Cocktails At The Burn Pit

 

Where have we been??  The summer has been a bummer here in Lucindaville.  Most of July was spent without electricity or telephone service.  A surge in the electricity fried the stove.   There was a plumbing problem.  My phone was out so much my phone bill was just under $3.  The phone company wanted ANOTHER phone number to reach me.  Seriously, if I had another phone that worked, I wouldn't be calling frantically.  If I had cell phone service I wouldn't need this crappy land line.

We are spending 720 million dollars a DAY in Iraq and Afghanistan, countries most people in Congress couldn't find on a blank map!  Maybe if we had a weeks worth of that funding we could get reliable phone service and electricity to WEST VIRGINA!   But I digress...



 During these travails, my friend Ann, who had to postpone her trip to visit, merely delayed it and decided that misery would love company.  She ventured out not knowing what she might find or NOT find, but she came prepared with tequila which needs neither a stove nor electricity.

By the time she arrived, the refrigerator was working and she stocked it Simply Limeade and the cocktail making ensued.  Ann developed a classic down and dirty margarita.  She was aided by glasses that had been in my family for a hundred years.  I checked and they hold 10 ounces.   So the next time your electricity goes off, of you lose phone service, of your stove blows, or frankly, you just need a drink without much thought, give this margarita a try.  Our  orange liquor of choice is Grand Gala.  It is inexpensive and had a bite.  It often gets criticised for its bite, but I love that in a margarita.

Ann's We Don't Have Electricity But We Have Tequila Margarita

2 ounces of tequila
1 ounce orange liquor
Simply Limeade


Measure 2 ounces of tequila and 1 ounce of orange liquor in a 10 ounce glass.  Fill with cold Simply Limeade.

It makes me happy just thinking about it...

Downton Abbey Alert

It will be a full four months before the third season of Downton Abbey, but that cannot stop die-hard fans.  Over at Vulture, they have a fan made trailer (spoiled by a thirty second commercial for a video game with fighting aliens, which is a perfect mesh for Abbey fans who want nothing more than to don Edwardian garb, make high tea, and shoot aliens from their Xbox... but I digress...) featuring the arrival of Shirley MacLaine and a bit of fan laughter in the middle.  Still it is a glimpse of Downton to come...

Happy 100th, Julia

 

Today would have been Julia Child's 100th birthday.  I joined several thousand of her closest friends in wishing her a happy 90th birthday.

PBS has put together Julia video featuring Guns 'n Roses

Then there is this particular favorite featuring Meryl Streep and Julia Child head to head.

Enjoy.

Girls and Guns

Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway

 Our recent post about Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn brought to mind the above photo.  We thought it was time for another installment of Girls and Guns.

Slim Keith

Marlene Dietrich

Carole Lombard

Helen Mirren

Requiescat in Pace - Marion Cunningham

 

Legendary home cooking advocate, Marion Cunningham, died yesterday at age 90.  Read our review of The Breakfast Book and tributes at Cookbook Of The Day.

Dreaming In French

While suffering trough the loss of no Law & Order during the derecho, I found a lot of time to read.  Do you ever get a book and just keep it a while because you know when you read it it will be over and you don't want that moment to come?  That is the way I felt when I got Alice Kaplan's Dreaming in French.

First and foremost, I am a devoted Francophile.  I love group biographies.  I have read extensively on the three women in Dreaming in French:  Jacqueline Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis.  The book looks a specific period in time in the development of each of these women, a time when they were still in college and sought adventure, refuge, and intellectual curiosity abroad, specifically in France.  The experience change each of them and molded their future endeavors.

Alice Kaplan teaches French at Yale.  She teaches young women as sophomores.  She watches them head off on their own junior year abroad.  More importantly, she sees them return as seniors.  She sees a change and was motivated to look at iconic women of the twentieth century and write about the effects on their individual lives.

The book begins with Jacqueline Bouvier who spent her junior year in Paris in the 1940's.  The war had ended, but life was not easy.  Bouiver claimed her French heritage with a passion.

