Bitch Kitty Racing

It’s three o’clock in the afternoon on a beautiful Fall day. I haven’t been writing as much lately, the same late-Summer blockage I get every year, as if my brain will not let me miss an ounce of sunshine; it knows that the Nine Months of Drear are nigh, and that in just four short weeks there will be only six hours of light per day, torrential rains, and an average temperature of 40 degrees F.

Gotta love Seattle.

So, for the moment I am rocking out, truly getting my dance on the The Go! Team and cooking. Yes, that’s where I’ve been these last four weeks, getting my OCD groove on in the kitchen, creating and testing and recreating old favorites, new syrups, fancy egg dishes, and going insane on French cuisine.

There is a rush of French in Seattle right now. We never had anything like “cuisine” until the 1990’s and Tom Douglas’s Asian Fusion cooking. Maybe it was the 1980’s. Point being, Fusion is now quite boring and perhaps we’re trying to catch up to the rest of the world. We’ve only been here for 150 years, and only had money enough to buy good food for the last twenty, so cut us some slack. While there has always been a French restaurant in Seattle, now there are at least ten and they have started to reproduce.

So, yes, while I am in the kitchen and missing the blue sky, I am also making parsnip puree. Yes, I know parsnips are a Winter vegetable, but I couldn’t wait. I’m also frying chicken (I’ve become obsessed with fried things lately, compliments of Alton Brown) and concocting a rosemary Martini to go with all this.

Cocktails have been long overlooked as aperitifs or social lubricant, nothing more. They actually have a range and depth which is just now beginning to be explored. While there is the candy variety designed to attract the younger drinker, there is now a movement to compliment the flavor of the base liquor with appropriate ingredients, not just slap mango in something.

Pardon me. I just had to switch the parsnips into the double boiler.

As I was saying, even apparently tasteless vodka has a definite palette (and it’s really stupid to think that vodka is tasteless. Why would they have all those tasting competitions?) to please the palate. It doesn’t need to be covered up with sugar. Enough mango, already! No more sickly sweet and syrupy cocktails designed to get Buffy the sorority girl to open her wallet wide and say, “Ahhhh!” There is no way we would ever have corn syrup, artificial colors and flavors in our food. Why in God’s name would we drink it?

Yuck!

No more cranberry unless it’s fresh. No more “schnapps” that is brighter than the neon lighting. No more fun shots designed to prove how big the drinker’s penis is. No more fake mixes, no more olefin on the fruit, no more bleach in the water, no more canned juice, no more fluorescent cherries.

And please, no more “club drinks.” I had a seemingly reasonable young man ask me for a Corona beer with grenadine syrup in it. I had another young man ask me for a Corona with a shot of lemon-flavored rum in it. The trick for both of these is to pour out a little beer and replace it with the filler. Oddly enough, both of these yahoos asked me what my strongest shot was. I told them it was 151 proof rum, and they both declined. Rum makers of the world, take note: make your strongest product taste like a Jolly Rancher and you’ll sell billions of servings.

It is possible to embrace and compliment the flavor of alcohol in a cocktail, though often times, especially with inferior product, it’s preferable to cover that flavor up. They actually sell grocery store-brand gin. I’m sure no one needs to taste that.

And enough mango already!