Lilac liqueur

As you might or might not recall, I left the lilac blossoms to macerate for a couple days more than planned, and wound up with a jar of, er, vegetal flavors that did not necessarily complement the lilac. Sitting on the shelf for 4 months has not made the magic happen with this. It tastes okay if you combine it with a little bit of sparkling water – a nice floral lilac flavor definitely comes through – but there are some vegetal off-notes that just won’t go away.

Next year, I will either be very careful to strain out the lilac within 24 hours, or just stick to a simple syrup. I never figured out a good cocktail for the lilac syrup but I adored the heck out of it mixed with soda water and a dash of rhubarb bitters.

Nocino

I strained and filtered the nocino in early September. It’s on the shelf and won’t be ready until next spring.

Pineappleweed liqueur

This one started with about a cup of pineappleweed blossoms in a pint jar with 2 sprigs of lemon balm and a cup of sugar, filled to the top with vodka, for a week.

This has been the smash hit of my liqueur season. It’s an interesting substitute for St. Germain or other floral liqueurs in any number of cocktails, and with a bit of allspice dram and/or lemon juice it makes a deeply comforting hot toddy.

Oregon-grape Gin

I filled a quart mason jar about 1/2 full of oregon grapes, plus a handful of sour cherries and early season blackberries and maybe a couple of cloves, a cup or two of sugar, and filled it up with London dry gin (I used Beefeater – in general you want something that is good enough to drink on its own, but isn’t too fancy. And the juniper-forward quality of a London dry style gin is much more suited to cutting through the flavor of the oregon grapes than the smooth botanical ensembles coming out of American craft distilleries).

It’s a matter of taste – my stalwart tasting assistants think it is oddly bitter, and too sweet, respectively, but I love it. It makes an excellent substitute in any cocktail recipes calling for sloe gin, with much more complexity to it than the purple treacles you can buy at the liquor store.

Lavendercello

The random variety of lavender that I picked up at a nursery a few years ago isn’t necessarily the most-preferred culinary or liqueur-making variety, but it’s good enough. I let the lavender blossoms macerate for about a week with maybe half a cup of sugar, and the end result mixes about like similar commercial products.

Bitters!

I went to my local crazy herb shop last weekend and bought a few different bittering herbs: Gentian, cinchona bark, and quassia. Plus some impulse purchases. Plus the last of the dandelion roots I dug up and roasted 2 summers ago. Plus I picked some rowan berries (I gave them an overnight in my freezer to emulate a frost, and did the heat treatement described here, which made the berries a little less sour but didn’t seem to have much effect on the weird bitter notes – which is precisely what I want out of an ingredient in cocktail bitters).

I’m about to place an order for a case of little eyedropper bottles and will spend some quality time in a week or three filling them with different bitters blends.

This may or may not qualify as “getting out of hand”.

Not Alcohol

While I’m full of updates: I did get some money plant seeds, and made a mustard with them. It was yucky. So much for that idea! I’ll keep eating money plant flowers and leave the rest of the plant alone (unless I find an excuse to wrap something in a giant flavorful leaf while cooking).

Last year I did two batches of nocino, one using black walnuts and a smaller one with English walnuts; this year, I only found enough nuts to produce one combined batch. Since my favorite last year kept switching back and forth as the liqueurs evolved, I’m hoping that I’ll get a nice blend of flavors.

To make up for the relative paucity of walnuts, I added a couple of fragrant leaves from the black walnut tree. I might take those out of the jar sooner than the traditional 40-day infusion the baby walnuts will be getting; since they are thin, they shouldn’t need as much time and might start to contribute less-soluble more-yucky constituents that aren’t present in the nuts and husks. Then again, I might forget, and leave the leaves in the whole time. We’ll see.

In a 1 quart jar, I put:

• 8 English walnuts (quartered)
• 14 black walnuts (halved – they are smaller)
• 2 black walnut leaves
• 6 allspice berries
• 3 cardamom pods
• 1 cup sugar*
• Cheap vodka that I ran through a Brita filter*

Tradition says that you can start drinking this at Christmas (or, accounting for the fact that Seattle’s walnut-ripening schedule is delayed relative to Italy’s, on National Pie Day) but tradition is wrong. I’m still figuring out how to tell when a liqueur needs more time on the shelf, and when it is at or past its prime, but the last bits of both of last year’s batches were so much amazingly better than the initial taste I had in January (and the subsequent tastes I had in February, March, and April…) that I’m not even gonna open this one until May.

