agua de jamaica

So we had a dinner party.
For now, this will have to stand in for my fulfillment of the salon challenge. And by stand in, I mean hold its place until I can follow my own rules, which I didn't quite.


My friend Jen and I made this dinner together, and fifteen minutes before everyone arrived, when I fully realized that we only had about half the food completed, I took a swig of my pre-guest arrival drink, and I asked Jen, "Will I ever learn to do this better? More efficiently? On time?" She answered that where would be the rush in that?

Last year we did a similar dinner party together, a benefit for the school like this one. That day was a bit of a mess, and by the moments before everyone arrived, we were actually sprinting through the kitchen. This time we didn't sprint, but I certainly lost a fair amount of hope, and I accepted the fact that dinner, in my hands, will almost always be later than intended.  Lucky for all of our guests, Jen's hands were involved too, and so they didn't go hungry for too long.




As soon as I let go of any hope of keeping it together, of course I started to have a much better night. Our intent was a Mexican feast, and all night we pressed tortillas and squeezed limes. And because the flavors might just come back into my mouth as a recount the menu to you, I will do my best to reconstruct the affair. Ready? Or rather, should I say, hungry?

We started out with rhubarb margaritas and chili lime popcorn. The margaritas, entirely responsible for my next day headache, were made with rhubarb ginger syrup.  They were worth the headache. For the popcorn, I melted butter, and whisked it together with lime juice, salt, and chili powder. That whole delicious mess went on the popcorn.

Then there was soup, a fish soup mostly from Diana Kennedy that was made from chicken broth, vegetables, and fish that I had brought back with me from Maine the day before. We floated little circles of lime in each bowl, a trick that I will be sure to repeat again.

And then there were pork tacos, but I've already told you about those. That time turned out to be practice for this time, and they were just as delicious. We pressed corn tortillas as we constructed the tacos. And then there was shredded pork, and radish and white turnip salad, queso fresco, creme fraiche, and guacamole.



Then there was salad, and because all the produce for the whole dinner was from Jen's farm, this was no slouch of a salad. She and her husband grow magical lettuces. I'll leave it at that.


Then, because we hadn't had enough homemade tortillas, we made more, and we topped them with swiss chard and garlic scapes, then Oaxaca cheese, a bean and corn salsa, and a fried egg.

 This was my favorite course to look at, but I was too full to clean my plate.

 
Then finally there was flan, which almost wasn't at all.  I burned the caramel twice, and then I had to send Joey out to buy more sugar. I had never made flan, and as we coated the pan in caramel, I couldn't figure out how this would actually work or why it would soften into the sweet brown liquid I knew it should. We stuck that custard in a water bath and said a prayer. And although we could have put it into little individual ramekins, I had the image stuck in my head of Penelope Cruz turning over a big flan in Volver, a move I found so inspiring and deeply sexy that I thought it needed to be attempted. If you haven't seen that movie, see it just for that moment. You'll like the rest too.

When we went to overturn that flan, Penelope Cruz was nowhere to be seen. Instead, it slid right out of the pan without turning over, but we cheered anyway because it was flan despite our failings.

 To drink through the night we had cheap Mexican Beer (I'm partial to Tecate in a can), and agua de jamaica, or, if you don't want to be saucy about it, hibiscus tea. I've had a big beautiful jar of dried hibiscus that Jen brought me back from her last trip to Mexico, and the last of those precious flowers went into our drink.

Again, absolutely worth it.

Before you go lamenting the fact that you have no friend just returned from Mexico bearing dried hibiscus, I'll tell you that it's not so hard to find. Some bulk herb sections in the store will have them, and if not, the online marketplace will help you out. In a pinch, however, a few Celestial Seasonings red zinger tea bags will do the trick here.

Agua de jamaica is sweet and sour, dark red and wonderful, and exactly what you need in your refrigerator on the hottest of days. That, and some cheap Mexican beer.


Agua de Jamaica

adapted from Diana Kennedy, The Essential Cuisines of Mexico

2/3 cup dried hibiscus flowers
4 cups water
1/3 cup sugar, or more to taste
1/4 cup fresh lime juice

Combine the hibiscus and 3 cups of the water in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Let the mixture boil for 5 minutes.  Remove from heat. Stir in the sugar and the remaining water, cover, and let sit for 4 hours. Strain out the hibiscus flours and add the lime juice. Adjust sweetness to taste.
Agua de jamaica can also be topped off with a little bubbly water if you prefer.

Because this is functioning as my salon challenge until I get to the real one, it's a perfect time to tell me about your dinner party! Anyone take the challenge out there?

watermelon licuado

Hot and steamy.
In true New England fashion, we have skipped from winter to summer, and as Joey said it so well this morning as he clung to his cup of coffee with a visible desperation that it would open his eyes enough to get to school, "it's hard to go back to spring after this taste of summer."
Memorial day weekend, 2011. A wedding. A farmers market. A work party. Several pimm's cups and a most of a growler of beer. Most of a trellis built for the raspberries. All the beds are grainy from dirty feet that tromped all over the neighborhood. Several tick bites and a little bit of what's looking like poison ivy.  Sunburned necks. Two parades. Lost sunhats, already. Comforters switched out for thin blankets.  And when Joey drove up to get the flat tire fixed yesterday, he called me a bit later, and said, "turns out, I'm in Vermont."  Summer brings out the adventurer in him.
This morning when I stumbled into Rosie's room at 6:30 to see if she was awake, she was staring into space, sitting in her rumpled bed in her tank top and underwear. "I am so, so tired."
Summer is coming. Summer is coming!

