A Perfect Dinner

Why does it always come down to food and drink with me?

Well, it does.  I 'spect it does with a lot of us.  So I'll give you a preview of my tomorrow's show, and tell you about the ultimate comforting dinner.

Did you see the thing in the NY Times about blender cocktails being OK again?  I was beginning to think they might be, as we make a couple of them that aren't spring break swill, and here on top of the Potter Building, we are very very cool.  So I made the Cherry Flip out of that article. Twice. It's dern good: fresh cherries, bourbon, bitters, lemon juice, and just a little sugar.  Blend with ice, garnish with mint.  We did it for Tom Jones (check out HIS show on Rando--a true delight!!!) last night, but tonight, we realized what the author of that Good Grey article had neglected: a splash of maraschino.  Cut back on the sugar if you do that, and maybe amp up the lemon juice just an eensy bit.  You've heard me go on and on and on about maraschino on the air...it's not the juice in the cherry jar, etc. etc.  'Tis a clear, not overly-sweet liqueur found in a well-stocked booze store, or on the net if your place of residence allows you to buy alcohol that way. 

I'm here to tell you that Cherry Flips rock.  I'll have more to say on my show.

And here's (believe it or not) what I made for dinner:

From scratch Tuna-Noodle Casserole (mostly organic ingredients and shut up 'till I explain), and...

Salad from our garden with homemade pseudo-Thousand Island dressing.  Pseudo-Thousand Island is mayo, a little buttermilk to thin it, ketchup, horseradish to taste, and a shake of dill weed.

From Scratch Tuna-Noodle:

1/2 pound decent pasta in a penne, rotini, or macaroni shape (can use Dreamfield's if you're low carbing it)

A big handful of chopped mushrooms--can be exotic or plain old

A smaller handful of finely chopped celery

5 tablespoons sweet  butter

4 tablespoons flour

2 cups milk warmed in the nuker

a pouch of mass market tuna (better than the cans)

about four ounces of grated cheddar cheese

a small handful of decent grated parmesan cheese

a few shakes of hot sauce

salt and pepper to taste

worcestershire sauce to taste

a shake of sweet or hot paprika

In a good-sized saucepan over low heat, sweat the onions and mushrooms in the butter, which you will have melted.  Add the flour when the veg are soft, and stir with a rubbermaid spatula until evenly distributed.  Cook a minute or two, still on a gentle flame.  Add the warm milk, turn up the heat to medium, and stir until thickened.  Add parmesan, tuna, & salt & pepper. Season with worcestershire sauce and hot sauce.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta.  Drain when just short of being cooked.

Mix the pasta and the white sauce mixture  in the pot in which you cooked the white sauce. Turn into buttered casserole dish, sprinkle with grated cheddar, add a shake of paprika and maybe another grind of black pepper. Bake in a 350 oven, covered (with lid or tin foil), for about twenty minutes.  Serve hot with salad.

OK, sneer.  It's middle 'murican food.  But the trick here is no fake ingredients--no cream of mushroom soup.  We fake that by making what the soup was in the recipe to fake in the first place: a white sauce.  It's easily enough made.  But it's so tasty I defy you to not eat thirds.

And a Cherry Flip is just the thing before it--sorta like a Squishee from the Quickie Mart, only really really good.  

I'm not heavily into irony unless you can eat it.

See you on the internet version of the airwaves tomorrow.

We Have Lifted Off

So, denizens of the Randosphere--

We have achieved lift-off.

RandoRadio is officially LAUNCHED.  The stream is running 24/7, we're readying new shows to upload, and all sorts of delightful treats are in store!

Want to know what it was like at the GaGa Arts Festival this weekend, sending our rocketship of a freeform internet radio station up?  It was hot.  I mean really hot--and not in the rock 'n' roll, sexy garments sense.  I mean good old-fashioned Hudson River Valley heat & humidity.  Lethal ozone levels.  The kind of hellish blast that one associates with...um...well, how about Hell?  As in "it was hotter than the hinges of Hell."  It was.

True RandoRadio fact: our beloved station lives in a very groovy (very basic in terms of luxuries like AC and such) arts center north of NYC, on the west bank of the Hudson.  We're in loftspace at GaGa, an old factory complex.  Think Soho before it gentrified, or Mass MOCA before they restored it.  It's cheap 'n' cheerful, and the company is great.  Our control room is thoroughly air conditioned.  But we needed to keep our office doors open to attract visitors during our launch party.  The result?  Lordy Lord.

How hot was it?

It was so hot that Ed Croft & Greg Schettino were actually slowed down, just a weeny, tiny bit.   Which meant that normal human beings could almost comprehend their energy levels.  Ed & Greg are, of course, the 17-year-old stars of Roots 'n' Ruckus, the one-hour live performance/oddball scratchy 78 rpm/rare C&W record show on Rando.  Think of that--two young guys, not even old enough to vote, who channel Hank Williams.  We've got 'em at Rando, and we're glad, even though it takes three of us oldsters to wrangle them when they come up for a show.  File under: herding cats.   Really talented cats, that is.  

Ed, Greg, and their electric band, The Moonshiners, opened the GaGa Arts Festival with a set of early Dylan, Hank Williams, and some rootsy/reggae-inflected original music.  They played outside under the music tent noontime this past Saturday.  They were astonishingly, dazzlingly good.  We have recorded evidence that they peeled the red paint off the old Haverstraw brick buildings surrounding them.   Stay tuned for it on RandoRadio!

