November's Where to Drink Now: Laurel Tavern

While facelifts are nothing new in Los Angeles, the recent renovation of Studio City’s Sapphire bar is definitely turning heads. Owners Will Shamlian and Mark Leddy exposed portions of the long brick walls, added a tin ceiling and built a butcher-block walnut bar in a four-month remodel that transformed the former cocktail lounge into Laurel Tavern, the now six-week-old gastropub. The beer list, designed by beer sommelier and consultant Christina Perozzi, features 16 rotating taps of California microbrews—Craftsman Heavenly Hefeweizen and Lost Coast Downtown Brown, to name just two—while the food menu offers pub-grub standards with a few gourmet twists: chorizo fondue, steak fries cooked in pork fat and a short-rib cheeseburger on a brioche bun. This is one makeover we’ll happily raise our glasses to.



Coordinates: 11938 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, California; 818-506-0777; laureltavern.net

Holiday Hosting Made Easy

”Let’s have the holidays at our house this year!” It sounded like such a good idea all the way back in September, but with Thanksgiving a little over a week away you’re beginning to wonder how to keep your dozen guests fed and happy. Don’t fret: Pick up any one of these helpful cookbooks and let the festivities begin.


The Christmas Table
Diane Morgan, Chronicle, $19.95
Celebrated food writer Diane Morgan proves that holiday entertaining can be delicious and seamless with the release of her newest cookbook. Dedicated to making the holidays fun, she offers up tasty recipes for yuletide entrées both traditional (bourbon-and-brown-sugar-crusted ham) and modern (whole roasted salmon). She devotes separate chapters to the “Great Cookie Exchange” and “Leftover Favorites,” and includes helpful menu and timetable guides in the back. Check out her recipe for Cranbeer-y Relish featured in the November/December 2008 issue of Imbibe.


The Paley’s Place Cookbook
Vitaly and Kimberly Paley, Ten Speed, $35
James Beard Award winner Vitaly Paley mixes his French-trained culinary artistry with wine notes and cocktail recipes in his first cookbook, out just in time for the holidays. Poignant farm-to-table stories are sure to warm your heart, while Paley’s recipes are guaranteed to warm your belly. Festive dishes like roast duck with cherries and huckleberry kuchen include helpful wine-pairing suggestions; a separate chapter dedicated to making your own bar mixers and juices will elevate just about any spirit this season.


Jewish Holiday Cooking: A Food Lover’s Treasury of Classics and Improvisations
Jayne Cohen, Wiley, $32.50
Traditional Jewish recipes meet new contemporary creations in this tome of Jewish cooking. Organized by holiday with inventive variations throughout, Jayne Cohen even provides tasty kosher alternatives for vegetarian and vegan guests while still maintaining the veracity of Jewish food culture and heritage.


A16 Food+Wine
Nate Appleman and Shelly Lindgen, Ten Speed, $35
Festive feasting just got a lot tastier with this deliciously informative cookbook and wine guide from San Francisco’s A16 restaurant. Take a journey through Southern Italian viticulture with wine director Shelly Lindgren’s wine resource guide and then follow executive chef Nate Appleman’s instructions for perfecting oven-cooked pizzas, house-cured meats and fresh pasta sauces. Thankfully, it’s out just in time to save you from all that leftover turkey.

Drink of the Week: Askinosie 75% Soconusco Sipping Chocolate

The directions for this chocolate seemed odd at first: Just 4 tablespoons of milk, really? Nevertheless, we dutifully heated the tiny portion of milk and stirred in the chocolate morsels until they blended into a thick, mahogany liquid.

First sip: Whoa, this is potent stuff!

Second sip: Hmm, this is much less sweet than a lot of drinking chocolates. You can really taste the …

Third sip: … pure chocolate, mmm, deep, dark, bittersweet chocolate.

By the time we’d finished half the serving, we realized why Askinosie suggests such a diminutive portion—this stuff is so rich and satisfying, you don’t need more than a demitasse to satisfy the strongest of cravings. We recommend drinking this grown-up drinking chocolate as a dessert after a spicy meal, and as you do, you can tell your guests the story behind Askinosie: The company was founded in 2006 by Shawn Askinosie, a criminal defense attorney who, after burning out on lawyering, decided to start making chocolate—and not just any chocolate, but single-origin chocolate sourced directly from small farmers. Askinosie presses his own cocoa butter and eschews typical additives like vanilla or lecithin. The result is chocolate that tastes like chocolate, period.

