Tomorrow night's Booze Group dinner

[Jenise]

Tomorrow I'm hosting Booze Group, and the theme is small production local Gins. So many distilleries have popped up in the last few years! The format we've worked out over our many sessions is: tasting thru the flight (usually 4-6 contestants) with snacks, then dinner, after-dinner cocktail, then dessert.

The gins will be fun. They vary from one to 12 botanicals--and many contain things the others don't. One has huckleberry, another has grapefruit and lavender, another has almonds and seaweed, etc. None are exactly alike.

We're also celebrating the fact that in the past few weeks one couple became American citizens. To prepare the menu, as usual I sat down and made a list of things that are typical gin flavors, like lemon, lime, cucumber and tonic. Then I toured the produce department at a local grocer with this in mind in case I got inspired by something that I only rarely purchase, and I did: jicama! And I thought about making a compound butter using lime zest for steak, as I brought some California limes from a friend's tree back from California last week. Which made me think of a Chipotle rub and a whole Southwestern menu. What's more uniquely American than that?

So here's the menu:

Shrimp and cucumber ceviche
Blue corn chips
Jicama and Watermelon pickles
****
Posole slaw (wilted cabbage, hominy, radishes with cheddar cheese topping)
****
Chipotle-rubbed flank steak with lime butter melted over
Charred green beans
Black truffle and corn tamales
****
Apple-tini tart with gin crust
Blackberry negronis

This salad has, btw, never existed before. It only occurred to me yesterday as I was thinking about all the add-in toppings typical of the posoles I had in New Mexico. And I love wilted cabbage slaw, so all that would actually go together as a warm salad!

The apple-tini tart is my own invention too, using gin to soften the crust in place of vodka in that popular treatment.

[Jenise]

So my guest list just went from 8 to 6. One couple just tested positive for Covid. It's my brother and his husband, in fact; my brother flew back from San Francisco on Wednesday. That's his third or fourth trip there in the last six-seven months, and each time he's said it would be his last until Covid blows over. Then he forgets....

Won't this time.

How about a cucumber ice cream served in brandy snifters, each one dosed with a shot of a different gin?

[Jenise]

I actually briefly considered a cucumber sorbet.

That gin with just one botanical--I assume it's juniper? Or are you counting things in addition to juniper?

-Paul W.

[Jenise]

Yes and yes, Paul. But of course, not just any juniper, from Bend Oregon that one uses juniper "hand-picked in the wild Oregon high desert"!!! Or so they say.

Btw, came home with two more jars of Lan Chi. The friends we met in CA are my Lan Chi connection.

[Jenise]

The dinner was a hit. Standouts were the posole salad and the tamale. My guests had never had anything like either one.

The charred green beans were only just okay. The prep was great (blanched then tossed with sesame oil and roasted at high heat for ten minutes) but the beans themselves were awful. I'll never ever ever again buy pre-packaged green beans (there were no 'loose' candidates in either of the two places I shopped).

The dinner was a hit. Standouts were the posole salad and the tamale. My guests had never had anything like either one.

The charred green beans were only just okay. The prep was great (blanched then tossed with sesame oil and roasted at high heat for ten minutes) but the beans themselves were awful. I'll never ever ever again buy pre-packaged green beans (there were no 'loose' candidates in either of the two places I shopped).

Same thing happened to me Jenise, this week I could not find straight, unbruised green beans, so bought a package of Haricot Vert in a package, not realizing that they were packaged to steam. They were well within the due date but when I got home, many of them were already turning.. I cooked the ones that were decent and they tasted terrible. A waste of good olive oil, butter and fresh tarragon.

Jenise, glad to hear you found a Lan Chi source.

-Paul W.