Current music:

Liam Finn - Gather to the Chapel | Powered by Last.fm

Partly Cloudy

mooflyfoof's and doomdoomdoom's food blogging and photos have got me all camera-happy. I made seitan and seared kale stew with toasted bulghur (OMIGOD the magical things that happen to kale when you nearly burn it!), but as good as it was, it looked like ... well ... stew.

So let's move on to the other, more photogenic part of dinner that prompted a big-eyed "That drink was goooood" from my roommate Andrea. I call it the Partly Cloudy.

The Dark and Stormy is a sweet, spicy drink that my friends Nate and Sasha introduced me to, and a grown-up version of the Trader Joe's rum and ginger ale that keeps me cool and cheerfully bleary for much of Burning Man every year. This is my own bright, kinda tangy version that uses fresh ginger, light rum and tons more citrus than the original.

The Partly Cloudy


Note: I use a superfine Microplane spice grater on the ginger because the other roommate, Dave, buys bad-ass kitchen stuff. THIS GRATER. IT IS MAGIC. Get one. It grates spices like crazy and turns ginger, garlic, and other wet stuff into a fine paste, and really puts the fear of God into your fingertips. It's hard to use it without imagining yourself accidentally grating your fingers all the way to the first knuckle. I guess you could make this drink without it, but you'd have to shred or grate a whole walnut-sized knob of ginger and muddle it with the lime juice or something to get the same tang and then strain it to get the fibrous little shreds of ginger out, and now you're talking about a high-maintenance, bitchy drink-mixing process, and if you wanted that, you'd just make a damn mojito already.

This makes two small drinks like the one in the picture, or one to fill my cocktail vehicle of choice, a wide-mouthed one-pint Kerr mason jar. Awww, yeah. Classy.

- 2 oz. date syrup (That's simple syrup made with date sugar; you can substitute plain simple syrup if you're not the kind of nut who has five kinds of sugar and eight varieties of flour in the pantry and a major crush on ethnic grocery stores)
- 2 oz. lime juice
- 3 oz. light rum
- dash of bitters (I used Peychaud's)
- 1.5 oz soda water
- 1/4 tsp. (pea-sized blob) fresh ginger, grated into a paste

Stir the ginger and a splash of the lime juice furiously in a glass, so you don't end up with startling gobs of raw ginger in your drink. Drop in a handful of ice and pour in the rest of the ingredients, then stir a bit more. Sip thoughtfully while poking at some kale in a cast-iron pan and musing about the near-magic effects of high, dry heat on cruciferous vegetables.