Harvest Report, Part Three: Dressed to Impress

As happens when your work is dictated by the elements, I missed the arrival of Boedecker’s Pinot Gris grapes: With rain showers predicted for a couple of days, Stewart decided to pick the Gris early. By the time I made it to the winery, the giant press was already full, its internal bladder extracting all of the Pinot Gris juice before the skin had time to impart any color on the wine. While I would have loved to witness the transformation of red grapes being crushed into white wine, I was still happy to arrive just in time for lunch. Daphna Kadim, assistant winemaker for Grochau Cellars, who shares the winery with Boedecker Cellars, had just ladled out bowls of her homemade lentil soup with duck confit, and there was a fresh green salad on the table. One bite of the bright and tangy dressing and I had to know what was in it. “Pinot Gris juice, straight from the press,” she said, also pleased with the delicate sweetness of her dressing. And while fresh-pressed, unfermented Pinot Gris juice is not exactly something you can add to your grocery list, Daphna says substituting an Auslese Riesling will impart similarly sweet, floral notes. —Tracy Howard

Daphna Kadim’s Fresh-Pressed Pinot Gris Salad Dressing
1/4 cup Pinot Gris juice, straight from the press (or sub with an Auslese Riesling)
juice of 1 lemon
1 tsp. Dijon mustard
1 pinch sea salt
1 pinch freshly ground black pepper
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

Combine first five ingredients. Slowly whisk in oil to emulsify. Toss with fresh, baby salad greens.

Adventures in Homebrewing

Two months ago, I showed off my budding hop vines from my backyard garden. My husband Ben and I harvested the hops in late August, over the course of two weekends, and got about six pounds of fresh hops from three vines. We dried the hops using a method recommended by my home-brewing friend and guru, Dave Selden: fill paper grocery bags 1/5 full with hops, staple them shut and stored the in a warm, dry place for about a week, turning the bags over every other day. Once dry and measuring in at about 1/4 their original weight, we stuffed the hops into freezer bags, doing our best to vacuum seal them, and we stored the harvest in our freezer (hops should keep in the freezer for up to about a year).

Last weekend, we decided to brew our first batch of beer with the help of our fearless leader Dave and a trusty copy of The Joy of Homebrewing by Charlie Papazian. The recipe we used (below) may look a little complicated, but it was actually pretty simple with the book in hand, a little guidance and the reminder Papazian repeats like a mantra: "Don't worry, have a homebrew." Lucky for us, hanging with a home brewer, there was plenty of homemade beer available to keep us inspired, from a deliciously bright Saison to a Bourbon Spiced Mystery Ale.

With our abundance of hops, we opted to brew an IPA, and since we hadn't used any pesticides on our vines, and organic grains cost a mere 30 cents more per pound, the decision to brew organic was easy. During our party, another friend decided to use chocolate malt in a Scottish red ale, which inspired me to make an ESB for my next batch. But first, I'll have to see how our IPA turns out—I'll report back in a few weeks after we bottle.

In the meantime, I'll be building up my collection of empty bottles and pondering a name. Any ideas? —Siobhan Crosby

Palilalia India Pale Ale
7 lbs. malt extract-light
1 lb. crystal malt, cracked (most brewing supply stores have a grinder, or you can use a rolling pin to crack the grain)
1/2 lb. malted barley, toasted
2 tsp. gypsum (we didn't use gypsum, because our local water already has levels of the calcium that gypsum is intended to add)
1 1/2 oz. northern brewer hops for boiling (we used about 3 1/2 oz. of cascade hops)
3/4 oz. cascade hops for finishing
1 package ale yeast (we used American Ale II yeast)
3/4 cup corn sugar for bottling
Tools: Large 5-gallon pot, heating element, mesh bags for grains and hops, wort chiller (optional), glass carboy

Toast malted barley at 350 for 10 minutes. Add cracked crystal malt and malted barley, in bags, to 5 gallons of cold water and remove when boiling commences (about 160° F). Add the malt extract, Northern Brewer hops (we added the hops in small batches over time) and gypsum (if using), and boil for 45-60 min. Add finishing hops during final minute of boil. Sparge (rinse bags with cold water over pot) into fermenter and cool with wort chiller, stirring to aerate. Once cool, funnel into glass carboy, add water to the wort and add activated yeast. Should age 3 to 4 weeks before drinking for best results.

From The Complete Joy of Homebrewing

Get Ye to the 2009 Grand Marnier Mixology Summit!

This April, Grand Marnier and NAVAN will host their annual Mixology Summit, where 100 bartenders from across the U.S. will converge on Vail, Colo., to showcase their bartending skills while they learn from one another. The 2009 program will include labs, seminars, tastings and networking parties, and wine and spirits expert Steve Olson helped to develop the curriculum. All you have to do to make yourself eligible is submit an application, along with four original cocktail recipes of your own creation. All applications and recipes will be judged to narrow down the 100 people who will be invited to attend this year's event. Those invited will receive an all-expenses-paid trip to the summit, so it's well worth the application process.

So to all of you professional bartenders out there, you have until November 30 to submit your application and recipes. For more info, including an application, visit mixologysummit.com. We look forward to seeing which 100 bartenders make it into this year's program—good luck to everyone!