Fallback

We are currently in my absolute favorite time of year. The holidays are just so joyful. There are so many happy events and opportunities to get together with friends and family. It's not yet bitterly cold, but the temperature is low enough to turn on the heat and snuggle up under a blanket. Preferably with a whiskey cocktail.

The one thing I don't like about this time of year is how short the days are. It seemed bad enough as fall began, but then Daylight Savings Time ended. We "fall back" and suddenly it's getting dark at 4 pm! This makes it supremely inconvenient to get good cocktail photos. I like to shoot with natural light, but I'm not usually going to have a drink in the mid-afternoon. I end up having to just set things aside for later. My husband has gotten used to coming home and taking a peek in the fridge to check whether anything I made earlier that day is waiting to be consumed.

It was with this annual disgruntlement in mind that I picked the Fallback out of Regarding Cocktails. In addition to the appropriate name, it's made with Applejack and Amaro Nonino, a couple of my favorite fall ingredients. They lend flavors of apple, spice, vanilla, and brown sugar to rye and sweet vermouth. The Nonino and a couple of dashes of Peychaud's give the drink just the right amount of bitterness. It's utterly perfect for the fall.

And it still tastes just fine if you have to throw it in the fridge until cocktail hour.

History: The Fallback was created by Sasha Petraske for John Dory Oyster Bar in New York City.

Fallback

1 oz. rye whiskey
1 oz. Applejack or apple brandy
1/2 oz. sweet vermouth (Carpano Antica recommended)
1/2 oz. Amaro Nonino
2 dashes Peychaud's bitters

Build the drink in a rocks glass beginning with the bitters. Add one large cube of ice and stir until the drink is chilled. Garnish with an orange twist.

Recipe adapted from Regarding Cocktails.

Mixology Monday: The Innocents Abroad

Hello from Louisiana! GarnishGuy and I are back home until Christmas, spending time with family and eating far more than we ought to. We're hoping to sneak away to New Orleans later in the week to celebrate our anniversary (eight years!) and check out some bars. Until then, we've been having fun experimenting with the contents of my parents' liquor cabinet, which has definitely grown since I started this blog! Last night's cocktails were, appropriately, the De La Louisiane and the Vieux Carre - both big hits.

Since we were pretty busy leading up to our trip, I didn't have much time to experiment with cocktails for this month's Mixology Monday. Luckily, the theme of this month's challenge, hosted by Stacey Markow, is digestifs. And I've had an absolutely fantastic recipe for a digestif that I've been looking forward to sharing. It's not an original recipe, but it's so good I can't resist sharing it for this challenge.

There's an excellent new restaurant in Boston's South End called SRV. It's a "Venetian-style Bacaro and wine bar" from the folks behind The Salty Pig and Canary Square, two of our favorite spots. We first went there for a drink while we waited for a table at Toro. We ordered a couple of cocktails and several of their bar bites, and we were really blown away. The bar snacks were ridiculously good: salt cod brandade on black bread with herbs, soft boiled quail eggs with white anchovies and a crunchy garlic pangrattato, grilled octopus with pine nuts and preserved lemon... I need to stop talking about this, I'm making myself really hungry right now.

The cocktail menu at SRV is heavy on amari and vermouth, which I love. They have a vermouth of the day ("We always drink to world peace") and some really great cocktails. One of these is The Innocents Abroad: Fighting Cock bourbon, Amaro Nonino, Gran Classico, and Kina L'Aero D'Or. It's been a while since I was so blown away by a cocktail that I thought, "I HAVE to make this at home," but that was what I thought about The Innocents Abroad, and I didn't really care how many bottles of liquor I needed to buy (three, it turned out - four if I wanted to use the same bourbon). On our second visit, I worked up the courage to ask the bartender for the recipe, which he happily shared. I hope they won't mind me re-posting it here, so that others can know the joy of this wonderful drink.

The Innocents Abroad is a perfect digestif. We recently made it after dinner for a couple of friends, and it was wonderful: sweet with just enough bitterness. It has an almost syrupy texture, thick on your tongue. It's one of those cocktails where the ingredients knit together so perfectly and tightly that it's hard to pick them all out. It's nutty, citrusy, and herbal, with the lovely flavor of the Amaro Nonino in the middle of your sip and the distinctive bitterness of the Gran Classico and Kina L'Aero at the end. It's definitely one of the best cocktails I've tried this year.

