Happy Hour at Hillbilly Tea

Drop yourself somewhere between the downtown arena and the downtown White Castle, and you'll end up at Hillbilly Tea: a disarmingly charming spot for food, tea, and for a little while now, booze.








Via their website, I discovered they had a happy hour.  The site says only "tea and hooch - happy hour - wed thru sun - 4pm-6pm!"  With that scant description, we were left to trundle on down there to see about the offerings. 

I settled on a tea-infused vodka flight to start.  With help from our server, I chose my three:

• Smoked, 
• The Good Earth, and 
• Big Earl's. 

      I hardly need to describe to you what smoked tea vodka tastes like.  It tastes, you know, like smoke.  Smoke that gets you drunk.  Smoked tea vodka was definitely worth a try, but it wasn't something I truly savored. 

The Big Earl's was a nice, easy drinking infusion.  It obviously resembled Earl Grey tea in its flavor profile.  The aroma was flowery and the taste mild.

The Good Earth, quite simply, must have been what the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream mixed their cocktails with.  (The vodka may have gone to my head a bit by the time I had this revelation.  You'll have to just go with me.)  To the nose, it was slightly minty, and it tasted like nectar in vodka form.

Speaking of going to my head: let's get some snacks.



We tried the white bean and sage fritters and the corn fried tofu; both were delicious.  The fritters were creamy and chewy, perfectly round fried balls of richness.  Reminiscent of hush puppies.  The tofu was a completely different texture: firm on the inside, slightly crisp on the outside.  The BBQ sauce that came with the tofu was divinely sweet and smoky.

A couple of cocktail offerings tickled my fancy, but with my fancy tickled enough already by the vodka flight, saving them for our next visit seemed appropriate.  The Big Early (Big Earl's vodka, soda and lemony syrup) sounded tailor-made to sip on one's front porch.  The Old Rose (bourbon and house made tea bitters, muddled with orange and a moonshine cherry) had me picturing myself draped in a shawl, winding a Victrola and tugging on the drink in my etched glass tumbler.

Hillbilly Tea serves up consistently great and creative food in a casually funky atmosphere.  The service is always friendly and chill, but very competent.  Their Happy Hour is yet another reason to stop in.

Vampin' on BourbonBlog

Thanks to BourbonBlog for picking up my story about Majid's Miracle Berry Feast.

Tripping the Berry Fantastic at Majid's St. Matthews, Louisville

"Hey there!" to anyone visiting from BourbonBlog.

Lonely bourbon? Pair with pear.

Finding myself with two lovely Bartlett pears, ripe and ready to roll, I hit the Google for some ideas on what to do with them. In particular, I thought they might be nice in a cocktail. Pear puree shaken with vodka sounded novel.

Well, that got derailed. I ended up aggregating some ideas I found, as is my way, and in the process, learning that pears taste really good with bourbon. Inspired by Make It Naked, I set out to create a pear vanilla simple syrup to pair with it.

I peeled, then quartered (or maybe eighthed?) the pears. My intention was to pop all of the fruit into the mix, but upon peeling them, the pears exploded with so much juice and fragrance, I was rendered helpless. A couple of the eighths went down right the hatch. Plenty of fruit left for the syrup, I figured.  My kitchen philosphy is one that eschews exact science. (Notice how little I bake.)

Beginning with the typical base for a simple syrup, I combined one part sugar and one part water in a pot and boiled it till the sugar dissolved. Next, I added the pear eighths and the peels. Some grated ginger. Then, the vanilla bean... Have you ever started a recipe just sure that you had a certain ingredient in your armory, only to get mid recipe, pot of stuff boiling on the stove, and find you don't actually have said ingredient? So it was with the vanilla bean. Luckily, we had just enough vanilla extract to approximate a vanilla bean (about a teaspoon of vanilla extract = one a half of a bean) so that went into the pot, too. Then I simmered the mixture for 10 minutes or so.

After that, the peels were removed, and the pear eighths were blended into the syrup with my immersion blender, and then the whole thing was sent through a strainer to smooth it out a bit more. The pear-vanilla simple syrup now complete, all that was left was to cool it down, so into the fridge it went, for about a half hour.