Susan Sontag in center

Susan Sontag went to Paris in 1950's.  It was not her junior year abroad.  She was 24 years old and already a wife and mother to a five year old, neither of whom made the trip with her.  Her to-do list included a note to remember to shower... every other day.

Angela Davis on right

In the 1960's Angela Davis was the only African-American student in Hamilton University's junior year abroad.  She had attended a segregated school in Birmingham.  While in Paris, the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed and four girls were killed. 


The book is a wonderful journey through the lives of three very different women and of the twentieth century as it unfolded in history.

Jacqueline Kennedy found in Paris a refuge from broken home and war-weary world.  She infused the nation with a hint of Parisian charm.

Susan Sontag thrived in the intellectual and sexual freedom of Paris, becoming an influential intellectual.  Two words not often found in tandem in America.

Angela Davis found a freedom in France that she was not offered in America.  She set out to change that by any means necessary.


The stories in this book are not merely a rehashing gleaned from other biographies, but a new and fresh insight on three of the most interesting women of the last 50 years.  Read it immediately... even if you have electricity.

Derecho!

 We got derechoed!

First -- everyone is OK.   But what a mess!

 Four large trees were taken out and blocked the bridge so we couldn't get off the property.

Two days later another large tree was felled at the gate and ...we couldn't get off the property.


Company was coming and the refrigerator was full... the freezer is ALWAYS full.  We lost power for four days as the temperature climbed to 104.  No lights, no water, no AC, no TV, no phone just the faint sounds of cats panting. 

Much of West Virginia went another 5 days without power and some still don't have any.  There are still parts of Shirley without phone service and we have been driving over the downed phone line.

We are still in recovery mode, but we will be back up to speed, soon.

How to be a Movie Producer...

...without even trying.


Have you ever wanted to be a movie producer but life got in your way?

Maybe you don't live in New York City or L.A.  (Los Angeles, not Lower Alabama.)

Maybe you don't have 50 million or 50 hundred. (But you do have $5 tucked into your pocket.)

Well do not despair.  Add that movie producer credit to your bucket list and head over to Kickstarter.

As you know, Kickstarter is a place where small projects can get big funding from some rich folks and poor folks like you (or me).  The Winding Stream got the money for their initial filming from Kickstarter and now they are working on the post-production.  (Truth is, they have accomplished their goal and their fundraising technically ends today.)


The Winding Stream is Beth Harrington's detailed documentary about the Carter Family.  While most of the general population knows the Carter Family because of Johnny Cash.  If it hadn't been for the Carter Family, Johnny Cash might have slipped into obscurity and much of the music we hear every day would be sadly lacking without the original inspiration from Maybelle, Sara and A.P. Carter.    Please take look at the preview of MY film...

Now head over to Kickstarter and find a project that you can be a part of.

Famous Food Friday -- Ernest Hemingway

A week or so back, my cable inadvertently turned on HBO and I taped a few things before they cut the feed.   One was  Hemingway & Gellhorn.  I love Clive Owen, but I can't say that I have ever been a big fan of Nicole Kidman.  When the movie started, I was pleasantly surprised that I like Kidman as the elderly Gellhorn.   

Clive Owen played Hemingway in the irascible, horrible, pain-in-the-ass way that one expects he might have been, but frankly Clive Owen is no Hemingway.   Every time someone called him "Papa" it made me laugh.  Hemingway at his most filthy and uncouth still managed to get the girl, which I find interesting if not a bit odd.  Clive Owen covered in sewage would always get the girl.   On of the producers of this film was James Gandolfini.  Gandolfini would have been a great "Papa" so why do they always cast the pretty boy?   Kidman spent a lot of her time throwing her rucksack across her shoulder.  It seemed to make kidman uncomfortable, as this was probably the first time on 30 years that she ever carried her own luggage.  I think Philip Kaufman is a great director and Henry & June is one of my favorite movies.  It is too bad that Kaufmann didn't cast Hemingway and Gellhorn with the same quirkiness he used in Henry  & June.  It might have been greatly improved.

