making you own liqueurs, but that’s a topic for another time.

The Bevvy Alexander.  A cocktail for cold nights.

I’ve been needing to get this up for a while, and now I’ve just about missed the season, but there are some chilly spring nights to come.

The excellent request made by a lovely guest: a great cocktail that’s warm, for when the weather is cold

I looked around and found lots of cider recipes and coffee-based drinks.  I hate apple juice.  I like my coffee to be coffee.  Ultimately, I just made a good cocktail and added hot water.  This may sound cheap, random, not very well-considered, I don’t know, just sort of wrong.  My guest liked it, though.  And, if I wanted a hot drink, I’d like it too.

At the end of the day, the Bevvy Alexander is hot and it tastes good.  It looks good too, in a lovely sort of way.  What’s wrong with that?

Ingredients

1/2 darker rum

1/2 Stone‘s ginger currant wine

1/4 Maraschino liqueur

few drops lavender & bergamot infused vodka

a squeeze of agave nectar

Combine all ingredients in a teacup (they should fill about 1/3 to 1/2 of it) and top with very hot water.  Stir and garnish with a twist.

I realize high-waisted, pleated women’s trousers are not exactly breaking news in the world of serious fashion, but they’re breaking news in my world.  Because I finally tried them on myself… and am now completely convinced that they’re very, very cool. 

Not every pair is right for everyone, and they won’t work with every shirt and sweater in your closet - nonetheless, I submit that figuring out how to wear them well is well-worth the bother. 

Chloe, Fall 2009

Let’s review the cool report card:

• Style: They look really good.  Especially if you, like me, would rather pants cinch your waist than the widest point of your hips.

• Tradition:  First popularized by Marlene Dietrich and Katharine Hepburn in the 1930s.  Here’s the evidence:

Marlene Dietrich

Katharine Hepburn

• Function:  They became popular for women largely because of their function, versus skirts and dresses.  Today, after a decade of low-rise pants creating awkward mid-section gaps for every woman trying to sit gracefully on a barstool, they seem functional in a whole new way.  It’s very reassuring to tuck my silk blouse into their waist, belt it, and be able to stride (and it) comfortably and confidently.  Bonus: they work really well with both sensible and fun shoes, especially with great hosiery.

Chloe, Fall 2009

• General conscientiousness:  There are not a lot of clothes that, in and of themselves, inspire me to look forward to getting dressed and spending time at the office, but these do – which almost no matter what they cost, makes them very good for the bank account. 

   They’re also stylish and comfortable enough to transition nicely to a cocktail and dinner at home.

Katharine Hepburn again.  Deciding what cocktail Bertessa will make her.

Don’t ever design a cocktail menu for high schoolers.  Empire Hotel, I am looking at you.

EE and I headed to the Empire Hotel this week for a drink in the Lobby Bar.  It’s in our neighborhood, and EE loves their logo (duh), which is not only monogrammed on everything monogrammable, but also forms the pattern of the carpets, and serves as door handles on all the double-doors:

Anyway, the most recent drink menu has a title like, “Try a Gossip Girl Cocktail”  WTF?  Really?

Let’s consider the problems.  The:

a) show is absurd (not that you personally are absurd if you like it, but the show IS – you know it).

b) characters are teenagers and have not been drinking long enough to possibly have knowledge worth emulating.

c) characters are teenagers who really shouldn’t be drinking at that level (without getting into a bigger debate over what the drinking laws should be).

d) drinks ACTUALLY REFLECTED IMMATTURE TASTES.

I took one look and said, “I’ll have a negroni.”  EE, bless her soul, ordered one.  She claims she felt rushed to make a decision.  It involved an Atomic Fireball.  She asked me what an Atomic Fireball is just after ordering.  Candy.  It is a piece of candy.  The rim was encrusted with sugar - the most sugar I’ve ever seen on a rim.  The thing tasted like a strange, flat Cherry Coke served in a martini glass with a sugared rim.  Nasty.  The kind of thing you might like if your standard breakfast consists of Mountain Dew and Sour Patch Kids on the school bus.

EE re-orderded a classic margarita.  Meant in the best possible way, this type of admission-of-ordering-error and assertiveness-in-correcting-it is not very characteristic of EE, which should really underscore how horrific the drink was.  To the hotel’s credit, they just switched out the drinks and never charged us for the freaky one.

The lobby bar of the Empire Hotel.  Cool place, good bar, nasty cocktail menu.

The sad thing is that the Empire Hotel bar is really cool.  The ambiance is great, but more importantly, they are skilled drink-makers!  My negroni and EE’s margarita were perfectly executed.  The bartender was fast; the waitress was attentive.  But the drink menu was disgusting!

We went to the hotel restaurant, Ed’s Chowder House, after cocktails.  Confounding us further in regards to the drink menu is the fact that Ed’s drink menu is AWESOME.  I had a spectacular West Side Gimlet.  EE had a great jalapeno-infused margarita (feeling scarred by her Atomic Fireball attempt at branching out, my sweet EE may be back to margaritas for a while now).  The oysters were great, the service was again great.  I highly recommend it.

