Monthly Archives: December 2014

Longmorn 41, 1969 (Gordon & Macphail)

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Longmorn 41, 1969

This is the the oldest Longmorn I’ve yet tasted. I referred to it in my review of the 1968-2004 from Scott’s Selection as probably the last Longmorn of this age and era that I will get to taste. This one is from Gordon & Macphail and was bottled for van Wees in the Netherlands. I couldn’t spring for a full bottle but also couldn’t resist paying for two 20 ml samples when the good people of Whiskybase made them available. As the samples were not themselves cheap I hope this one will live up to the standards of the other ancient Longmorns I’ve had.

I think this one might be different though from the others of its age/era that I’ve tasted in that it’s from a first fill sherry butt. I don’t believe the G&M 40, 1971 (the previous oldest Longmorn I’ve had) was from first fill sherry, and I don’t believe any of the Scott’s bottles are either (Scott’s Selection, of course, very rarely specified the type of cask their releases were from). Continue reading →

Ghugni: Chickpeas in a Bengali Style

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Ghugni
Following my “Indian Home Cooking Week“, just a one-off recipe this week. [And see here for the second edition of “Indian Home Cooking Week”; and here for all my cooking posts so far.]

This one is for a take on a classic Bengali dish called ghugni. Ghugni is one of those rare dishes that is both a popular street food and made at home. It can be found year round but is often made in homes on the last day of Durga Pujo—the week-long celebration that is the Bengali religious/cultural festival (imagine Christmas, Thanksgiving, the 4th of July, the Oscars and the Super Bowl all rolled into one but communal, public, louder and with more food). It’s most traditionally made with dried yellow or white peas but it’s not unusual to see it made with kala/desi/black chana/chickpeas as well. Here I make it with garbanzo beans. This has always been a popular dish with everyone I’ve made it for and it’s supremely adaptable.

As with almost all my bean cooking I don’t really bother with anything but Rancho Gordo’s garbanzo beans (disclosure: Rancho Gordo proprietor Steve Sando is a pal). They cook implausibly fast, are incredibly sweet and the pot liquor is great. Continue reading →

Kavalan Solist, Fino, Cask S060814011

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Kavalan Fino Solist

I’ve reviewed a bunch of Kavalans before and not found any of them to merit the hype emanating from some quarters. They’ve ranged from mediocre to very good, but not even the one I’ve liked the most so far seemed to me to come close to meriting the very high asking price. That would be the last Solist Fino cask I tried (cask S061127001). That was an EU release and since then the Fino has arrived in the US and is going for anywhere between $300 and $400 (and doubtless for more at stores that don’t show up online). It’ll be interesting to see what their success will be like at this price point. Will the high price be enough to turn it into a status item for the Christmas season or will we see it discounted eventually? Time will tell, I suppose. But I’ll be able to tell you a little sooner than that what I think the cask this sample is from is worth.

(This is not the current US release either, by the way; this was released in 2012.)

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Laphroaig 14, 2000 (Old Malt Cask)

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OMC Laphroaig 14

I purchased this Laphroaig in knee-jerk mode. Laphroaig is my favourite distillery; sherried Laphroaigs are thin on the ground; the marriage of peat and sherry is great when it works out; almost every sherried Laphroaig I’ve had has been very good. So this seemed like as sure a bet as I was ever going to make.

I opened this bottle for one of local group’s tastings earlier in the fall and it did not do so well. One person did like it a lot but almost everyone else had it as their bottom whisky of the night (we drink an ounce each of four whiskies at each tasting and everyone other than me drinks blind). It wasn’t my bottom whisky but I didn’t give it a high score either. The problem? Sulphur. Now, it’s been my experience that sulphur can sometimes dissipate and so I let the bottle sit for a long time before coming back to taste it again. I could tell that there was a very nice whisky under there somewhere and I hoped time and air would pull it out. Did it happen? I’m sorry to kill the suspense, but no, it did not. There was some improvement but it remained a sulphured mess.

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Mortlach 15, 1995 (Chieftain’s)

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Chieftain's Mortlach

Mortlach has been in the news a lot this year with the launch of their hyper-expensive new line. Prices of indie casks from the distillery seem to also have gone up a little as a result. It will be interesting to see if things remain that way in the long run. Diageo may want to protect the new profile of their brand by making fewer casks available to the indies but if production is also going up (a big if) then more casks will become available anyway.

At any rate, this is not a recent release. It was released in 2011 by Ian Macleod’s Chieftain’s Choice label. This label used to be quite ubiquitous in the United States once upon a time, but I haven’t noticed too many new releases—not that that means very much given my general level of obliviousness and my disinterest in reading press releases and marketing materials. This was a bottle I thought hard about when it was first released but after tasting it at a Minneapolis store decided against it. I did love an older Mortlach bottled by Chieftain’s for K&L and so always wondered if I’d given unfair short shrift to this one. And so I’m very glad to be able to review it again from a large’ish sample.

