As part of my fall harvest dinner menu I made a home made pumpkin soup with roasted pumpkins from a local patch. One surprising pairing that I added for this was a mushroom crisp which was made from roasted porcini mushrooms that were blended, dehydrated and cut into little mushroom shapes. Fungi are a surprising good pairing with pumpkin/squash as the umami mushroom flavors blend quite well into the pumpkin.
I started playing around recently with homemade alcohol infusions. My tea infusions didn’t come out too well as they got overly bitter and tanic which didn’t pair well in cocktails but one success I had was with a flavored rooibos tea. I got a very fruity/aromatic blend of elderberry and lavender from a great local tea shop and then infused gin in my 2L glass dispenser. This made for a great gin and tonic which is only made better by a bit of lemon juice to compliment the fruity notes.
One cocktail hack that I have rarely seen talked about is aromatizing a cocktail with bitter. In a normal cocktail, especially one that is chilled, the aroma coming from the bitters is very muted since the scent chemicals haven’t vaporized. One neat trick I have been doing is putting bitters into small atomizing bottles and then “spraying” a bit of bitters over a finished cocktail. This ensures that on that first sip you get a beautiful aroma right as you taste the cocktail. This can be done with commercial bitters, homemade bitters and even flavored alcohol extracts.
I got my hands on some gold leaf recently and so I started playing around a bit. One thing I wanted to tray was a “Golden” old fashioned where I would wrap the maraschino cherry in the gold leaf giving an elevated touch. This looks great with clear ice but I did mess up the tilt a bit :(.
This has become a bit of a comfort dish over the last half year especially with a crispy fried rise. Whenever I get a chance to get a well priced duck I always split it myself so I can confit the thighs but then the breasts are always leftover. Lately I have been just roasting this to render the fat and then thin slicing it over leftover fried rice. I try to mix in the rendered duck fat back into the fried rice which I think adds some beautiful flavor.