Bar of Ed’s Chowder House at the Empire Hotel.  Awesome.

Lesson: Skip the lounge bar and walk upstairs to Ed’s.

Moral: never design drinks for high schoolers.

Sorry, if you’re upset, that posts have been infrequent.

I’ve been busy.  I’m only getting busier.  TR lives on, it just may not get as much love.

(EE-craftiness: part of a heart garland.)

I love Valentine’s Day.  I view it as an ideal holiday, and strenuously disagree with those who consider it to be over-commercialized, depressing, and all the rest.  Valentine’s is a bright spot in in the otherwise desolate month of February (at least in the Northeast).  Even before the days of EE, I was always happy to invite a pretty lady to be my valentine (and in my limited experience, ladies always enjoy being a valentine).  What could be better than fine dining, and perhaps the exchange of an extravagant gift or two, with someone whose company I enjoy?  Share the love, that’s what I say.

(Only on Valentine’s Day will your friends give you this card.  Hopefully.)

This year, EE and I somewhat reinterpreted our traditional Valentine’s celebration: we threw a cocktail party!

We hosted about 30 guests, a mix of singles and couples, for the express purposes of Valentining and having cocktails.  The goal was not to provide dinner - it was to provide an extra oomph of glizt and glam (and maybe even gossip and drama) to whatever evening people may or may not have planned for themselves.

In preparation for this momentous event, I went to work creating some drinks that fit the occasion.  The challenges/criteria were:

• 3 colors – EE often thinks in colors, so we determined the need for a red drink, a pink drink, and a white drink.
• Glassware – we only have so many of each type of glass, and wanted to avoid plastic.  The drinks had to spread across tumblers, stemmed wine, and stemmed cocktail glasses.
• Flavors – needed more than one type of flavor profile for a range of drinkers.

The results were (bearing their Valentine names):

Passion

Color: Red

Glass: Tumbler

Flavor area: Bitter

Ingredients

1 Tequila

3/4 Campari

3/4 Blood Orange Italian Soda (I bought this at Whole Foods)

1/3 Sweet Vermouth

drop Orange bitters

A muddled cherry (buy the frozen ones)

Muddle the cherry, stir vigorously with ice and all ingredients except the soda.  Strain into serving pitcher, add soda and stir gently.  At the party, I mixed batches of these in a pitcher, which we put out with an ice bucket and the correct glassware.

Blush

Color: Pink

Glass: Cocktail

Flavor area: Lightly fruity, easily accessible gin

Ingredients

1 Bombay Sapphire

1/4 Domaine de Canton ginger liqueur

1/4 Kumquat liqueur (you have to make it yourself – a post for another time – substitute Cointreau)

half a Lime’s juice

drop of Cranberry juice

Combine all ingredients with ice in a shaker and shake vigorously.  At the party I shook up batches and funneled them into a good-looking clear liquor bottle that I had de-labeled and cleaned.  The bottle was then left in an ice bucket next to the correct glassware.

Lovely

Color: White (ok, it’s yellowy, like white wine is white.  But true white is a pain)

Glass: Wine

Flavor area: Light, aromatic, refreshing, and sweeter

Ingredients

2 Seltzer Water

1 White Wine (something dry and simple – I used an Austrian wine made by Berger)

3/4 St. Germain Elderflower Liqueur

1/4 Dry Vermouth

1/4 Dolin Blanc Vermouth

Combine all ingredients and stir.  Or, if using a siphon for the seltzer (a superior way to go), just add the seltzer last and allow the blast of seltzer to do the mixing.  For the party, I had some old french lemonade bottles with flip-tops that I put batches into and then topped with seltzer.  We left the bottles in a bowl with ice next to the correct glassware.

Note:  Sadly, we had such a good time at the party that we didn’t take any drink/party pictures.  Sorry, that was lame of us.  Here’s a final photo:

(My present to EE this year – they are antique sterling stirrer-straws. I was a little wary of giving her something cocktail-related, given it’s kind of my own hobby at all, but she does seem to like them very much.)

An N.A. Cleanser.  Serve it on the rocks, or in a flute.  With brunch, or at cocktail hour.

If you read lots of drinking/mixology blogs, you will have noted that January is practically international sobriety month.  Everyone needs a break after the holidays.  Here in Tessin land, we try for a little more balance by having non-drinking days every week (as opposed to a lot all at the beginning of the year).

Sometimes, though, the lure of drink-having ritual, or a desire for a new flavor, beckons when we do not want any alcohol.  Or we have a guest (like EE’s young cousin) who wants to feel part of the party, but can’t have alcohol.  I have also been informed that pregnant ladies do not lose their desire for tasty beverages even though they cannot imbibe fine spirits.

To support such challenging periods in life, I make some N.A.s.  I have not perfected the N.A. - I  can’t make one that really seems correct served up in a martini glass, and I am over-reliant on seltzer – but I have made some tasty beverages:

N.A. Pomegranate Lime

1/2 Pomegranate juice

1/4 Agave nectar

juice from 1/2 a lime

Mix the above ingredients and then top off with 3 times as much water as mix.  You can use sparkling or still, rocks or not.