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Grand Szechuan Yet Again

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Grand Szechuan: Stir Fried Pea Tips

It may seem like I post reviews of every meal we eat out but that’s not entirely true. I certainly don’t post reviews of every meal we eat at Grand Szechuan, for if I did it would get rather monotonous.We are probably a couple of meals away from having eaten their entire Sichuan menu. Once we’ve done that we’ll probably go back with our most hardcore friends for a personal “best of” meal.

Indeed, I’ve never actually posted meal reviews of Grand Szechuan—both of my previous reviews have been compendiums of several meals eaten there (see here for the first and here for the second), and the same is true of this one. This covers a number of meals eaten since the summer, and only some of what we ate on all these occasions is pictured: things that were pictured in the previous reviews have been omitted (even I am not that tedious); however, I may channel my inner George Lucas and go back and update some of the really crappy older pictures with (slightly) better ones of the same dishes taken on later occasions. Continue reading →

Highland Park 18

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Highland Park 18

I’ve previously reviewed the Highland Park 12 and 15, and here is the third in the classic trifecta from the distillery. The Highland Park 18 is one of the great distillery bottlings and in some ways may be the quintessential Highland Park malt. Richer and rounder than the 15 yo, mellower and fruitier than the 12 yo, this and the Lagavulin 16 would be at the top of my list if I was told that I had to pick only a handful of widely available bottles to drink for the rest of my life (the Laphroaig 10, the Nadurra and the Clynelish 14 would probably round out the top five).

The price has gone up over the years but it remains good value in my book (and it helps that in our neck of the woods it can still be found a little south of $100 from time to time). I think it’s between this and the Yamazaki 18 for the title in the OB heavily sherried class, and the Yamazaki 18 now costs almost twice as much. Let’s hope that the owners don’t muck this (or the 12 yo) up as they continue to release an endless stream of NAS/young bottles with silly concepts and packaging.

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Chapatis and Parathas (Indian Home Cooking Week 1)

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Parathas
Rejoice, whisky people, Indian Home Cooking Week is at an end.

As for those of you who have been following and enjoying these recipes, and possibly looking forward to them, you might recall that I’d promised chapatis, parathas and pickles for the last post, and here I am with only chapatis and parathas. This is how life is. Also, the post will get way too long if I write up the pickle recipes as well and so I’m going to save those for a future post. Stop whining! I’ve already given you so much!

First, a tedious autobiographical detour!

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Hybrid Chicken Curry (Indian Home Cooking Week 1)

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Ready to Serve
“Indian Home Cooking Week” rolls on.

If you’re wondering about the “hybrid” part, it’s not in reference to the ancestry of the chicken I used (though it was probably a hybrid too); it’s in reference to the origins of this recipe. Like yesterday’s salmon recipe this one is also not a regional recipe. It is, however, a very conscious mixing of two approaches, one Bengali and one Malayali. The recipe gets underway more or less as in the style of an excellent recipe from one of my aunts, and is finished in a manner very common in Malayali cooking (Malayali= (of) the Malayalam speaking peoples of Kerala). I don’t usually go about trying to create hybrid or Indo-fusion dishes like this one but this one just works because there’s a strong crossover to begin with.

Let’s get to it.

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Masala Salmon (Indian Home Cooking Week 1)

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Masala Salmon
After some dal and pumpkin it’s time to get non-veg with Indian Home Cooking Week.

I always go on about the regionality of Indian cuisine but this salmon recipe is not regionally specific at all. It uses combinations of ingredients and flavours that might be very loosely dubbed southwestern Indian but it’s not from any particular place. It’s a recipe I improvise anew each time I make it, and on this occasion I’m even improvising the chief mode of cooking—roasting—for the first time. Usually, I do this as a braise. I generally advise against cooking anything for the first time if there’s an audience involved, but this actually came out rather well and so here it is.

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Mishti Kumro: Pumpkin/Squash in a Bengali Style (Indian Home Cooking Week 1)

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Mishti Kumro
Indian Home Cooking Week kicked off yesterday with a recipe for chholar dal; here today is a recipe for a vegetable dish to eat with it: mishti kumro. “Mishti” means sweet in Bengali, and for those of you know Bengali food it may seem redundant for a Bengali dish to be qualified thus. My people have a renowned sweet tooth (though we can’t compare to most Gujaratis) and often add a bit of sugar to a lot of savoury dishes as well. The “mishti” in the name of this dish, however, is a qualifier of the second word “kumro”, which means pumpkin, and means only that the dish features sweet pumpkin—the dish itself is not particularly sweet. I’m not really sure which of the bewildering multiplicity of pumpkins and squashes available in the US is closest to the Bengali pumpkin. If I had to guess, I’d go with buttercup, but really I use whatever I have at hand: butternut, buttercup, kabocha, delicata, or in this case ambercup. Continue reading →

Chholar Dal (Indian Home Cooking Week 1)

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Chholar Dal
Here is the first of my recipes for my Indian Home Cooking Week and fittingly it’s for a dal.

