Excellent Replica Breitling, Omega At Affordable Prices

If you were in New York in the 1980s, you probably have vivid memories of a vocal and opinionated mayor named Ed Koch, who spent his days noisily trying to tame a Bright Lights Big City that was rampant with crime and AIDS.

But even an overburdened mayor needs to kick back now and then. Mayor Koch did just that every Labor Day weekend at his friends David and Bobbie Margolis’s home in Quogue, a town on Long Island. The Margolises always put on a big lobster lunch, but what everyone really loved were David’s cocktails.

“We would sit there in his house and watch him with the blender and the coconut milk,” Mayor Koch recalled. “And we couldn’t wait for the first drinks to come out of the blender.” Namely, Margolis’s two specialties, the Ramos gin fizz and the coconut daiquiri, an icy wonder of coconut cream, fresh pineapple, lime juice and rum. Mayor Koch didn’t quite go so far as to give Margolis’s daiquiri the key to the city, but he did declare it his favorite drink in The Times in 1987.

I called David Wondrich, a cocktail expert whose book “Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl” will be out in November, and found him on a beach on Fire Island with, coincidentally, a thermosful of daiquiris at his side. When I read him the Margolis recipe, he said, “What you have there is actually a piña colada” with lime. Doh!

But the two are easily fused and confused. Many versions of the “coconut daiquiri”can be found online, all more or lesslike the Margolis recipe. Wondrich later summed up Margolis’s drinkby e-mail, calling it “adaiquirized piñacolada.”

“In other words,”he added, “it takes a piñacolada and, by exploiting a common element (the rum) and adding a feature of the daiquiri (the lime juice), appropriates the daiquiri’s name and (we must assume) serving style —that is, straight up in a stemmed glass.”

But the piña colada is really just a daiquiri with cosmetic enhancements. The original daiquiri, said to have been invented in Cuba during the Spanish-American war, was a rudimentary affair, made with rum, lime juice, sugar and a little soda water.Its creation is often attributed to the American mining engineer Jennings Cox, but as withmost cocktail histories — which Wondrich described as “a bottomless sinkhole of murk” —everyone present at the moment of its supposed concoction was drinking. A handwritten recipe survived the night.

“You could say it’s the first classic cocktail invented outside of the U.S.,” Wondrich said.

The recipe migrated to America around 1908 and was a popular drink by 1912. The American part, according to Wondrich, was putting it in a cocktail shaker and shaking it up with ice. It was only a matter of time before people would begin adding coconut, maraschino, pineapple and what have you.

The beauty of piña coladas and this kind of daiquiriis that “they’re creamy, they’re light, they’re extremely delicious when made properly,” Wondrich explained. “They’re not big, heavy-hitting, high-alcohol drinks. They’re frothy. Pineapple juice will froth up like the egg white in a fizz.”

All roads lead back to the Ramos gin fizz, a drink made with gin, lemon, orange-flower water, cream, soda water and egg white. Margolis’s other signature drink was a fizz. When I gave the coconut daiquiri recipe to Ravi DeRossi, the owner of Cienfuegosin Manhattan’s East Village, and his bartender, Jane Danger, and asked them to come up with something new, they ended up with a fizz that’s part piña colada, part Ramos gin fizz.

Their concoction, which they called an Isle of Manhattan fizz, blends lime juice, pineapple juice, coconut purée, rum, gin and orange-flower water, and it is extraordinarily good.

I met DeRossi and Danger at Cienfuegos, a restaurantspecializing in punch bowls, which is tucked above a Cuban sandwich shop at street level. Danger, who was dressed in a Coors T-shirt, short shorts and tall black boots, assembled the drink part by part, using an immersion blender to whip air into the mixture. The coconut purée, which Danger explained“takes the place of the cream and egg white in a fizz,”can be ordered by mail; it looks like Marshmallow Fluff and has a pure coconut flavor (coconut ice cream can be used in its place). The Isle of Manhattan fizz’s white-cloud appearance belies a serious drink (though if you have more than one, nothing will seem serious). Waves of rum, orange-flower water and coconut lap at your nose.

I bet Mayor Koch would change parties — from daiquiri to fizz — over it.

RECIPES

1987: Coconut Daiquiris
This recipe appeared in an article in The Times by Marian Burros. The drink came from David Margolis, a friend of Mayor Ed Koch’s.

1/2 very ripe pineapple, cut into chunks

Juice of 1 lime

2 tablespoons Coco Lopez cream of coconut

71/2 ounces Bacardi light rum

20 ice cubes.

Combine the ingredients in a blender and whiz until smooth. Serve immediately without garnishes. Makes about 5 daiquiris.