Old B-town, current staple for mixin'. Regan's Orange Bitters.

Meanwhile, I assembled the ingredients for the cocktail. Just bourbon and bitters. I used a two-to-one syrup-to-bourbon ratio, added a few dashes of bitters and shook it all together with a heaping helping of ice. Lots of ice seemed necessary as I couldn't quite wait for the syrup to cool all the way down.









What poured from the shaker was nothing less than a preview of autumn in liquid form. Spicy orange bitters conjure a gust of bracing November wind, swirling leaves, sweaters, boots... Slàinte!


I ended up with quite a lot of extra simple syrup. So I poured it into an ice cube tray for safekeeping. I'll throw one into a bourbon on the rocks, just to amp it up a bit, and a cube recently made its way into one of my husband's smoothies.

Handy little buggers to have around.

Tripping the Berry Fantastic at Majid's

Majid’s hosted The Miracle Feast this past Thursday evening, serving a tasting menu and various cocktails in order to illustrate nature’s power to alter how flavors are received. Four cocktails and nine food tastings... twice. A gastronomical "Groundhog Day.” Except in this case, the second time around, things didn't taste the same as they did the first. I would have the Miracle Berry Tablet to blame for the transformation. For the uninitiated, the Miracle Berry tablet’s active ingredient is miraculin, a glycoprotein that causes sour foods to be perceived as sweet.

It all started out innocently enough. We began with the Violet Hour and a tasting of The Countess, a special cocktail prepared by our guide for the evening, bartender Stephen Dennison. The Countess, he explained, was a great way to get an aperitif into our bellies in advance of the oncoming barrage of flavors and richness. A divine starter, it was comprised of the ingredients for a Negroni dry shaken with black peppercorns, thereby infusing the drink with essential oils.

Nine dishes were served via a combination of family style and waiter presentation: Portuguese kale salpicon, kimchi Brussels sprouts, chimichurri flank steak rouladen, double-fried chicken wings, duck bruschetta, cucumber strata with pimento goat cheese, braised pork belly, calamari ceviche, and whiskey sour bread pudding.

Four beverages were in place when we sat down - three artisan cocktails and a glass of pinot grigio. My favorite of the mixed drinks was the Thanks for the Memories, aptly described by Dennison as a cross between a mint julep and a champagne cocktail. Two of my favorite drinks melded into one.

After the first tastings were concluded, we received our assignment: eat the tablet provided and allow it to transform our conceptions of taste. Each of us was given a spoon (all the better to scrape the surface of our tongues, so as to help the miracle tablet work its magic) and one Miracle Berry Tablet. The trick was to make sure it coated the tongue as it dissolved, so as to thoroughly confuse the taste buds.

The test was a lemon wedge; if tasting it felt like you were licking the sugar rim of a lemon drop martini, you were in business. I was off and running. For the remainder of the evening, I continued to use the lemon as a barometer, checking periodically to make sure the miraculin was still working.

Not much of a pinot grigio fan in general, I had sipped the wine after first sitting down to get my initial impression: kind of flat and not much to it, said my taste buds. However, post-miracle berry, it assumed the flavor profile of a semi-sweet Riesling.

Some of the food tastings didn’t change on my palate: the kale salpicon was just as creamy and the pork belly just as smoky and delicious as they were the first time around.

Others, however, changed dramatically. The kimchi Brussels sprouts were stripped of all their acidity, leaving only sweet, earthy sprouts behind. The chimichurri on the flank steak paired with the daikon inside the roulade were sugary. Even the fruity-hot chicken wings, with their fresh lime juice coating, gave off waves of extra sweetness. The Kool-Aid explosion came from the likely suspect: the ceviche. The calamari tasted like it had been marinating for days in a Skittles vinaigrette.

The night concluded with Dennison handing everybody one more spoon, this one containing a couple mouthfuls of hibiscus granita - yet another welcome aperitif. I took a final hit of lemon wedge, only to find that the miracle berry's effect was, by that time, at about 50%. The pinot was starting to taste like pinot again. “Lick a snozzbery; it tastes like a snozzberry,” I thought. The Miracle Berry trip nearing its conclusion, I realized the ride I had just been on wasn’t a dinner at all. It was a mouth-watering science experiment.