The Weekly Meat

The Limoncello Experiment

My wife, AKL, and I have a set group of 7–8 foodie friends we get together with every two months for what we call a Moveable Feast. We rotate hosts, and the host picks a theme around which that day's Man v. Food challenge meal is based. And then we cook and eat holy hell out of that theme. Everyone has great kitchen skills, is adventurous, and no one goes home less than painfully stuffed sated.

This weekend, we host the Feast, and AKL picked "lemon" as our theme (our past choices have ranged from Cajun to Sandwiches to "Food on a Stick"). From the outset, I planned to use the lemon feast as an excuse to whip up a batch of homebrewed limoncello.

And that's just what I've done.

After tasting several "house made" versions in restaurants lately (traveling in Tel Aviv last year, I couldn't swing a cat without getting hit with a complimentary snift of the stuff, post-dinner), I was keen on trying my own.

Now, after two months or so of curing/brewing/mellowing/chilling, it turns out, it's some damn fine limoncello indeed. We have quite a lot of it too (locals, come on by for a sample aperitif), which should keep us cheery well into Spring.

But all that lemon peeling must amount to something more than booze. And so, a blog post — including pictures, for those of you keen on amateur liquor porn (god help you if you've stumbled onto this page by Googling that phrase; I'm not even going to try it myself).

Things you need to make yourself some damn fine homebrewed limoncello:

• Gallon (or bigger) glass jar/jug
• Sharp veggie peeler (worth $5 for a new one because that piece of trash from your college dorm kitchen might be fine for carrots but not for nice pith-free lemon rinds)
• Vodka, or — if you can get your hands on some (I, sadly, could not) — Everclear grain alcohol (which has less native flavor than vodka and is therefore a better foundation for lemony goodness)
• Bag of organic lemons (remember, it's all about the peels with this, so skip the pesticide and such)
• Bag of sugar

That's about it; step-by-step instructions here, here, and here (as I'd recommend with any new time-consuming recipe, it's worth looking at several so you get a sense of what matters). But essentially, I used the following for this batch:

• Rinds from 14 good-sized lemons
• 1.75 L jug of vodka
• 3 cups sugar dissolved in 3 cups water

Word to the wise: I made the mistake of buying some organic pure cane sugar, with the thought that quality ingredients equal quality booze. Unfortunately, the thing about pure cane sugar is that when you make the simple syrup with it, the end result is a bit dank for a drink meant to be bright and lemony yellow. So I went back and used standard white Domino's sugar. The result, while less smooth and subtle, was hella more clear than the former — and my resulting limoncello is not the color of pond scum. Which is nice.

Flavor-wise, limoncello does not masquerade as anything more or less than what it is: alcohol, lemon, sugar. Depending on your water:sugar ratio in the simple syrup, it can range from tart to cloying. (This was my first effort, so I stuck with the standard 1:1 simple syrup recipe, and would actually go with less sugar next time (say, 3:2) and see where that leaves things.) Stick it in the freezer (it will thicken up a touch, but the booze keeps it from freezing) and drunk straight up after a nice dinner, it goes down like honeydew vine water.

Note: I didn't initially run mine through a clean coffee filter, and the end result was a bit cloudy (pic at right) — and not in that uniform, milky way of some limoncellos. Rather, it simply looked unfiltered. So I've since filtered it, and am happy with the results. And bound to be even happier this weekend once plied with some hefeweizen, lemon orzo, Moroccan chicken with preserved lemons, veal piccata, lemon tart, pavlova with lemon curd, and the like...

P.S. Come on back later in the year for my homebrew kahlua recipe, which is even easier (no peeling!), and most definitely guaranteed to put a hem in your dress.

Tournament of Human Vices - 2010 Bracket

Some very difficult first-round matchups this year.

Click the thumbnail for a full-size, printable bracket. Have at it, people!

The Thing That Ate the News

Not long after weathermen (note that old-school "stewardess"-like gender specificity) became known as meteorologists, newsrooms starting pimping out their gadgetry with green screens, and hiring shiny "talent" instead of local science geeks who hadn't gotten into MIT or Cal Tech. And not long after that, Weather quite simply ate the entire newscast as we knew it.

It used to be that the broadcast Weather took a backseat to Sports, to the News itself even. But no more. Whether a result of climatological nightmares caused by global warming, or recent devastating storms — or just the fact that for most, Sports now lives on ESPN, or online; or that there is no longer perceived to be any real news in the News (despite fighting wars on two fronts, and being on the verge of enacting game-changing healthcare reform).

Nowadays — if we actually sit through the fatty part of the news — we are party to 5–10 minutes of talking-head telestrating with 27 plasma-color maps with circles and arrows and a snow squall's worth of jibba-jabba on each bit. Before, blessedly, they finally succumb and show the simple thing we have, in fact, been looking for all along. The only graphic that really matters: the 5-day forecast, complete with temperatures and easy-to-follow happy-sun/angry-cloud icons.

And really, they could make it a 3-day graphic, and I'd be happy — because I live in New England, and have no earthly reason to believe a weather forecast 4–5 days out.

And jargon? I don't give a goddamn about el niños and la niñas. I don't care about why and how. I want to know how warmly I should dress tomorrow and if it would be prudent to bring home my laptop from work due to impending snow. End of story.

In fact, I'll make a deal with all the meteorologists out there on the teevee: I won't talk to you about my particularly technical niche of professional expertise, and you don't tell me about the leading edge of a cold front mixing with warmer air coming up from the Carolinas due to the tropical depression in the Caribbean or whatever the hell it is with which you all so constantly regale us.

Ah. But as noted, there is (expensive) gadgetry and technology in broadcast Weather — far more than, say, Sports — and producers like to show off their budgetary darlings. So, like a Hollywood summer blockbuster shooting their stunt-gag wad with histrionics not essential to the plot, our newscasts now teem with meteorological pyrotechnics in the same vein (or should I say "vain" — because, just as any film director with say over the final cut of their films, the end result is most certainly less about the audience than it is about simple vanity).

Here's what I want. I want weather tweets. A strict 140-character limit broken by neither sun nor rain nor sleet nor snow. Ditto the beloved "major weather events" — be they tropical storms, water spouts, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, blizzard of '78s, or Halloween Gales.

Bam! Done, and done. And with time left to actually grab the emergency kit and run downstairs to the cellar.