*I was planning to do 2 cups of sugar, but I put the vodka in first, and then didn’t want to waste it by sloshing it all over the top of the jar… sugar can help pull flavor into an infusion (something something osmotic pressure something) but it can also be added at bottling time.

Thinking I was clever, I put the dried, split pods in a paper bag, shook them up, and then smashed them up a bit. Then I went outside to try to winnow the seeds from the pods.

If Sisyphus and Maxwell’s Daemon had a love child, that child’s chore would be to winnow money plant seeds from their dried and smashed-up pods. I tried every technique I could think of – or rather, since it was raining, I tried every technique I could think of that would work underneath the covered part of my back deck – but either the seeds would bounce into the chaff bowl, or the chaff would fall into the seed bowl, or both. Usually both.

Since money plant is an aggressive weed I didn’t want to put too many seeds into my compost. I was reduced to picking them out by hand. Maybe winnowing is always this inefficient and I just have unrealistic expectations, maybe I was doing it wrong, or maybe the flattened money plant seeds are just unusually good at hiding behind their chaffy friends. Whatever, lesson learned: On the next batch I will refrain from shaking and especially from smashing the pods, and just split them one by one over a bowl.

The seeds by themselves have a mustardy-horseradishy pungency when fresh; after drying they taste bitter. If I hadn’t read about how making conventional mustard involves soaking the seeds in cold water in order to activate the enzymes that turn a bitter flavor into a pungent one, I’d be discouraged – but I refuse to be discouraged. I sank about two too many hours into these seeds to believe that the resulting condiment will be anything but amazingly delicious. Besides, I just ate some yellow mustard seeds for comparison (the sacrifices we make for knowledge!), and they are much more pungent but the bitter flavor is very similar.

The winnowing was enough work for one day. I’ll save the mustard-making for later.

So when I found three trees near the ground, I was in the perfect frame of mind to heedlessly stuff two grocery bags full of flowers, not entirely realizing what I’d done until I got home. If you don’t count the parts where I was jumping off a windowsill trying to pull down a particularly flower-laden branch in a back alley, the picking went very quickly. After the flowers were washed and fluffed dry, the large bowl, the giant bowl, the stockpot, and the popcorn bowl were all overflowing. Ohshit.

Over the course of the weekend I’ve gotten it down to just the giant bowl. We’ve been grabbing handfuls of the flowers to nom as we walk through the dining room (for those of you keeping track, that is Way #1) and eating them in various ways for lunch and dinner; we also managed to offload quite a few at a potluck.

As far as I’m concerned, black locust blossoms are a functional equivalent to peas, and *not* the same thing as rose petals or lilacs. Though I am grateful to The Three Foragers for their timely black locust flower post, I don’t quite understand what drives them to make custard and jelly from their flowers. I was really happy with my savory and sweet-salad uses. Concepts (they are only “recipes” in the medieval use of the word) are below the jump; suggestions for ways to use up the remaining flowers are welcome.

Sesame Summer Rolls

We had some leftover chicken, some carrots that were about to go bad, store-bought egg roll wrappers, and the black locust blossoms. Oh, and the chive blossoms – the chives have been feeling super sexy lately and putting out tons of flowers. And a few dame’s rocket flowers, which I’d picked when I despaired of finding accessible black locust. Shredded the chicken, grated the carrot, and mixed it up with some tahini, soy sauce, and ginger.

Sadly, the camera was out of batteries, or I’d have a picture of how they looked just before wrapping. If I make these again I will wilt the flowers before adding them to the egg roll, so that they don’t leave such big air pockets after cooking, but that’s a minor tweak; the egg rolls still fried up really well.

Actually, if I make these again I will stick to dame’s rocket and money plant flowers. The black locust flowers were okay, but not really noticeable as anything other than vegetable filler underneath the tahini; the dame’s rocket flowers were amazing.

