What I'm Cooking: A Weekend in Ithaca

Many of my posts are about adventures in ingredients and cooking. This post is not adventurous at all. 

 I've mentioned that I live in Ithaca, but visit Toronto frequently. I may not have made the frequency of these visits clear, but some already know that I'm usually in Ithaca for most weekdays and about one weekend per month. Most of the rest of the weekends I spend in Toronto, which is great for recharging, exploring and hanging out with friends there.

Weekends in Ithaca are scarce and have become special. They're an opportunity to see my friends here, which is great; but also a time for some quiet and not spending hours in the car. And I usually try to spend lots of my quiet time on cooking and food prep. This past weekend was no exception, so I thought I'd tell you about the things I made.

Saturday I had plans to watch football with friends and promised to bring dessert. I'd been craving ginger ice cream. When steeped with fresh ginger it has a wonderful burn that is tempered by the richness of the custard. I was definitely planning to make that.  Wegman's also taunted me with Meyer lemons that I couldn't resist, though. So I picked up a bag and made some sherbet as well. I took all of the ice cream to my friends, but saved some sherbet for myself.  Recipes for both of these came from David Lebovitz's Perfect Scoop, which I've said before is a fabulous ice cream book.

While the ice cream was steeping , I also threw together some peanut butter cookie dough. I like to have cookies on hand to take to work for dessert with lunch, and had another party on Saturday night to which I'd promised to bring baked goods.  I had actually never made peanut butter cookies, so this seemed like as good an opportunity as any. I used the recipe from the Flour book; they're quite simple: cream butter and sugar for a long time, add eggs, add peanut butter, add flour. Rest dough. Bake. Tastiness.

I also have a habit of making foods for myself for lunch and dinner a week at a time. Most weeks lunch is just assembling ingredients for sandwiches. This week I had seen a recipe in Bon Appetit for a roasted carrot and beet salad with feta and parsley in a cumin/lemon vinaigrette. It sounded delicious, but the presentation was a little over the top for my tastes (it had everything nearly whole and artfully arranged on a platter). I wanted something I could eat out of tupperware with a plastic fork.  So I chopped everything a bit smaller prior to roasting. And I also added the beet greens to the roasting pan because it seemed a shame to throw them away. And had some walnuts so I tossed those in too. 

For the week's dinners, I made soup. This will come as a shock to some of you, as I have historically not been a soup eater. I still am not a broth-y soup fan, but love purees of various sorts. In this case, I made a fennel-leek soup; starting with a stock from fennel, leek greens and potatoes, combined with more fennel, sauteed with more leeks, carrots, potatoes, spinach, dill and lemon. I've been eating it with some nice bread and fennel fronds.

In addition to hanging out with friends and a great walk on Sunday afternoon, that was my weekend.

Making Tonic

21 grams of cinchona bark

Since I was 19 or so, my drink of choice has been the gin and tonic. This long-term love affair began with what I initially thought was a pretty horrible-tasting, room-temperature concoction (sorry, Tim…).  With that concoction, though, I joined my friends' summer tradition of sitting on the porch by the lake, enjoying a refreshing beverage (the taste grew on me), and then tossing our lime wedges into the woods in the hope that a lime tree might grow there next year (never mind that we were in northern Michigan…).

A few years later, I discovered that spending a bit more on gin yielded appreciably tastier results. Bombay Sapphire is my favorite, but I've done a fair bit of tasting. And I've also converted a few friends along the way (you know who you are…).

4 grams hawthorn berries

What about the tonic, though?  I mean, what is tonic?  Most people don't know. I didn't either. We all know it contains quinine, because that's usually printed on the bottle. What's quinine? I now know that it's an anti-malarial agent derived from the bark of the cinchona plant.  The word 'tonic' also connotes a primitive medicinal function that might be good for ailments, bad humors and such.

If you look at the ingredients on a bottle of mass-produced tonic, however, you'll see that it's really just sugar water with quinine and maybe some other flavors. More accurately, high-fructose corn syrup water. People (or at least I) tend to group tonic in a sort of benign category with club soda, but it really doesn't belong there.

12 grams dried bitter orange peel

That hasn't always been true, however, and recent years have seen the introduction of many micro-batch tonics that use more traditional recipes. I decided to make my own. I'd thought about this for a while, but the real inspiration came from Andrew Schloss's great homemade soda cookbook.

He points out in the book that the effort involved is nontrivial, but I was game for the challenge. First step was to track down a bunch of obscure ingredients (including cinchona bark), which required a bit of Googling. This led me to Herbie's Herbs in Toronto, a fascinating store full of things I never knew existed. Returning home, my kitchen table felt a bit like an apothecary. The ingredients I had are in the scattered photos.

18 grams blueberry leaves

These all got combined in a mini-chopper along with a cinnamon stick, a star anise and a few cloves to create a coarse powder (which may have actually been ground too fine). I then put the powder in tea baskets that I simmered in a pot of water, along with some salt and citric acid. After a bit of simmering, I added lemon grass, and zest plus juice from two limes and a lemon. This was then simmered for about an hour and added to some agave syrup.

8 grams sumac berries

Ok, lots of work. How does it taste? Well, how does it look would actually be a better first question. Unlike most tonic, mine isn't clear at all. It has the color of dark apple cider, and the consistency of a thick syrup. I suspect I could strain it with cheesecloth to remove some of this and might try that next time. The taste is extremely acidic, but delicious. I don't (yet) have a soda siphon, so I think I will add it to a bit of club soda along with gin to make a drink.  It's sufficiently citrus-y, though, that there definitely won't be a need for limes. I guess a tree isn't going to grow anyhow…  

2 grams cassia bark