A few weeks back we asked you to tell us what seasonally and locally inspired cocktails you’re drinking now, with the idea that the reader with the best answer would score two tickets to our winter Good Spirits, the next in a series of seasonal cocktail parties we host in tandem with Edible Manhattan. As usual your answers put our own drinking habits to shame.
Recipes
Thanksgiving has come and gone, but many of you will be looking for ways to cook the bird, bake the pies, and libate the guests in just another month. Here’s a re-cap of some of the awesome advice that chef Alfred Portale of Gotham Bar and Grill gave during our Thanksgiving-themed Q & A last Tuesday right on our Facebook page.
You might recall that way back in April–when Spring foods were just beginning to appear–we…
Deprivation. That is what eating seasonally means. It means that in high summer you do not eat an apple. You walk right on by that crackling green Granny Smith that lurks year round in the grocery store bins. Because it didn’t come from around here. It means that in January you do not buy those stackable plastic boxes of raspberries (sometimes I cheat; I do), and it means that tomatoes are not the pink slices in silly salads or the vine-grown California ones in February, but the ripe, fat, sweet and bursting Brandywines of August.
In case you missed last week’s Edible episode on NY1–it’s on the spiked Scandinavian winter warmer called glögg–we wanted to point your attention both to the television segment (which you can find here online) as well as the Edible Manhattan article that inspired it, which includes the recipe for the drink, a heady, dangerously drinkable blend of sweet red wine heated up with a spike of citrus and some gingerbready spicing. We procured it from Morten Sohlberg—the Norwegian-born CEO of Smörgas Chef’ Restaurant Group, which runs three Smörgas Chef’ restaurants in Manhattan, including the one inside the Scandinavia House cultural center where we shot the piece for NY1.
You could drink this creamy, caramel-coated toddy from Dream barman William Ward all afternoon.
For a Nordic restaurateur, this glögg is almost as good as going home for the holidays
Working directly with networks of local foragers from Italy, France, Croatia and Spain, they seek out the best of the best, bringing in fourteen tons of truffles annually
We like to pride ourselves on using up every bit of a plant, gobbling up everything to young radish leaves, to pickled Swiss chard stems (a tip we learned from Michael Anthony at Gramercy Tavern) to the fresh roots of green garlic (that one was from Shea Gallante, of Ciano). But until we went with NY1 to The Bronx to visit Toby Adams, the manager of the 1.5-acre Ruth Rae Howell Family Garden at the New York Botanical Garden, we didn’t know that you could actually eat the tops of carrots.
When we travel, we’re often oblivious to the best place-based tastes, right under our noses.
I take back everything I said about needing to involve kids in garden and kitchen chores.…
By mid-July all us locavorically minded drinkers should be guzzling Jersey peach and blueberry sangria…
