FYI: This is an archive of my Tonight's Negroni email newsletter.
THAT'S RIGHT, Y'ALL! WE GOT "SEASONS" NOW!
Hey everybody. I'm gonna see if this becomes a thing again. It'll never be more than just off & on, but maybe I can make it a little more "on" than it has been.
Podcasts have changes the way I look at my commute. There are days that I'm actually bummed I only had half an hour in the car to listen to the latest Roderick on the Line. So, when I found out Mike, my "internet friend" from back in the early days of blogging, was on a podcast, I loaded that sucker up.
The thing about Mike is he and I are different peas from the same pod. We are both really good cooks, though he blows me out of the water with technique. At bottom, though, we are both beverage nerds. His passion to match my cocktail obsession is coffee (I mean, he's @coffeemike on Twitter!) and he knows so much about coffee. I'm totally into coffee, too, just as I imagine Mike likes a good drink. We're kind of mirrors in that way.
So anyway, it turns out the podcast is a sort of "Dad podcast", which is apparently a thing that exists. And it turns out the guys on the podcast had met Mike at a "Dad conference", which is also a thing that exists.
Note: I'm actually excited these things exist. Parenting seems like the hardest thing in the world, and I'm glad there are people getting together to share information or at least stories. Through whatever paths life has taken me, I am not a parent, so I consequently have no awareness of these things. I'm pretty sure it ain't easy being a dad.
Luckily for me, most of the talk was wrapped in the frame of cooking (with a bit of a coffee rabbit hole). it was in this context that Mike uttered the one thing that really lit me up. He was talking about developing the skill of cooking and mentioned off-hand that the first little success you have drives you to keep trying.
This is the essence of what I like to talk about here. The whole hobby thing...
You get interested in something, often first as a consumer. Then you think, "Hey, I should learn how to do this." So you read up on things and at least get a sense of where to start. Maybe you even take a class or something. Then you just have to start experimenting. Sure, occasionally you screw up, but you will succeed. And one little success will turn into another, and then another, and another! Those successes will excite you so much that you have to keep trying.
Another example is when my Special Lady Friend cooks something without a recipe for the first time. She gets jazzed!
This is the feeling I'm looking for every time I think to myself "What if I subsitute this ingredient for that in this cocktail recipe?"
Which brings us to:
Gran Classico Negroni
Gran Classico is an amaro from the illustrious Tempus Fugit Spirits company. It has just made it's retail debut in my home state of Colorado, so naturally I raced out to procure a bottle (thanks to the Proper Pour).
It is not a direct analog of the classic Negroni base, Campari. It's almost like a mix of Campari and Amaro Nonino (which is excellent, as well). Ultimately, Gran Classico is very complex and very interesting to play with as an ingredient.
- 1½ oz Hayman's Old Tom gin
- 1 oz Gran Classico
1 oz Cocchi Vermouth di Torino sweet vermouth
Add ingredient to a rocks glass with a big rock.
- Stir.
- Enjoy