Black Locust Blossom, Chive Blossom, and Mint Salad

Ingredients: Black locust flowers, chive flowers, dressing. Separate the chive flowers (unless you prefer your onion-y flavor in heterogeneous nuggets).
Dressing: Mayonnaise, mint, lemon juice, sugar, a pinch of powdered ginger, a pinch of salt. Finely mince the mint and mix, or just buzz everything in a food processor. I’m not sure the ginger added anything important; onion powder might’ve been better, but I didn’t have any on hand.

We took this to a potluck picnic and it got excellent reviews.

Cream of Black Locust Blossom Soup

Sticking to the theory that black locust blossoms are just a funny kind of pea, I made more or less this summer pea soup with onions, mint, homemade chicken-and-scraps stock, and my shiny new immersion blender. It was tasty warm, and I imagine that it’ll also be tasty cold.

Don’t Bother: Dehydrated Black Locust Flowers

After the Mister lamented that the plain flowers ought to be crunchier, we decided to try them in the dehydrator. I tossed them with a little bit of oil, mint, and sugar and left them overnight. The results taste good but the texture is all wrong – the flowers are too small to sink your teeth into, so it just feels a little bit prickly and very unsatisfying.

For Tomorrow: Pasta with Black Locust Blossoms, Brown Butter, and Sage

Snap peas + brown butter + sage was a Flavor Bible recommended pairing that got into my brain while I was cooking the soup. You can’t go too far wrong with brown butter (unless it burns).

YOU GUYS. IT TASTES EXACTLY LIKE YOU EXPECT LILAC TO TASTE.

After my initial batch of syrup I still had enough blossoms left to pack a quart mason jar. So I did that, and added a little bit of sugar, and filled the jar with vodka. After sitting overnight, it had a distinct floral flavor and aroma, but the Mister and I were running off to go bikecamping so I didn’t decant it until Sunday night.

During those two days it acquired rather more, well, I’ll call it vegetal complexity. It’s not bad, but it’s not the overpoweringly floral this-jar-is-trying-to-have-sex-with-my-nose flavor I got with the syrup, either.

I strained out the blossoms, added a bit more sugar, and stuck it on a dark shelf. A few months of patience did wonderful things to last year’s nocino, and the preceding year’s oregon grape jam, so we’ll see how it goes with the lilac. Meanwhile, I think I’ll use the rest of the blossoms for more syrup, or possibly for jelly.

Sometimes people are stupid jerks. Jeez. What do you want from me?

When this many people are asking me to defend the behavior of wholly separate unrelated individuals with whom I have only one thing in common… well, there’s clearly something going on. And I went back and forth over whether to use the word “privilege” to describe it. “Privilege” is a bit of progressive jargon – I’m using it here to describe a manifestation of a particular kind of social hierarchy, with cars on top as both the assumed default and the most prestigious mode of transportation. If you would rather think about this as “structural advantage” or “being in the majority”, or whatever, feel free to mentally substitute your favorite phrase as needed.

The overwhelming majority of cyclists in this country are also drivers; there aren’t really any widely recognized entrenched social hierarchies (“isms”) where so many people are able to move at will between “privileged” and “disprivileged” status several times over the course of a day. This list is not intended to establish a comparison between car privilege and white privilege (or male privilege, or any other systems of power and oppression). I don’t think car privilege is comparable to other systems of privilege in the magnitude of its effects, the extent to which it is entrenched in cultural institutions, or any other way, really.

I do, however, think four things:

1. Human beings aren’t hugely creative about the ways in which we think about social minorities and/or exercise social power; we tend to reuse and repurpose a limited set of strategies that we carry from one set of majority/minority or privileged/disempowered groups to the next.
2. U.S. culture and infrastructure provide many amenities for car drivers, often at the expense of other modes of transportation.
3. Privilege checklists like this one can be useful ways to think about the ways society makes your life easier, that you might otherwise not notice.
4. The overwhelming dominance of single-occupancy automobiles is an ecological disaster.

Finally, this list is blatantly U.S.-centric, because that’s where I ride my bike. Some items don’t apply to all of the U.S., either – Seattle has been pretty good about installing bike sensors at traffic lights, for example.