History: This cocktail was created for SRV by David Spielburg. According to this article, it's a something of a riff on the Paper Plane. I imagine it must have been named after the book The Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim's Progress by Mark Twain, which tells the story of his travels through Europe and the Holy Land on a retired Civil War ship.

The Innocents Abroad

1 1/2 oz. bourbon (Fighting Cock recommended)
3/4 oz. Amaro Nonino
1/2 oz. Gran Classico
1/2 oz. Kina L'Aero D'Or

Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass with ice and stir until chilled. Strain into an Old Fashioned glass and garnish with a lemon twist.

Recipe courtesy of SRV.

Bottle Buy: Amaro Nonino

A few months ago, I wrote about an amazing meal I had with some friends at Gramercy Tavern in New York. After dessert, our waitress recommended a couple of amari for us to taste. She brought out Amaro Averna and Amaro Nonino. Everyone else at the table seemed to prefer the Averna, but I liked the Nonino better. When I saw the price difference between them, however ($30 vs. $50), I made the Averna my first amaro purchase. But I suppose I was just delaying the inevitable - I finally bought a bottle of Nonino, and I think it was well worth the money. Its flavor is just beautiful. It's light and sweet and nutty, with flavors of vanilla, caramel, spices, and a bit of anise. I already snuck it into one cocktail, the European Vagrant, and I've got many more to come.

Amaro Nonino (officially Amaro Nonino Quintessentia) is made in Friuli in northeastern Italy. The Nonino distillery was founded there in 1897 by Orazio Nonino, who produced grappa, an Italian grape liqueur. Though the family has continued to produce grappa ever since, I was surprised to find out that Nonino is a fairly new product, born in 1992. It is made from an aged grape distillate infused with a number of herbs and spices including gentian root, saffron, bitter orange, licorice, rhubarb, tamarind, sweet orange, and carmelized sugar. It's traditionally served at room temperature after a meal as a digestif, but it can also make a nice aperitif when served on the rocks or in a cocktail. It's easily one of my favorite bottles in my bar.

Amaro Nonino

Price: $50
Alcohol Content: 35%
Popular Cocktails: Paper Plane, served up as a digestif

The Paper Plane is one of the better-known drinks that contains Amaro Nonino. Like the Last Word, it's an equal-parts cocktail with four ingredients: bourbon, Aperol, Amaro Nonino, and lemon juice. It's sour and tart, with a subtly bitter aftertaste. Nuttiness from the Nonino, bright citrus from the Aperol, and rich bourbon tie it all together. It's lighter and more refreshing than you would expect from its ingredients.

If you don't have Amaro Nonino and aren't ready to take the plunge (do it!), you could definitely try this recipe with other amari and see how it turns out. I've also seen a version that uses Campari instead of Aperol. There's definitely room to play around, but it's hard to beat the original.

History: The Paper Plane was created by Sam Ross at Little Branch in New York City. A former bartender at the famous Milk & Honey, Ross opened Attaboy with Michael McIlroy in the bar’s old space. He also invented the well-known Penicillin cocktail, so he’s kind of a big deal.

As I mentioned last week, I got to spend the weekend before Thanksgiving in New York City, crossing some amazing cocktail bars off my bucket list. One of these – my favorite, in fact – was Attaboy. I vaguely knew that Sam Ross owned the bar, but it didn’t occur to me to find out what he looked like or anything; for some reason I assumed that the big-name guys who own these bars never actually step behind them anymore. So when our bearded Australian bartender introduced himself as “Sam,” I just smiled and nodded and complimented the drinks. It was literally 48 hours later that the wayward neurons in my brain (no doubt a bit fried by the weekend of barhopping) made the connection, and I facepalmed pretty hard. No wonder the drinks were so perfect. Sam, on the off-chance you read this, thanks for a lovely time.

As for the Paper Plane, Ross named it after M.I.A.'s song Paper Planes, which he was listening to while he worked on the recipe.