There is a good bit of food in Hemingway's writing and historian Craig Boreth compiled many of those recipes in The Hemingway Cookbook.   Long out of print and quite collectible, the book is getting a second shot this year when it is republished and launched again.

During one scene in the Hemingway & Gellhorn  the couple is in the famous El Floridita.  

Hemingway at El Floridita with his arm around Spencer Tracy and his back to wife number four, Mary.

There Hemingway makes his favorite drink, the Papa Doble.  This recipe is based upon the Daiquirí recipe from El Floridita that Hemingway drinks with A. E. Hotchner in his book Papa Hemingway.

Papa Doble or Hemingway Daiquirí

2 1/1 jiggers Bacardi or Havana Club rum

Juice of 2 limes

Juice of 1/2 grapefruit

6 drops of maraschino (cherry brandy)

Fill a blender one-quarter full of ice, preferably shaved or cracked. Add the rum, lime juice, grapefruit juice and maraschino.

Blend on high until the mixture turns cloudy and light-colored, "like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots."  (Islands in the Stream, p. 281).

Here is another example of Boreth pulling a recipe from fact and fiction.

"Aboard the Pilar, Ernest's beloved fishing boat, food took on epic
proportions. Even something as simple as a peanut butter and onion
sandwich, his lunchtime favorite, can be elevated to heroic status while at
sea:

     "Well, go down to the galley and see if that bottle of tea is cold and bring
it up. Antonio's butchering the fish, go make a sandwich will you, please?"
     "Sure. What kind of sandwich?"
     "Peanut butter and onion if there's plenty of onion."
     "Peanut butter and onion it is, sir."
     He handed a sandwich, wrapped in a paper towel segment, to Thomas Hudson and
said, "One of the highest points in the sandwich-maker's art. We call it
the Mount Everest Special. For Commanders only." (From Islands in the Stream, p. 390-1).

A.E. Hotchner, in his biography, Papa Hemingway, notes that this sandwich,
along with a glass of red wine, was Hemingway's favorite (Papa Hemingway, p. 194)."

Mount Everest special 

2 slices white bread
Peanut butter
2 thick slices onion

Spread one piece of bread thickly with peanut butter. Lay onion slices on
top. Cover with second slice of bread.

Clearly, there must have been something magical about Hemingway.  Name the last dirty guy, covered in fish scales and reeking of peanut butter and onions that you would take home to mama?

 UPDATE:

For those of you who don't like trolling comments, The Ancient pointed out that while living with and married to Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway was kind of a babe.   We do love blogging as our horizons are always broadened.   Perhaps we did have a bit of Hemingway bias, but remember, peanut butter, onions, fish guts... not to mention he will steal your job...

 

 

Fancy Food

We spent the early part of this week at the Fancy Food Show in D.C.  Acres and acres of new and familiar products.  My friend, Anne, and I make this a yearly ritual.  This year there was a lot of dried okra -- a great way to eat okra without the slime.  There were also many bottled shrubs, fruit drinks with a kick of vinegar which I usually have to make by hand, so it was nice to see them already bottled for me.

There were several folks in attendance who we have written about at Cookbook Of The Day.

Jeni, from Jeni's Splendid Ice Cram was there with splendid ice cream.   We just love ice cream books almost as much as we like ice cream and Jeni's is a favorite.   Check out our review of her book here.  To find out what makes Jeni really special, take a look at this video of Jeni describing her ice cream.  Anyone who is inspired to make ice cream by reading Edna St. Vincent Millay is someone we want to party with.




  

Another favorite book of ours is Wild Table.  Connie Green and Sarah Scott introduced a new line of foraged products including a great fennel pollen.  Their elderberry shrub was a prize winner.  Check out their products and foraged items at Wine Forest.

The guys at Brooklyn Brew Shop were busy making beer.  I made beer in a D.C. apartment, once.  It took up most of the kitchen and all of the linen closet.  Brooklyn Brew Shop shrunk the process down into a gallon fermenter and the rest...as they say, is history.   So grab a kit and brew beer in your Airstream if need be.

And their shirts were cool, too.


Ah, so much food, so little time.   I am spending the next few days soothing my blistered feet!