Okay, that was a long preamble. Onto the list.As a driver:

• I can typically get where I am going without spending time in traffic with vehicles that move much faster than mine.
• Traffic-sensing stoplights will sense my vehicle and cycle the signal appropriately in response.
• Traffic signals are timed to maximize the smooth flow of vehicles moving at my typical speed.
• The roads I use have lane markings that are designed for my vehicle’s width and speed.
• The part of the road I use is typically kept clear of snow and debris.
• During major road construction, detours for my mode of transportation are clearly marked.
• New buildings are required to include parking designed specifically for my type of vehicle.
• The laws and customs governing my mode of transportation are widely understood, even by people who do not use it. If I am using the road in a legal and customary manner I will not be told by other road users that my behavior is unacceptable.
• The dangers I face on the road are widely understood, even by people who do not use my form of transportation. If I take evasive or preventive action, I can expect other road users to understand what I am doing and why.
• If I fear for my life during a traffic situation, I can expect that the other people involved will recognize the gravity of the situation and understand my fear; I will not have to explain to them how a situation they experienced as a minor annoyance could have been life-threatening to me.
• Other road users have been trained to carefully watch for my type of vehicle on the road.
• When I use additional safety features for my mode of transportation, it does not cause other road users to behave more recklessly towards me.
• Places I want to visit – museums, restaurants, etc. – usually provide directions and parking information pertinent to my mode of transportation on their website.
• When I ask someone for directions, they will start by giving me directions appropriate to my mode of transportation.
• I can easily find movies, TV, and books where gaining access to my mode of transportation is depicted as an important rite of passage.
• I can easily find movies in which lack of access to my mode of transportation is depicted as a sign of loserdom.
• If I’m criticized for my unprofessional appearance at work, I can be sure that it’s not because of my mode of transportation (unlike this guy).
• If I’m not offered a job after a promising interview, I can be reasonably sure that it’s not because I discussed the mode of transportation I would use for my potential new commute.
• I am not asked to explain the behavior of other people who use the same mode of transportation as me.
• If I do something boneheaded or discourteous in traffic, people won’t attribute it to my mode of transportation.
• When people talk about “traffic” they are usually talking about people using my mode of transportation.
• If I am not in a convertible or classic car, people assume I’m on the road because I am trying to get from Point A to Point B, and not because I am out for a leisurely pleasure ride.

I’ll be interested to hear from people about where I’ve gotten things wrong, and what should be on this list that I’ve missed.

I love the Flavor Bible. It doesn’t provide any recipes or technical instruction; instead, it draws on the world’s culinary traditions and the work of modern chefs to provide a catalog of effective flavor combinations. Turn to the entry on cantaloupe and it tells you to try lemon juice, black pepper, port, or curry powder. The entry for lavender refers you to both herbes de Provence and ras el hanout, and offers up caraway seeds as a potential substitute.

Unfortunately, unsurprisingly, the Flavor Bible does not have entries for Japanese knotweed, Oregon grape, or any of the other wild ingredients that often kick off my Step 1. (It does at least have dandelion greens, but it’s fairly obvious to me that you would treat those like collard or mustard greens, so that’s not much help.) When I get a new plant, I take the first wild-ass guess reasonable botanical analog that I can think of.

Last weekend, after picking three grocery bags worth of knotweed shoots, I looked up the bible entry for rhubarb. It told me to pair it with cardamom and orange, so I made a big batch of knotweed jam with cardamom and blood orange zest. Delicious jam success!

Then this morning, I read a post with several ideas riffing on the theme of lemons, instead of rhubarb. Oh man! How obvious is that in retrospect, and how jealous am I that I didn’t think of it first! It makes me wonder how many other excellent analogs and combinations I am missing while I’m grooving away in my little rut of Oregon grape PBJ and nettle-clam-alfredo pizza.

Once you’ve gotten over the novelty of a wild food and incorporated it into your regular harvest, how do you break that routine to explore its potential? I can only wade through the same 3 Internet recipes for dandelion petal bread, sorbet, and jelly so many times – life is short.

This is, of course, why they pay the Herbfarm folks (and other professional chefs) with real cash money. Maybe someone could just mechanically index a bunch of old Herbfarm menus and publish the results as a sort of cut-rate Wild Flavor Bible.