Paper Plane

1 oz. bourbon
1 oz. Aperol
1 oz. Amaro Nonino
1 oz. lemon juice

Combine all ingredients in a shaker with ice and shake until chilled. Strain into a coupe glass. No garnish. Or get cute and fold a teeny tiny paper plane to hang on the glass.

Recipe adapted from Liquor.com.

Mixology Monday: European Vagrant

Is it already time for Mixology Monday again? I feel like August and September have flown by. That's not really a bad thing - I'm so excited for the start of fall. Cooler weather, fall colors, hair that doesn't frizz within moments of walking outside... it's possibly my favorite season.

This month's MxMo is hosted by Rebecca of The Shrubbery, and the theme is Drink Nerdy. Acknowledging that all of us who participate in MxMo are probably nerdy about cocktails, Rebecca has challenged us to create a cocktail inspired by something else we're nerdy about. This is such a fun challenge, and I'm excited to see what everyone else likes to geek out over.

As both a devoted fantasy reader and a scientist, I can get pretty nerdy about a lot of things. But the most unique thing I'm nerdy about is probably birds.

I have no idea why I started liking birds, but I've been interested in them for the longest time. Around seventh grade, I decided I was going to be an ornithologist, and that's what I've pursued ever since. I defended my PhD thesis last year, so I guess I've officially fulfilled my childhood dream! While my enthusiasm for the world of academia has waned a bit, I've never lost interest in birds. They are just hands-down the coolest animals out there, and I feel so lucky that I get to spend my time studying them. And while I’ve never gotten into the crazy competitive side of birdwatching (oh yes, this exists), I do keep a life list and get pretty darn excited when I see a new species.

When I started thinking about what it means to be a bird nerd, I thought the concept was well encapsulated by a brief exchange I witnessed a couple of weeks ago. My lab went out to Plum Island to watch shorebirds, and there were tons of other birders there. We were all lined up by the road with binoculars and spotting scopes, gazing out at the birds on the mudflats. Two girls pulled up in a car behind us, peering out at the sea. I don’t like to jump to conclusions based on appearances, but I’m going to guess that these ladies were not the type to do much birding.

“What are you all looking at?” one asked.

One of the other birders turned around and said excitedly, “A Ruff! It’s a European vagrant!”

I have no idea why she didn’t share our enthusiasm.

“Vagrant” is the word we use to describe a bird that turns up somewhere it shouldn’t be. Most bird species have well-defined ranges where they occur, but every now and then an individual will end up somewhere odd due to a storm or some confusion during migration. Birders get really excited when this happens. The Ruff (Philomachus pugnax) is a shorebird that generally only occurs in the Old World, so getting the chance to see one in Massachusetts was pretty cool.

But still quite nerdy.

The Ruff, Philomachus pugnax. This is what we saw, except much further away, somewhat blurry, and surrounded by native Massachusetts shorebirds that looked basically identical. I don't know why no one thinks birding is exciting.

For my European Vagrant cocktail, I wanted to work with local ingredients and throw in one very European one. While thinking about thoroughly American ingredients, I was reminded of the American Trilogy, a riff on the Old Fashioned with rye and apple brandy. I decided to replace the orange bitters with an Italian amaro. After some experimentation, the winner was Amaro Nonino. I thought the nutty flavors of Nonino blended really nicely with the apple, and it provides just the right amount of sweetness and bitterness. Unfortunately I haven't introduced Nonino yet with a Bottle Buy, but stay tuned! It's coming soon.

One more note - as with my original American Trilogy, I made this recipe with Laird's Applejack, which is a poor man's apple brandy (about 35% apple brandy, I believe). I need to hunt down a bottle of Laird's Bonded Apple Brandy and make these cocktails properly. That said, I still really enjoy them with the Applejack, and I think you will too if that's what you have on hand.

European Vagrant

1 oz. rye whiskey

1 oz. Laird's Applejack or Bonded Apple Brandy

1/2 oz. Amaro Nonino

1/2 tsp. simple syrup

Combine all ingredients in a mixing glass with ice and stir until chilled. Strain into an old fashioned glass with one large ice cube. Garnish with an apple fan and an orange twist (and preferably a bird-themed cocktail pick).