The Alcoholian

Posted by maksim.

I have recently read a diet and health article on BBC News. My diet is actually quite in line with that article, but I still started to look into extra ways to introduce more broccoli into my diet. Now, Whole Foods has this prepared salad they call “Broccoli Crunch” that both my girlfriend and I like very much, but at $9 dollars a pound it really bites. So, I decided to reverse engineer their recipe and tweak it a little bit. E.g., theirs has bacon in it. I really don’t need no stinking bacon in my salad, y’know.

So, here is my open source “Broccoli Crunch” recipe. I’m really glad there is no patents on food recipes. If the food industry was like the software industry, I would be in jail within minutes of publication of this blog post. It’s not the first time I reverse engineer an expensive restaurant’s recipe, y’know.

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Posted by maksim.

Some of them are more equal than others.

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Posted by maksim.

Over the past weekend Wendy very much enjoyed my chocolate martini, so here is the recipe just like I made them that night.

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Posted by johngl

Since my trip to Alaska about six weeks ago, I haven’t done any salmon dishes, probably due to salmon overload. However, the other day, we found some beautiful sockeye salmon fillets that I just couldn’t resist.

Adding a saffron-infused cream sauce didn’t hurt either.

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Posted by johngl

We had a service outage this morning that lasted several hours. My thanks to Max for getting the network guys working on the problem. We apologize if this inconvenienced you, our readers, in any way.

Posted by johngl

Charlie Hills, renowned author of Why Your Last Diet Failed You and fellow food blogger on the recently-launched Lord of the Onion Rings demonstrates the proper way to make…Onion Rings (what else!).

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Posted by maksim.

What I was shooting for is that recipe of bubbly and brandy that John posted a few days ago. Rosé “Champagne” Cocktail.

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Posted by maksim.

My food and drink philosophy differs greatly from that of John. I don’t live to cook or make drinks. I cook and make drinks to enjoy my life better. I enjoy good food, but I would not spend a weekend making that perfect dish. Same for drinks. I hate getting cocktails in bars because to get a good one you’d have to pay through the nose and even then you never know what you gonna get.

I make cocktails at home because I know I can make a good one. I still have a strong preference for the cocktails I can make quickly, cheaply, and with minimal hassle. I like mojitos. But getting mint is pain and it’s not always available. And it does not store too well in the fridge. Besides, lately I have been discovering mojitos taste to diluted for me now.

I like caipirinha, but this one is too strong and I really see no point in buying cachaça just for this one drink, when I have 9 bottles of rum at home that needs using. So, I set out to explore a simple rum based drink that does not need mint.

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Posted by maksim.

It’s a couple of days until 4th of July and as a proud patriot I’m getting ready to celebrate in style.

But what would you drink in humid Central Texas heat on 4th of July? Margarita, of course!

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Posted by johngl

On a post wedding whim the bride, groom, some friends, and I decided to hit Truluck’s near the Arboretum for a honeymoon sendoff. At the time, it seemed innocent enough.

We arrived on a Friday at just after 5pm and the bar was already hopping. The six of us were seated in the middle of restaurant. Since I was at the wedding snapping photos, I brought in my camera on the off chance that I might turn this visit into a viable post. Apparently, that thought was not in vain.

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Posted by johngl

I had such great success with the sea scallops in an earlier post, Sumptuous Sea Scallops, thanks mostly to the most glorious one’s suggestion of using Cointreau as a component of the marinade, that I gave it another whirl as a full-fledged magarita by adding tequila to a cream sauce.

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Posted by johngl

Oftentimes, people ask me why we call the site the Alcoholian when we mostly talk about food.  But if you really think about it, a lot of my recipes and techniques involve alcoholic beverages.  Even my recent posts on scallops and tuna involved Cointreau  and Sake, respectively.  Most of my sauces include some kind of wine or another.  A lot of my marinades involve using Cognac.

Perhaps this post will keep you off my case for a while; it’s a spin off of a classic Champagne Cocktail popularized w-a-ay back in the mid 19th century.  This was about a hundred and fifty years ago (for those that are chronologically impaired).

Back then, it was a hunk of sugar, a splash of bitters and the remainder, your favorite bubbly.  It was all the rage at formal gatherings and soirees in the genteel “high” society (there was a reason they called it that).

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Posted by johngl

I’ve talked about dry-aging beef before, but mostly that related to steaks of one form or another.  This time, I am talking about a hunk-o-meat big enough to feed a party of sixteen.

Start with a well-marbled piece of choice grade meat:

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Posted by johngl

You may have noticed that I have been a bit preoccupied lately. I didn’t do my normal two posts last weekend and I didn’t do my normal Saturday Morning Post (pun intended) this morning. Well, here is the story…

But first, pan seared tuna:

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Posted by johngl

Some might call it ice cream, but make no mistake, this is wa-a-a-y different than anything you can find at the grocery store. It is iced cream, that is for sure. You won’t find any milk or other substitutes in this stuff. The ingredients are simple: heavy cream, eggs, sugar, and vanilla. Let’s get to it.

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