Posts made in July, 2012

Sweet Potato Syrup? I’m In!

Posted on Jul 31, 2012 in Botany, Featured, Recipes | Comments Off on Sweet Potato Syrup? I’m In!

Oh….this takes some work, but I have a feeling it’s well worth the effort.  From the always clever and enterprising people at CLASS Magazine comes this video on the creation of an Old-Fashioned variation made with sweet potato syrup.  You’ve got to make it ahead, so don’t leave this for the last minute–and have some friends over, because once you’ve made up a batch of the stuff, you’ll want to use it all!   (I suspect it would keep in the freezer, but invite some friends over anyway. Go here to read all about it and watch the DIY video.  (and...

Read More

Tales of the Cocktail notes

Posted on Jul 26, 2012 in Events | 2 comments

  This post will only make sense to you if you were in the talk I gave at Tales of the Cocktail called The Drunken Botanist:  A Preview. It was a sneak preview of my new book, coming out in March 2013, called The Drunken Botanist:  The Plants That Create the World’s Great Drinks.  I promised to share links to a bunch of sources, so here they are: Handbook of Alcoholic Beverages — this new two-volume set covers a wide range of research and technical information that I referenced throughout my talk. FDA DATABASES: Poisonous Plants.  (This is not a comprehensive list of...

Read More

Stop the Madness!

Posted on Jul 15, 2012 in Featured, Recipes | 5 comments

Let us review the brief and troubled history of the Modern Cocktail. It began in the early nineties, when youngsters realized that a Martini was a nice thing to order in a bar. A few variations on the martini followed, most notably the godawful “dirty Martini” made with excessive amounts of olive brine, and the vodka-based Cosmopolitan, which featured prominently in HBO’s “Sex and the City.” That gets us to about 1999. A few years later, somebody in Brooklyn decided it might be refreshing to order a drink with some whiskey in it, and pretty soon we all remembered about the Manhattan...

Read More