Watermelon Licuado

(Do I have to write a little something to entice you to make this? A little headnote, describing it's perfect sweetness, thirst-quenching abilities, and shade of pink? I didn't think so. I'm guessing you already get this one. Are you heading over to your blender? Pulling that leftover quarter of watermelon out of the fridge? Yes! Yes! Yes!)

serves 2

4 to 5 cups cubed watermelon
1 cup vanilla ice cream
1 cup milk

Combine. Blend. Drink.

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new orleans part 2: tonique and the pimm's cup

 

I left the blooming azaleas back in New Orleans, but I took the Pimm's Cup back home with me.

It tastes just as good here as it did there, even though we are on the eve of an impending April 1 snowstorm, even though you can't walk two steps without hearing reference to "mother nature's April fools joke,"  even though there is not a drop of humidity and when the temperature got up to 42 degrees today, we all took of our coats as if it were truly warm.  Even though all of these things, still, the Pimm's Cup is just the drink for the day.

 Of course I came to it like most things, peering in from the sidelines, checking out what everyone's doing.  Like kosher salt and vanilla beans, I got it from gossip first- then waited for the right moment.  I'd never heard of the stuff when Molly wrote about it last summer, and then it came up again here and there, and then my friend Naya sent me a few emails that turned out to be our primary guidebook to the city, and there it was again: "have a pimm's cup."

And so there we are, and it is Saturday.  We've started our in depth perusal of the road food festival and  there appears our friend Alice, who, superhero that she is, decided to fly standby from Providence so that she could spend four hours eating in New Orleans with us before getting back on a plane to go back to graduate school.  This is Alice.  I have known her for a long, long time, and she continues to surprise me in a good way.

And so we ate.  And when it was time for Alice to go, we walked her back to where she had parked her funny looking rental car, which was almost all the way out of the French Quarter, and across from Louis Armstrong Park, which still remains eerily and firmly closed since Katrina. And we hugged and said goodbye, and when kisses were blown and she was on her way back to the airport, Joey and I let out a collective sigh at the shortness of the visit.  I looked up, and there was a little sign, and I said, "isn't this that bar that we were supposed to find?"

And of course, because it was New Orleans where all of the places seemed to find us, it was.  It was only 3 o'clock, earlier than usual for a drink in my usual life, but it was New Orleans, and so really, we were late to the party.  And so we slid into a little white leather booth, and I swear to you that the air smelled sweet and the music was perfect.  And I said to Joey, "I'm so glad that we don't have anywhere even remotely this fabulous near us.  I'd drink here everyday."


The drink menu read like an epic poem, and I wanted to order every single thing, just for a taste of each.  Of course, I never had to think about what I would order.  It was time for the Pimm's cup.

 

Pimm's #1 is a British liqueur for sunny days, and it can be mixed with many things, but the classic is ginger ale or 7-up.  My Pimm's cup at Tonique was my first of several over the next 36 hours that I had left in New Orleans, and I studied the differences.  What made Tonique's cocktails so special, besides the perfection of the place itself, was it's ice.  I was so moved by the ice, and I marveled at it's squareness and stability within the drink.  I tried to contain myself, but I had to ask the lovely tattooed bartender how she made such ice.  "We have a special machine," she said, and although she told me the long and scientific name, I was drinking at 3 o'clock, and I don't remember what it was called. 


That first Pimm's cup was fantastic, but later there was one with sliced cucumber.  It seemed like a pretty garnish, but what it really did was infuse the whole drink with coolness.  I would imagine that if it were Summer, and I were sitting on my porch, I would pick a bit of mint and smoosh it up in there too.  I've heard rumors of strawberries if the time is right.  I think that the possibilities are endless.

And what does a  Pimm's cup taste like?  Besides summer itself, I'd say there's a bit of fruity iced tea in there.  My first thought was that although I've always hated the whole Dr. Pepper/ Moxie family of sodas, this would be how they would taste if they actually tasted good.  Don't get me wrong- this is not an April kind of drink.  This is not an eve of snowstorm kind of drink to sip while you are stirring soup to get you through the hunker down.

Except that it might be.  If you're like me and you're timings a little off, if you come late to the party or laugh a beat after the joke is over.  Screw timing.  The winter has been long, and we need summer any way we can get it.  It will come, friends, and by the time it does, you will be an expert at mixing your perfect Pimm's cup.

Pimm's Cup
(partly from the back of the bottle, and partly from my favorite parts of my varied New Orlean's Pimm's cups)

Start with a tall glass.  Fill it half way with ice (from a special machine!).  Add about 1 1/2 to 2 ounces Pimm's #1.  Then fill it most of the way up with ginger ale (Reed's brew is a winner here).  Add a hefty squeeze of lemon, a hefty squeeze of lime, and stir.  Top with slices of cucumber.  Acceptable to drink with a straw.