“The 18,000 marriages will be evidence that California is not going to fall apart if gay people get married,” Mr. Lok said. “It’s not like there’s not going to be an earthquake.”

Oh ho ho, won’t Mr. Lok and his husband be chuckling at that one when San Francisco falls into the ocean! In fact, the potential link between same-sex marriage and earthquakes is one of the strongest arguments I’ve ever seen in favor of preserving the traditional-except-for-all-the-ways-we’ve-changed-it-in-the-past institution of opposite-sex-only marriage.

While the observation that same-sex marriage might be followed by earthquakes has been made before – notably by Israeli parliamentarian Shlomo Benizri and American preacher Pat Robertson – science has advanced beyond the simple “God does it” explanations most commonly proposed by nutcase conservative public figures. Below the fold, I will tell you how we actually think this process works.

The Castro district in San Francisco is constantly emitting small pulses of gay energy, called Love waves. These Love waves usually pass harmlessly through the crust, causing only occasional dirty thoughts in sensitive individuals.

Each time that a committed same-sex couple’s family bond is recognized and supported by the government, another pulse of gay energy is emitted from the relevant bureau. If this recognition occurs in the form of marriage, the pulse is strengthened, by a factor of approximately 31, through a complicated resonance of the couple’s wedding rings with their official marriage license (the exact multiplier varies depending on the font chosen by each county registrar, but it’s usually Helvetica).

Under normal conditions, these Love waves would also dissipate harmlessly in the crust. However, due to California’s unique geographic and geological conditions, the pulses emitted from state offices in Sacramento combine with the Love waves coming from the Castro in a phenomenon known as constructive interference. This interaction creates a pattern of standing Love waves in the soft sediments of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta:

At the constructively interfering nodes between San Francisco and Sacramento, gay energy is strong enough to penetrate the crust all the way to the seismogenic zone. The effects of this penetration on the seismogenic zone are governed by lubrication theory. Suffice it to say, when enough gay energy lubricates the underlying faults, California will be doomed – maybe not immediately after same-sex marriage is finally legalized for good, but definitely on or after April 15 the following year. Nothing emits pulses of pure gay energy more efficiently than a joint tax return.

(NB: Small numbers of same-sex marriages, typically involving a transgendered spouse whose legal gender is or was different from his/her preferred or identified gender, have been legally recognized even when same-sex marriage generally has not been. These marriages still cause Love waves to be emitted from Sacramento, but their effects have thus far been lost in the noise of ordinary tectonic and heterosexual seismicity. However, the effects of sub-seismogenic quantities of gay energy on the water in the delta – which is an important source of drinking water for Southern California – have not been studied.)

I was on a fairly simple reconnaissance mission, which involved driving around with a map and a clipboard and taking notes. Obviously, jobs requiring more equipment (and less driving/working while your foot’s on the brake) have slightly different requirements, mostly involving cargo space.

• Multiple cup holders. Constantly scrounging for the whatsit you put on the passenger seat next to the map, that has since rolled onto the floor or gotten wedged in the cushions, is tiresome. Actually, what I want is a cup holder (or two, if I am in the field with a coworker), plus a pencil holder, a GPS holder, and a wallet-change-keys-iPod holder… but we could start with just putting the parking brake lever on the left-hand side somewhere, instead of the right, and using that console space for storage. Chevy Aveo, I’m looking at you here.
• Emergency kit. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a rental car that came obviously stocked with basic first aid supplies, or been offered a kit in the list of pay-per-day add-ons, but it would be nice. It’s a pain to pack your own, but when you’re driving around on random back-country logging roads all day, it’s a good thing to have with you.
• Aux input on the stereo. Much easier than fiddling with a little “personal radio station” adapter thingie, or trying to find decent music on the radio.
• Although I’m sure the folks at Enterprise would be horrified if they saw some of the roads I covered with their precious little econoblob, four-wheel drive is still worth thinking about for, say, back-country logging roads. It’s unfortunate that the “wee little Jeep” class isn’t more well-represented on the rental market, because for any job I’ve been on short of a multimodal geophysical survey or 30-person field trip, a “standard” 4WD pickup or SUV is total gas-guzzling overkill (I’ve complained about this before).