Teetotalers will like the way this homemade grenadine brightens up sparkling soda or ginger ale when served over ice. Serve this cocktail anytime, but especially as summer draws to a close on September 20th—National Rum Punch Day.
If the flavors of autumn could be rolled into one, this meringue roulade would be the result: warming cinnamon, burnt honey, sweet apples, and tangy orange come together to make a dessert fit for the festive season. Make sure all your individual components have completely cooled before assembling—you don’t want to create any excess moisture in the roulade. Get ahead by preparing the apples and cream the day before, keeping them refrigerated until needed.
Once the choices are made for a feast’s roasts and meats, it’s time to focus on the vegetables. Brussels sprouts roasted with honey, apples, and marjoram taste almost too good to be just a side dish, so let’s view them as a fabulous cozy weekday dinner as well.
Skirt steaks come from two different muscles and are sometimes labeled as inside skirt steak or outside skirt steak. The more desirable outside skirt steak measures 3 to 4 inches wide and 1/2 to 1 inch thick. Avoid the inside skirt steak, which typically measures 5 to 7 inches wide and 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick, as it is very chewy. Skirt steak is most tender when cooked to medium (130 to 135 degrees). Thin steaks cook very quickly, so we recommend using an instant-read thermometer for a quick and accurate measurement.
I absolutely love the flavor and aroma of real Mexican mole. It has an exotic quality to it from the nuts, chiles, spices, and bitter Mexican chocolate. The result is a deeply complex sauce that is rich, multidimensional, and unforgettable. I know the ingredient list looks long and intimidating, but I think you’ll agree that the results are worth the effort. Save this recipe for a special dinner with family or friends. I like to serve this dish over steamed rice with plenty of fresh cilantro and Spicy Marinated Onions.
Carrot cocktails sometimes end up tasting oddly healthy. But this one from Chad Hauge of Chicago’s Longman & Eagle is just pure fun. It’s salty, bright, smoky, and fresh—the kind of thing that’ll get you dancing. Orange and lime juices give the carrot juice a lift, and leathery mezcal finds its match in a rim of salt and smoked paprika. If you don’t have a bottle of mezcal, you should get some. Liquor store’s closed? Blanco tequila will do.
This recipe is based off of the oldest known written recipe for milk punch (which I found in cocktail historian David Wondrich’s book Punch). The original features a simple combination of brandy, lemon zest and juice, sugar, and water and is clarified with scalded milk. My adaptations to Mary’s original recipe are few: I use cold milk in place of hot, add orange peel and orange juice to the lemon for a more complex citrus flavor, and scale it down to make one quart (the original makes about twelve 750-milliliter bottles). The finished drink is bright and clean with limoncello-like lemon (and orange) intensity, and the whey that remains after clarification provides velvety body.
Baking with olive oil has been a way of life for Mediterranean cooks, and is gaining steam in America. In California, where olive oil is produced and citrus grown, this cake is as common as a yellow birthday cake with chocolate frosting.
Having made this so many times with so many combinations, I can now say with confidence what Laurent told me when he first described the dish, “You’ll love it.”
Use this Orange Flower Cake as a blueprint for other citrus cakes. Serve it plain, with a dusting if confectioners sugar, or poke the top with holes and saturate it with a tart glaze as follows.