It's Bubbly Time, and Say Hello to My Little Friend
The cleaver I never knew I needed, and a couple of sparklers for New Year's Eve
Happy New Year’s Eve Eve Eve
Another beautiful sunrise snuck in before the morning cloud cover arrived. Incredibly, exactly a week after a fierce cold wave settled over Chicago, we have a forecast high temperature in the 50s. If there’s not already a sportsbook for Chicago weather, there should be.
Read on for a couple of sparkling cocktails you might enjoy for your New Year’s Eve festivities (or your New Year’s Day Sunday brunch)… and an introduction to my new kitchen friend.
My Favorite Bourbon Bubbler (and You Can Mix Things Up)
Bourbon has been my go-to liquor for a long time. So when I saw a recipe for the Seelbach cocktail in the New York Times many years ago (like I was still living in D.C.), I gave it a try — and found my favorite spirits-sparkling wine drink.
The Seelbach is named for the hotel bar — in Louisville, Kentucky, not surprisingly — where it was invented. The photo above shows the result of the basic recipe, which is simplicity itself: 1 ounce of bourbon, 1/2 ounce of triple sec, 7 dashes each of Angostura and Peychaud’s bitters (the Peychaud’s gives it that pretty pinkish color), topped with sparkling wine (I used prosecco) in a champagne flute.
As good as the original is, the recipe also lends itself to your own creativity. For me, bourbon and bubbly are the fixed ingredients, but I’ve played plenty with the triple sec and bitters.
The drink above is an example, which I guess I’ll call a Mich-tucky Cider Sparkler. I replaced the triple sec with apple cider from Ellis Family Farms (Benton Harbor, Michigan), and replaced the Peychaud’s bitters with cherry bitters. Quite nice.
Hot tip: Unless you have serious money to burn — in which case I’m available as your personal chef — this is not the place to break out the Dom Perignon and Pappy’s. A nice everyday bourbon and sparkling wine will do fine.
Say Hello to My New Little Friend
Since you’re into food, you’ve probably purchased a new kitchen implement that you’d never seriously considered before, and immediately kicked yourself for not thinking of it earlier.
My latest example is the cleaver in the photo above. I’ve gotten by quite well enough with my mighty chef’s knife throughout my adult life. But when I attended cooking demos with Sebastian White — the founder of The Evolved Network nonprofit — I saw how the cleaver he used made short work of chores that would otherwise have required a lot of elbow grease.
The one I bought is under the Mueller brand, and it’s highly rated even while it is shockingly inexpensive. I test drove it last night on a beef chuck roast — received in my first home delivery order from 99 Counties, about which I wrote recently — and the cleaver sliced through that chuck roast — a relatively tough braising cut — like butter. Mind seriously boggled.
My object was to make this beef stew from Mark Bittman’s revised How to Cook Everything (a November birthday gift from Barb). It is not only the best beef stew I’ve ever made — helped along by that gorgeous pasture-raised chuck roast, local potatoes and carrots, and homemade broth — but quite possibly the best I’ve ever eaten.
The necessary caveat is that the cleaver blade is very, very, very, very sharp, so appropriate care must be taken in handling. But that long handle and the smoothness with which it cuts greatly reduces the chances of accidents.