The Negroni

I rarely post about drinks in this space. Truth is, until recently I hadn't a clue how to mix a good drink. My bar was "stocked" with two bottles of Kahlua, a half-empty jug of Bailey's, and the brandy and sherry I use in cooking. For a nice, hard drink, I went around the corner and plopped my derriere at a bar. So it was.

I'm pretty sure it was Jen, from Last Night's Dinner, who, in a sort of roundabout way, kickstarted my newfound intrigue in liquor and the cool things you can do with it. (I sound a little bit like I just had my 21st birthday, I know.) It's ironic, since Jen's husband, Mike, is the real drink expert. He blogs at A Dash of Bitters and writes a drink column for Serious Eats Drinks. But it was Jen who got me started. Earlier this year, Jen posted a recipe on Food52 for linguine with sardines, tomato, and fennel. That dish became one of my addictions this past winter, and I made it probably once a week. It's a beautiful recipe, in which long pasta meets melted fennel, bright tomato, briny sardines, toasted bread crumbs, and...dry vermouth.

Vermouth, I came to learn, is a fortified wine. There's sweet vermouth and dry vermouth. I've come to think that in cooking, dry vermouth is to white wine what shallots are to onions: more complex, more buttery, more exciting. I still cook with plenty of white wine, but especially in savory dishes, I turn more and more to dry vermouth.

Then there's sweet vermouth, which has about half as sweet as port and, again, fortified with various herbs and spices. I've used it in chicken dishes to impart a gentle sweetness with plenty of flavor. The stuff is really, really good.

In my urban kitchen, where we're perpetually in negotiations about the necessity of every utensil or appliance, the vermouth functioned as a new toy. It was great in food, but I wondered about its potential in, of all places, the glass.

I started playing with vermouth-based cocktails, this and this. But I have both a terrible memory and a penchant for not following recipes so well, and when those two things combine, you've got yourself a terrible mixologist. So at the end of the day, I've come to favor a cocktail that's as easy to memorize as it is to quaff: the Negroni.

A Negroni is 1 part gin, 1 part Campari, and 1 part sweet vermouth. Let's discuss: gin, you know. Campari is an apertif, a liquor infused with herbs and spices, that's notable for its bright red color and its mysterious bitterness. It's great with just soda, but it's even better when it meets gin and sweet vermouth. The result is a sweet but bracing cocktail, perfect to serve your guests before dinner. If that dinner is, say, a 4th of July barbecue, all the better. Negronis will gear everyone up for burgers and cherry pie.

Other July 4th menu ideas:Not So Potato-y SaladSingapore SlawAsian Cabbage SaladCucumber Avocado SoupJam-Filled Hand PiesMint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

The Negroni

Now, if you're a drink expert, please don't freak out about the picture at the top of this post. Negronis should be served on the rocks, I know. But you see, our normal ice trays broke, leaving us only with the ice trays meant for water bottles, which produce long, skinny ice logs that sit very awkwardly in our cocktail glasses. Left with no choice, I stirred our Negronis on plenty of ice, but poured them off into our glasses without the frozen, so we wouldn't be whacked by ice logs while sipping our drinks. So be it.

Serves 2

2 oz. gin (I used Plymouth - no need to use Hendricks or anything too fancy here) 2 oz. Campari 2 oz. sweet vermouth ice cubes

Combine ingredients in an old fashioned glass. Stir, and serve.

Zucchini and Snap Peas with Sesame Oil

In some sense, it's hard to come up with anything insightful to say about a dish containing four ingredients, one of which is salt and the other three of which are in this post's title. On the other hand, one taste had me going on and on about how simple, how delicious, it all was. It's a dish of contradictions: complex flavor from very few ingredients, a celebration of the bounty of summer with none of the fuss involved in, say, sour cherry pie.

We're talking about zucchini and snap peas, two of summer's greatest-hit vegetables. If you've seen those very small zucchini at the market and wondered what to do with them, this is the perfect recipe for showing off their shape. (If you can't find baby zucchini, regular zucchini sliced into thick coins will work just fine.) I've spent many summers sauteing zucchini coins in butter; never once did I consider ditching the butter in favor of water. (Ditching butter? Would I ever? No.) But this is an exception: when you're dealing with summer's freshest vegetables, at the peak of the season, a little salted water is all you need.