2010: Isle of Manhattan Fizz
By Ravi DeRossi, the owner of Cienfuegos in Manhattan, and Jane Danger, a bartender at the restaurant.

1/2 ounce lime juice

1/2 ounce pineapple juice

3/4 ounce simple syrup (see note)

2 ounces coconut purée or coconut ice cream

4 drops orange-flower water

3/4 ounce Oronoco rum or other dark rum

3/4 ounce Hayman’s Old Tom gin or any gin you prefer

2 tablespoons club soda

Lime twist, 3/4-inch wide, for serving.

1. In a shaker, combine the lime juice, pineapple juice, simple syrup, coconut purée, orange-flower water, rum and gin. Use an immersion blender to purée the mixture and give it volume.

2. Add ice and the club soda to the shaker. Shake for 30 seconds, then strain into a tall, stemmed glass. Garnish with a wide twist of lime. Serves 1.

note:To make a simple syrup, combine equal parts sugar and water in a small saucepan. Bring to a boil and cook until the sugar is dissolved. Let cool. The coconut purée, which is made by Culinary Traditions, is available at Amazon.com.

Driver from: www.nytimes.com

FIGURING out what to do with leftover grilled meat is not exactly a bewildering conundrum. Slice it thinly, stack it onto some good bread with a smear of mustard and a gloss of mayonnaise, and last night’s London broil becomes today’s deluxe lunch — no recipe required.

But some occasions demand more than a simple sandwich. It might be friends coming over to dinner, the desire to open a bottle of wine that’s more special than usual, or just a hankering for something more substantial than meat, condiments and bread.

To be ready for moments like those, I’ve been grilling more than I need for just one meal, reveling in the convenience of a fridge stocked with cold, tasty meat to be repurposed with a minimum of fuss.

There is one caveat when using leftover grilled meat. As the meat chills, the flavors recede, becoming quieter and mellower. So while a nicely seasoned garlic-rubbed leg of lamb might taste like savory perfection eaten hot off the flames, the next day it could probably use a boost.

In sandwiches, the condiments do that work.

For the chicken quesadillas that I made out of Sunday’s grilled chicken thighs, shredded and stuffed into a corn tortilla with a little cheese and quickly toasted, I stirred together a lime-zest-imbued cucumber and avocado salsa that added a welcome citrus edge.

For a Vietnamese-inspired cold steak and rice noodle salad I had made a few weeks earlier, I used fish sauce and chilies to play up the beefy nuances while peanuts added texture and a warm, toasted flavor. To keep things as speedy as possible, I picked up some thin rice sticks, which complemented the flavors of the sauce and could be soaked instead of boiled.

A quick soak was all the couscous for a lamb and feta salad needed, too. I added some golden raisins to the bowl to soften while the couscous plumped up. Plenty of lemon, and herbs from the pots on my deck, added freshness and tang.

My most recent grilling endeavor included sausages. A few days later, I thought about what to do with them. Should I toss them into another salad, maybe with potatoes and capers? Or crumble them into pasta? In the end, I heeded my cravings and made hoagies with melted provolone and a coleslaw spiked with minced pickled peppers to add a moist and spicy crunch.

After all, it had been a while since I made a sandwich out of leftovers.

Driver from: www.nytimes.com

I'm a spice freak. It's virtually impossible for me to pass up the chance to fritter time away in exotic markets of any ethnicity -- which is why my husband will often remind me that "we're supposed to be walking briskly, honey" when I pull him into some eye-catching, aromatic shop whose aisles are jam-packed with herbs and spices.

Once I'm inside a culinary casbah, I'm on the lookout for spices I've never tried before, because I love to cook and to experiment with new flavors. Recently, I came home with a little bag full of tiny seeds labeled as "black cumin."

I know regular cumin, of course -- I use it all the time in Mexican and Indian dishes. The black cumin seeds I bought didn't look anything like the cumin I know -- these obviously were from a different plant entirely.

I tasted them and liked their interesting thyme-oregano flavor -- which, I discovered, was delectable when sprinkled liberally on broiled salmon filets. They also make a tasty addition to breadcrumb or panko toppings for sauteed chicken breasts or fish.

So I was intrigued when I got a press release a couple days ago from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Researchers there have been studying black cumin (Nigella sativa) and discovered that a chemical in its oil called thymoquinone (which, by the way, is also present in the essential oil of thyme -- hence the flavor similarity), is an anti-inflammatory that seems to inhibit the development of pancreatic cancer in lab studies.

Turns out, black cumin seeds and oil are used in traditional medicine by many Middle Eastern and Asian healers for a broad array of diseases, including some immune and inflammatory disorders, says Hwyda A. Arafat, MD, PhD, associate professor, departments of surgery and pathology, anatomy and cell biology at Jefferson Medical College.

Driver from: healthy.com