There are most likely few things more tiresome than someone using their newsletter to berate themselves for not writing enough newsletters, but I will just say quickly that I had a suspicion that my late-2021 habit of publishing weekly newsletters was just a passing mania, and I was mostly right.
Turns out it’s a lot of work to push out a newsletter every week??? And in the beginning last Fall, I felt like doing one once per week. That was sustainable until it wasn’t, and here we are.
The benefit of not doing one of these for nine weeks is that there is no shortage of things to talk about.
I think probably the most exciting one is that I got a recipe published in the June/July issue of Bon Appetit. It’s a spiced mango-peach ginger shrub-slash-syrup. It was a pretty ambitious concept (for me, at least) and I wanted to create something that was kind of a hassle, but could be sandbagged and used over time across a few different applications.
A fun BTS fact here is that I had to significantly retool this recipe after cross-testing This was initially somewhat ego-bruising but the result was actually so much better than I could have produced alone. The crux of it was my equipment: I had a sieve that was able to strain to a certain fine-ness that was hard to replicate outside of the confines of my own kitchen, and the syrup did not integrate well with other ingredients. (A needed reminder that instructions need to be replicable and accessible.) To fix this we applied heat to the fruit before blending. (Also I hilariously developed this recipe in March using the least-flavorful fresh peaches you could possibly imagine.)
I’m really heat-averse when it comes to making syrups. Mostly from a flavor perspective but also I am impatient and undisciplined (my last newsletter was April 8) and I don’t like waiting for things to heat up and also be vulnerable to overcooking and ruining a batch of whatever it is I’m making. This is why I am a staunch blender advocate. However turning this into a stovetop situation was an improvement in every way: flavor, texture, prep time—it did wonders to extract every last milligram of flavor out of my lifeless winter peaches.
Go read it. Make the syrup and tell me what drinks you make with it because I really wanted this to be a universal donor that would hold up against a lot of different ideas.
I went on my friend Youngmi’s Hairy Butthole (lol) to talk about my mother’s death and how poorly I dealt with it. Listen HERE.
And on a lighter note, I was a guest on In Yo Mouth, where I spoke to the host Michael Muñoz about being gay and working in hospitality and I gave a (perhaps unnecessarily) exasperated answer when asked what “pride” meant to me. Whoops! Listen HERE.
My latest for Food52 is all about a large-format El Diablo and I got castigated in the comments on youtube not for wearing lipstick but for being rough with carbonated ingredients. And… they have a point. I was pouring and stirring with a bit of dramatic flair for the camera, but it’s always been my understanding that you pour heavy/thick ingredients INTO the bubbly ones because it lessens contact with the dissolved solids that bring the CO2 out of suspension. This is why you drop the sugar cube in the champagne for a champagne cocktail instead of pouring the Champagne onto the sugar cube. I could be wrong.
And here’s where I talk about bisexual dirtbag queen, Tove Lo, who is an absurdly amazing Swedish (of course) artist who has been serving consistent jams for like a decade. I first heard a remix of Stay High and actually watched the video for the first time just now and it tows this fine that she always does where it’s a mix of ragey, wild druggy sadness that I love about her.
Watch Hey You Got Drugs, Bitches, Are You Gonna Tell Him, I Really Don’t Like u (ft. Kylie Minogue) and then No One Dies From Love—in that order.
And then check out this video from her and Years & Years where she serves cvnty Padmé Amidala realness.
Thanks for reading! Please forward this to someone you like.
Love,
-JdB