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I first had simple blanched baby zucchini at Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Theirs were blanched very briefly, kept still somewhat crunchy, then coated in sesame seeds and served just so, as a first course. Zucchini and sesame are a great match, and I echoed that pair here, but using sesame oil instead of the seeds. The blanched vegetables need little else: just some flaky salt to make the flavors really pop.

It's important to really drain the blanched vegetables well. By the time you're dressing them, you really want them completely dry, or else the oil will mix with the water and make a very diluted dressing at the bottom of the bowl. Usually I love that sort of delicious runoff, but here it's not welcome. You're looking for bone-dry vegetables, lightly coated in sesame oil and speckled with good, flaky salt. That is all. You will eat these on the porch, on a long summer evening. Or in the hot kitchen, off the platter, with your fingers. And then (I hope!) you will thank me.

Zucchini and Snap Peas with Sesame Oil

As I said in the post, you really want the vegetables to be completely dry before you dress them. Let them strain well for several minutes, and you'll be all set.

Also, two different ways to serve this dish. The first is to drizzle the sesame oil and sprinkle the salt over the vegetables. The second is to serve the vegetables unadorned on a platter, and give each of your guests a small bowl with a tablespoon or so of sesame oil and a sprinkling of salt. That way, they can grab a warm zucchini, dip it in the salted oil, and eat with their fingers. I think I actually prefer the second method, but both are great.

Serves 4 as a side dish

1 pound zucchini (if using baby zucchini, leave whole; if using large zucchini, slice into 1/2-inch coins) 1 pound snap peas 3-4 T sesame oil flaky salt

Put a pot of salted water over high heat and bring to a boil. Add zucchini to the pot and cook 1 minute. Add snap peas, cook 1 minute more, and drain. You're serving these vegetables warm, so no need to use an ice bath; instead, you just slightly undercook them, and they cook the rest of the way while cooling.

If using coins of large zucchini instead of whole baby zucchini, add them at the same time as the snowpeas, and cook just about 1 minute, maybe 10 seconds more.

Drain vegetables well, wiping with a towel if necessary. Transfer to a serving platter. Drizzle with sesame oil, enough so that when you give the platter a few shakes, all the vegetables look thinly coated. Then sprinkle some flaky salt over the whole dish. Taste one. Does it need more oil? More salt? Adjust seasoning accordingly. Serve now, or later. They're great at room temperature, too.

As I mentioned above, if you'd prefer, you can serve the vegetables plain on a platter, and put out the salted sesame oil in a bowl for dipping. I think I prefer the dish this way, but both work just great.

Sour Cherry Compote

It seems my latest attempt to test the temper of this bearable summertime weather has, gleefully, been ignored. DC persists in being comfortable. In June! No, I'm not complaining.

Instead, I'm reveling in the joy of walking down to the farmers' market on Sunday mornings after a workout, all hot and prepared to stay that way, only to encounter 80-degree breezes and precious little humidity. Sacks full of produce, I can walk home without needing the day to recover. Call it the tyranny of low expectations, but it's quite a thrill.

The nice (for summer) weather makes the bounty of East Coast produce an even greater bonus. To wit: I turned on my oven this week to make sour cherry hand pies, and guess what? No one fainted. Success. I'll have a recipe for that soon.

For now, there's this lovely compote, which you should make not next week, not tomorrow, but right now, before sour cherries vanish. It all happens so quickly, and I don't want you to miss out. The beauty of this compote is that it's a cinch to make, and it'll keep in your fridge for weeks, extending the fleeting season of my favorite summer fruit.

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You might wonder when you'll have occasion to use a compote, but trust me: if it's in your fridge, you'll suddenly find ample uses. Over scones or pancakes; alongside grilled meats; swirled into yogurt; spooned over vanilla ice cream. If those possibilities aren't sufficient, you could eat it straight from the jar. Or use it in these wonderfully sloppy sour cherry pies. Think of fruit compote as a headstart to all other desserts. Crumbles, pies, muffins, ice creams -- all of these would benefit from some compote mixed in.

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Sour Cherry Compoteadapted from Karen DeMasco's The Craft of Baking

4 cups (1 lb.) stemmed, pitted sour cherries (fresh or frozen) 3/4 cup sugar juice of 1 lime (or lemon)

Set a strainer over a metal bowl.

