Years ago I was out for dinner with the trade show crew of the company I worked for. The company was paying, so we went to a pretty nice Italian restaurant — nice enough that it had a sommelier. The local coworker assumed control of ordering the wine. He fancied himself something of a wine expert, and after a brief conversation with the sommelier, a bottle of a red wine was ordered; it was probably about $50 in today’s money.

The sommelier returned with the bottles, went through the ritual of opening it, and poured a splash into our wine expert’s glass to evaluate. He closed his eyes and went through the heavy inhalation, the swishing around in his mouth, the unpleasant gargle, until he held the glass up, peered at it, and said to the sommelier:

“The wine is very good…but the glass is a bit cabinet-y.”

The sommelier apologized, scurried off, and returned with new glasses for all of us.

We then enjoyed an excellent wine, with hints of cherries, tobacco, and lavender, and a finish with notes of embarrassment.

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For the second time in the past month and the second time in my life, I just made no-knead pizza dough. It has thrown my conceptual world into a tizzy.

Since I was about 20 years old, I’ve made pizza by making a dough, kneading it, and cooking it. People (= my wife) claim to like it. But the Internet was all abuzz with the no-knead approach, so I of course tried it, just as I tried eating Diet Coke and Mentos together, poured a bucket of ice over a stranger’s head, and bit some kid’s finger. The recipe is 100% weird.

The ingredients are basically the same: three cups of flour, some water, salt, and 1/8th of a tsp of yeast. Yes, you read that right: 1/8th of a teaspoon. My teaspoon measuring set stops at 1/4. So I had to fill that one up, and gently blow on it until it looked half full. Or half empty.

You then mix all the ingredients together but just until they’re combined. As you may have guessed already, you do not knead it. Instead you put it in a warm place for 22-24 hours. You then take it out and once again you do not knead it. You pull it into shape, put on sauce and cheese, and bake it at 500F for 8-10 minutes, or until it’s a little crunchy on the bottom.

Then you take it out carefully because it’s very very hot and the melted cheese is designed to attach itself to flesh like a pain magnet. And, now at last you knead the shit out of it.

Nah, now you eat it. And it tastes more like pizzeria crust than my fluffy kneaded dough. Crunchy, chewy, slightly charred.

The process shoots to hell my mental model of how gluten forms. I thought molecules rubbed against each other and got entangled like barbed wire riding a packed rush hour train, forming long chains of stringy gluten. The kneading did the entangling. But in this recipe nothing does. Gluten apparently is the result of bread’s need for intimacy.

And you know what else doesn’t make sense? The recipe says to put crushed canned tomatoes on top as the sauce, rather the cooked concoction I’ve been making. And that sauce is better, too.

What next? Chickens that lay omelets?

BTW, here’s the recipe I used. Please note that it doesn’t require kneading the dough.

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I’m drinking more during this pandemic than I ever had: I’m up to having a cocktail 3-4 times a week. Pre-pandemic I’d have perhaps two a month, so this is statistically a serious increase, but does not yet concern me or my wife.

There aren’t a lot of cocktails that I like, although there are many that I’ll drink. I actively enjoy Negronis, but now I feel obliged to point out that I started drinking them about 6 months before they became hip. I can promise you I am not hip. Well, in my own way…never mind.

But here’s a drink I invented in the sense that people have undoubtedly been drinking them forever but no one told me. I call it:

The Orange Bee Martini

Pour a good slosh of Barr Hill Gin into a class larger than that slosh. I’m not (just) being a snob here. Barr Hill uses honey as a “botanical”, giving it a honey flavor without actually being sweet. That makes it a lousy gin for a plain old non-hip martini that the squares drink, but it’s good for my new ultra-hip libation.

Add less of a slosh of white vermouth. Until I achieved adulthood around the age of 55, I disliked martinis because I thought you were supposed to drink them in the sophisticated “dry” fashion by asking the bartender to drink a shot of vermouth and then breathe out through his nose into the shaker. It turns out that I’m not that crazy about gin, although the olives were good.

So now I put about half as much vermouth as gin into my martinis. I can do that because I’m no longer a child of 54.

Then add even less of a slosh, but more than a hint, of the orange liqueur that you bought to bake with and haven’t used since because how often do you make a cake soaked in orange liqueur? If your answer is more than twice a year, then you have a problem. With orange cake, not with alcohol.

Mix it all in a glass and put the glass in the freezer for an hour because alcohol tastes terrible.

Enjoy!

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