The Modern's Kina

The last time Mike and I were in New York it was sort of for my birthday but also to see The Clock at MoMA, possibly my favorite museum on the planet. The line had a four-hour wait, but I managed to make friends with the girl in front of us. I held her place while she went to buy a book, and she held our place while we had lunch. By the time we got back in line, we only had five more minutes to wait.

At lunch, I had a truly fantastic cocktail in MoMA's high end bar, The Modern. I was thrilled to find that the recipe had been printed online, and though the ingredients are a little hard to find, it's worth the search.

The Modern's Kina

Ingredients

• 1 1/2 ounces gin
• 1 1/2 ounces Dolin Blanc Vermouth
• 1 1/2 ounces Cocchi Americano
• Dash fino sherry
• Garnish: Lemon twist

Fill a mixing glass with ice. Add gin, vermouth, Cocchi Americano, and sherry. Stir until well chilled. Strain into a cocktail glass, garnish with lemon twist, and serve.

New cocktail Wednesdays: British Bulldog

I've gone about a year or two straying from my first love, bourbon, to my new BFF, the martini. I make the best martini ever, really. I'll share my recipe at some point.

But my repertoire has narrowed significantly, so I decided to institute New Cocktail Wednesdays. This week's experiment is the British Bulldog, a riff on the "most expensive cocktail ever" recently in the news, which sells for $12,916 per cocktail.

From Eatocracy:

Winston (approximated)

• 2 ounces 1858 Croizet Cognac Cuvée Léonie ($156,760 per bottle, at least when last found at auction; Churchill and Eisenhower allegedly drank this Cognac while planning D-Day, hence the cocktail’s name)

• 2/3 ounce Grand Marnier Quintessence ($800 a bottle)

• 2/3 ounce Chartreuse V.E.P. Yellow ($150 or so)

• 1 dash Angostura bitters

Stir with ice, serve to billionaire.
Cost per cocktail: $12,916.
The bargain version I’m going to christen the British Bulldog (with apologies to Mr. Heffernan, whom I’m sure is actually one heck of a bartender):

• 2 ounces VSOP Cognac, your choice ($40, give or take)

• 2/3 ounce Grand Marnier ($35)

• 1/3 ounce green Chartreuse (much easier to find than the yellow, stronger, not as sweet and about $60)

• 1 dash Angostura bitters

Stir with ice in regular ol’ cocktail shaker with a chopstick, serve to anyone who looks thirsty.
Cost per cocktail: $4.80.
You know what? It ain’t half bad, though a little on the sweet side. Plus, you can have 2,690 British Bulldogs for the price of a single Winston. That’s what I call value.

I agree, it's too sweet for my tastes, but it's not horrible. I substituted Armagnac for the Cognac, but otherwise it was the same. Mike may have liked it better than I, but he still switched to Negronis after the British Bulldog.

Letters to Santa

We're all looking forward to tomorrow. Thea may still be awake, and Liam will no doubt be up before dawn.

The kids made dinner

I've been trying to get Thea and Liam into making dinner once a week. Tonight the kids made a super easy chicken parmigiana (sort of) that turned out well. This was Liam's first time making dinner, he wanted me to be sure to note, though Thea has made lasagna before and is getting pretty good at chopping. Here's what they did (with supervision):

Step 1: Bake some chicken tenders (10-15 minutes at 425 degrees).

Step 2: While the chicken is baking, warm up tomato sauce on the stove-top and add spices. (We added onion powder, thyme, oregano, basil, salt, and sugar.)

Step 3: Take the chicken out and put it in a casserole dish. (Liam did this part and arranged the chicken as if her were a professional, one layer down and then the next layer overlapping on top just a little in a perfect pattern.) Put some tomato sauce on the chicken, then put a bunch of shredded cheese on top.

Step 4: Put it back in the oven and bake until the cheese is brown and bubbly. An important lesson in baking: ignore the time for the most part and open the oven door only when your food smells done. Pull it out of the oven only when it looks done.

That's it! The kids were proud of the results and thrilled that it was my turn to set the table.

Action shot of eating!

I forgot to take a picture before dinner was served, but as you can see, it looks pretty good!

Lulabelle is jealous of the kids' big box

The dishwasher died (maybe) right before Thanksgiving, and it's taken forever to get a replacement. I finally had a new one installed yesterday, but it still didn't work. The installer said it may have been a bad breaker, though replacing the faulty one still didn't provide power to the dishwasher. So Mike fiddled around with some wires and, voila, working dishwasher! Though we may not have needed a new dishwasher after all, the kids are having fun with the box it came in.

That Mike is quite handy. Since moving in a few months ago, he's installed two overhead lights and a garbage disposal, fixed the dishwasher (twice), and solved the leaky roof problem.

UPDATE: How could I forget, he also refinished all the floors on the first floor and repainted the den and living room, including the living room ceiling!

First-world threats

My neighbor Saira, Mike, and I are coming down hard on all five of our kids. "If you don't finish your homework and clean the living room," we yell, "no soufflés for any of you!" O_o

Puma and I are worn out

I fell asleep pretty much right after dinner. There's much I could say -- that Thea made dinner or that, despite my efforts not to give my son a name so popular he'll be one of dozens of Liams in his life, his name is #1 for baby boys this year -- but instead I plan to be awake only long enough to close out the month of posting without having to back date the last post.

Aaaaand scene.

The kids made swans out of their Chipotle leftovers

So classy. No one does that any more. In fact, how did they know of it?

Nerd fight!!

I found this drawing on the chalkboard by Thea. Cute!

Hank hiding after Sunday dinner

The kids aren't allowed in the grownups' room. Is that why Hank was here?