It’s hard to imagine a meal in an Indian home that doesn’t feature dal of some kind, whether it is as the fulcrum of a meal—as the primary source of protein in vegetarian households, or as a cheap source of nutrition in poorer households—or as a preliminary “course” before you move on to fish or meat. It’s eaten with rice, with chapatis and parathas and other breads, and even by itself. As with all other aspects of Indian food, there’s a strong regional aspect to dal: some dals are more prominent in some regional cuisines than others, some are traditionally not eaten at all in some regions, and even the dals that cross regions in popularity are usually prepared very differently in them. And, of course, their names change with language—one region’s toor dal is another’s arhar dal etc.

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Indian Home Cooking Week

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Mr CreosoteI’m afraid I am going to be taxing the patience of my whisky readership greatly this week (or at least in a different way). I said earlier this month that I would be posting more recipes going forward and I am not a liar.

There will be no whisky reviews this week. Instead I will be posting each day this week a recipe for an Indian dish. All of them are for dishes as prepared in homes, and so often very different from what those who are used to Indian restaurant food in the West will recognize as Indian food. Together they will add up to a full menu.

Here is what is coming: Continue reading →

Springbank 12 CS, Batch 7

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Springbank 12 CS, Batch 7

Let us stick with the cask strength whisky but move south from the Speyside, all the way to Campbeltown: yes, it’s the Springbank 12 CS, the seventh release to be exact. This is a mix of first-fill and refill sherry casks (I’m not sure of the proportion). I’ve had some of the earlier batches, with the first batch (at 54.6%) my favourite. Again, that bottle was finished long before the blog and so I have no notes on it.

Despite the fact that they bottle  a lot of sherried whisky Springbank doesn’t always come up when people ask for recommendations of sherried whiskies. This is partly because their more intensely sherried whiskies are quite expensive (see the 18 yo and the absurdly priced 21 yo) and partly because the more affordable ones emphasize the quintessential distillery character (brine, leather) over sherry for sherry’s sake. That has been my experience at any rate. Let’s see if this one supports that claim.

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Aberlour A’bunadh, Batch 45

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Aberlour A'bunadh Batch 45
Having reviewed the Glenfarclas 105 and the Macallan CS, I may as well complete the trifecta of iconic young, cask strength sherried malts from the Speyside. And so here is Batch 45 of the Aberlour A’bunadh (I’m not sure what number the series is up to now). As I noted in the review of the 105, the A’bunadh is very well-loved by whisky geeks—indeed, it’s probably not a stretch to say that it might be one of the most loved of contemporary malts among whisky geeks. Its name comes up seemingly on a daily basis on the Malt Maniacs Facebook page (this is an exaggeration—please do not bother counting) and you can always count on it being mentioned when someone asks for a whisky recommendation on a public forum. Its easy availability and its affordability (in relative terms, not in relation to its age, which is unknown) both probably have something to do with it, but, as I’ve said on a number of occasions, I think the real key is the batch numbering (which make every release limited and “special” and also triggers obsessive compulsive disorder, which whisky geeks are very susceptible to). It’s also, of course, usually quite good.  Continue reading →

Bangkok Thai Deli II (Saint Paul, MN)

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Bangkok Thai Deli: Tilapia

After our decent but not particularly special meal at Sen Yai Sen Lek we were left with a hankering for some better Thai food. So when we found ourselves heading to the Children’s Museum in Saint Paul a few Sundays ago we followed that visit with a return to Bangkok Thai Deli for lunch (see here for my writeup of a previous meal there). On’s Kitchen is closed on Sundays or else we would have gone there, but really there’s not so very much separating On’s and Bangkok Thai Deli these days. Well, there is the fact that Bangkok Thai Deli is usually crammed for Sunday lunch which means the likelihood of both a wait and fairly spotty service, both of which we encountered. Continue reading →

Macallan CS

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Macallan CS

Following my review of the Glenfarclas 105, here is another cask strength, sherried beast from the Speyside: this time the Macallan CS (I actually tasted it right after the 105). I believe this has been discontinued. I’ve finished a couple of bottles of this over the years and have always liked it. I expect I will again as this is from a 2010 bottling (which was probably what my last ex-bottle was as well—my spreadsheet says I finished it in December 2011). Of course, these days a lot of Macallan’s whisky is NAS but it’s now mostly all colour-coded as we’re all apparently children. And I don’t think they put out any official cask strength whisky anymore.

I do have to say that the CS always seemed like an outlier in their lineup even before they went to the paintbox series. What I mean is that Macallan has always been associated with drinkability and a mellow palette of flavours (I don’t meant this in a pejorative sense at all) and the CS was always rather unruly. So maybe they also have greater “brand “conformity now across the lineup? I doubt that had anything to do with the decision to discontinue this expression though. Anyway, let’s get to it. Continue reading →