Combine cherries, sugar, and lime juice in a small saucepan and set over medium high heat. Cook -- watching carefully, because it will inevitably bubble over the minute you turn away -- until mixture bubbles and starts to foam, and cherries are soft, about 7 minutes. Pour mixture into strainer set over bowl; cherries will separate from syrup. Pour syrup back into sauce pan, and transfer cherries to the metal bowl.

Cook syrup over medium-low heat (you're looking for a simmer here) until reduced by half, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat and cool about 10 minutes more.

Put cherries into a glass jar, and pour syrup over cherries. Refrigerate. Compote will keep in the fridge for a few weeks, if it lasts that long.

Mint Chocolate Chip Ice Cream

DC's pulled some fast ones this summer. I keep expecting those terrible Washington heat waves, and not that we haven't had a couple -- remember the day when I ate my way through a chili cook-off in 105-degree weather? dumby -- but on balance, this city is seeming suspiciously temperate.

Still, I'm not one to press my luck. It wants to be 77 degrees out? Fine by me. And if Murphy's Law is worth anything at all, I'm crossing my fingers that making ice cream might keep the summer demons away just a little bit longer.

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Not just any ice cream, mind you. In this house, mint chocolate chip ranks right up there with mango, strawberry, and cucumber-basil as one of the most refreshing ice cream flavors there is. It's an old favorite of D's: she tends to alternate between it, oreo, and chocolate chip cookie dough. It's probably obvious if you read this blog that I'm not big on either of those other two, but D surprised me with a trip to Portland over Memorial Day weekend, and I can't let the wife-of-the-year award go to her completely uncontested. Enter homemade mint chocolate chip ice cream.

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Here's the strange thing about homemade mint chocolate chip ice cream: it tastes almost nothing like store-bought variety -- something that, even after years of replicating store-bought items at home to great success, I actually didn't anticipate. In retrospect, it makes perfect sense. The main flavor in the homemade stuff that doesn't come through in Breyer's or Haagen Dazs is a distinctly green flavor, like you chopped up fresh mint, steeped it in milk, and then made ice cream. (Oh, right. That is what I did.) The milk tastes somehow sweeter and fruitier, the chocolate not in big hunks but in dainty drizzles, resulting from the "stracciatella" technique of splattering melted chocolate into the freezing custard in thin threads. Quite frankly, it's the best mint chocolate chip ice cream I've ever had. I'm pretty sure it earned me some points - makin' a strong bid for wife of the month, at least.

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Mint Chocolate Chip Ice CreamAdapted from David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop

1 cup whole milk 1/4 cup (150 g) sugar 2 cups heavy cream pinch of salt 2 cups (80 g) lightly packed fresh mint leaves 5 large egg yolks 4 oz good bittersweet chocolate, chopped

Warm the milk, sugar, 1 cup of cream, and salt over medium-low heat. When milk mixture is warm, add mint leaves and stir into milk. Cover pan, remove from heat, and let steep about 1 hour. When this process is completed, the milk should look ever so faintly green. It's very exciting.

Strain the milk into a medium saucepan (you can strain it into a bowl and then back into the same saucepan as before), pressing hard on the mint leaves to extract as much flavor as possible. Discard mint leaves. Pour the remaining cup of cream into a fairly large bowl, and set aside.

Set the mint-infused milk over medium heat to rewarm. In a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks thoroughly. Once the milk has been rewarmed, add ladlefuls of the milk to the egg mixture to temper the eggs - work slowly to avoid scrambling the yolks. Once you've added a few ladlefuls of the milk to the eggs, pour the egg-milk mixture into the remaining warmed milk, and whisk to combine. Set over low heat. Stir constantly with heatproof spatula or wooden spoon, as mixture gradually thickens. Make sure the heat is as low as possible to avoid curdling your custard. When mixture coats the back of a wooden spoon (or spatula), it's done; remove it from the heat, and pour through a fine-mesh strainer into the bowl with the remaining cup of cream.

Freeze ice cream according to your ice cream maker's instructions.

While ice cream churns, melt chocolate in a double boiler until completely smooth.

At the very end of churning - we're talking right before you transfer your ice cream to a container - drizzle melted chocolate into ice cream maker while running, so that the chocolate distributes itself in thin threads into the ice cream. Freeze thoroughly before serving.