N.A. Ginger Clementine

1 clementine orange, peeled

1/3 grapefruit juice

1/4 ginger juice

a few frozen cranberries

Muddle the ingredients (be sure to pop the cranberries), and then shake.  Top off with just twice as much seltzer as mix.

Sometimes, we need to go a step beyond a tasty N.A. to an N.A. that will correct some of our non-N.A. excess.  In those cases, I tend to make a batch for the household/group, because everyone probably feels about the same way.

N.A. Cleanser

handful frozen blueberries

handful frozen cranberries

1/3 ginger juice

1/4 tsp. cayenne pepper

Combine above and muddle.

2 pomegranate juice

1 cranberry juice

1 grapefruit juice

2/3 agave nectar

Mix in remaining ingredients and stir well.  From here you need to add water, still or sparkling, with ice or without.  It’s pretty versatile really, but EE says I have to warn that all that juice really may cause your body to flush itself out (maybe not the worst given the circs, as long as you’ll be near a restroom).

A few notes:

• Always use pure fruit juice with no sugar added – no cranberry cocktail, just the cranberry juice
• Anywhere I say agave, you could use honey or simple syrup, but I like the agave flavor
• The seltzer will work better if it is from a siphon – that way the blast of water mixes everything up

The summary: 

The point of this mini manifesto is to set the stage for more posts on things I consider cool, and in keeping with the Tessin Rinpoche aesthetic.  To keep it interesting, I will try to focus on things that are not currently particularly popular.  And I will try to be a tiny bit disciplined about logic, reason, and research. 

Is this whole endeavor sort of silly and presumptuous?  Sure.  But the serious goodness of TR’s cocktails aside, the whole blog is an exercise in silliness, so you won’t find a lot of apologies here. 

Lively/unserious commentary and debate always welcome.

Sometimes – unfortunately not often enough – it’s possible for one thing to simultaneously possess/embody:

1. Style
2. Tradition (in the best sense of the word)
3. Function
4. General conscientiousness (e.g., to be healthy, thrifty, locally-made, green – in the environmental sense…. not necessarily all of these at once… 1 or 2 may be enough). 

I try to keep a sharp eye out for anything that fits this description.  When something fits into all of these categories, it’s only a matter of time (though admittedly, sometimes a very long time) until it becomes popular in a more mainstream sense.

I’d say home mixology itself is a good example.  It has some inherent style (if you think drinks look pretty and that there’s graciousness in the act of serving them).  It certainly has tradition.  It is very functional – customized drinks for yourself and your favorite people, in the comfort of your (or their) home!  And it’s even thrifty.  No wonder the hobby is enjoying a resurgence.

For the purposes of brevity and ease of communication, I call anything and everything that I believe possesses all of these qualities, whether it’s currently popular or not: “cool.”  In my book, this is very high praise.

If something is EE-cool, the good news is that it doesn’t really matter to me whether it’s actually popular or not.  If it isn’t popular, who cares?  I think it’s cool in its own right, and if/when it’s “discovered,” I’ll feel I was ahead of the time.  If it is popular, who cares?  I still think it’s cool in it’s own right, it will probably stay popular for a while, and eventually it will probably become popular again (see previous point). 

(In case you’re wondering, Bertessa and I usually, but do not always, agree on what’s cool.  In general, he thinks anything very popular/branded becomes, almost by definition, uncool… whereas I don’t hold this against something.  Example: Louis Vuitton Damier canvas.  I, on the other hand, think he gives function too much weight relative to aesthetic appeal.  Sometimes function is enough to justify something, but it doesn’t make it cool.  Example: Crocs.)

A few months ago, I wrote about potpourri, which I think is cool.  But there are other examples, which have enjoyed varying degrees of popular resurgence (currently or previously).  Whether we own these things or not, I’m a big fan of all of all of the things the below.  Not everyone is.  But as explained, it doesn’t really matter to me. 

 Basic examples, in no particular order: 

Dutch bicycles

 Obviously beautiful, useful for getting around, healthy – if you ride carefully – and environmentally responsible.  Sadly, not too affordable in the USA.

Awesome.  Almost enough to motivate me to dress up and ride to work…

 …or maybe we can leave that to Bertessa.

Barbour coats

Stylish (especially if you’re tromping around the grounds of a Scottish castle, in mind or body), a wardrobe classic for outdoor hobbies since the 1910s, warm, waterproof, long-lasting, and relatively thrifty – esp. considering the long-lasting part.  

The classic – waxed cotton 

Great vintage poster, circa 1920s?

 Props to Barbour for having the good sense to feature a Border Terrier on their homepage.

But we will not be outdone, even if it requires resorting to poor-quality Blackberry photos from last winter.

(And few Tessin posts are complete without fitting in at least a couple pet photos.)

 Dahlia models her very own Barbour, with some snowmen in Central Park.

For the record, clothes for dogs don’t qualify as cool.  They’re just cute.

Dahlia on the move.

Picardie glasses

So nice to look at, traditionally used in many charming cafes and restaurants, stackable, very easy to hold, very difficult to break, very inexpensive. 

 So great!

 Wine in a Picardie glass at an outdoor cafe – so cool.