Throughout the weekend, we streamed all our shows live, with video at Ustream. Saturday was Glenn Carella with My Midlife Crisis,  Kenny Pearson with The Black Coffee Hour (plus a bonus hour of Kenny performing his original songs and some great covers, too), Gus Mason's Lament, and The Father Of Us All, Lou Cannizzaro, with Random Madness.   Sunday opened up with Giacomo Servetti's G Train, and steamed down the tracks pulling along Cocktails with Chris (starring moi), Treavor Hastings' Sonic Streamz, and the long-awaited debut of Tom Jones, better known back in the FM heyday as WRNW's Duke of Darkness.  Treavor's fixing up the recordings of that rich stew right now.  It'll be rerun on our stream very soon.

Visitors dripping sweat drifted through, waving at the DJ's behind the glass window. Temperatures in our offices hovered around about 90 degrees.  It was meat-locker-ish in the control room though, and blessedly so, keeping radio hosts and computers from melting down.  Glenn inaugurated the weekend with a fanfare that summed up the whole affair perfectly: The Portsmith Symphonia's utter demoliton of  "Also Sprach Zarathustra".    

The rest of us, eagerly awaiting our turn at the frosty & refreshing mic, alternately laid our heads on the desks and whimpered, drinking oceans of sugar-free ginger ale (courtesy of Lou), and bothering one another by singing the refrain to "B Double E  Double Are You In?  Beer Run!  Beer Run!" Gus Mason completed the dreaded ear worm effect by playing the cursed thing on his show.  He was locked in the control room so we didn't kill him.

But we also managed to meet lots of folks who love the idea of free form radio that includes what we include: Edith Piaf, Robyn Hitchcock, Psychedelic bands no one has ever heard of,  Sun Ra, Kenny Young and the Eggplants...the list goes on...If one of those visitors was you, dear reader, welcome, welcome!

I spun all thirteen minutes of The Incredible String Band's "White Bird" on my show, along with my fave track from the Sex, Food, Death & Tarantulas (do I have the order right there?) Robyn Hitchcock CD.  My old pal Sheila from Summit School stuck her head in--and then my god kid, Juliet.  I'd cut down my RandoRadio T-shirt to a sleeveless Flash-dance sorta thing by then, which might not be quite the look for me, but at least I was cool enough to focus.

The video stream revealed me getting my hair caught in the headphones, getting the gauzy Grateful-Dead-concert-skirt I'd worn caught in the rolling chair, and exposing the side of my midriff to the world at large.  I'll tell you, Ladies and Gentlemen, that's entertainment!!  The audio stream was pretty darned good, though, if I do say so.  And what a cool thing it was to actually be a little nervous on the air because LOTS OF FOLKS WERE WATCHING AND LISTENING.

God, I love this station.

You should have been there.

Most of the Rando DJ's ended up back at my house later that night, drinking the Mojitos we'd been so cruelly deprived of in our effort to be coherent for station visitors that weekend.  

Friends, there is great joy in the Randosphere today.  Keep listening!  Keep listening!

  

Retro Lasagna

Unreconstructed, 1960's variety Lasagna!!

There are a number of dinner recipes that work very well with listening to Cocktails With Chris, and in fact that just plain work well with cocktails & friends over for dinner.

I made lasagna for the first time in maybe twenty years tonight, and it rocked.  Lasagna is something I used to make for my friends Back In the Day.  What I'd forgotten about it is that you can get it all tucked into the oven to bake and have plenty of time for a drink with your pals who have shown up for dinner or your mate before sitting down to something that (let's face it) everyone really, really likes.  

Here's what you need to make what I made tonight:

A box of good dried lasagna--Italian imported is best, but if you're counting carbs, Dreamfield's is pretty darned good, too.

2 big cans of decent crushed tomatoes.  I like Muir Glen fire-roasted, organic.

2 medium sized onions, diced

7 cloves fresh garlic, chopped or run through a press

a few tablespoons of olive oil

a shake of crushed red pepper

a shake of fennel seeds

2/3-3/4 pound bulk sweet Italian sausage (or links)

about a cup of fresh sliced mushrooms (any variety)

One fifteen ounce container of ricotta

One egg

A pinch or about ten gratings of fresh nutmeg

One one pound ball of fresh mozzarella

either dried or fresh basil, to taste

a good handful of fresh parsley, chopped

a splash of leftover dry red wine

Sautee the onions in enough olive oil to keep them from sticking (2 tablespoons or a little more).  When they begin to soften, throw in the sausage and the mushrooms.  Add the garlic.  If you're using bulk sausage, break it up with the spatula and saute.   If you had to buy links, add them sliced, and cook them that way.   Add crushed red pepper and fennel seeds. When the sausage and 'shrooms are mostly cooked, deglaze the pan with the red wine, dump in the tomatoes and cook for about ten minutes on medium/medium low heat.  Taste and correct the seasoning.  You may need a pinch of sugar (no more) if the sauce tastes acidy.  Throw in the handful of parsley.  Season with basil to taste.

Meanwhile, cook 12-14 pieces of dried lasagna in boiling water, using the largest pot you own.  When it just begins to soften, drain and rinse with cool water.   Grate or cut the mozarella cheese into tiny pieces.  Beat the ricotta in a bowl with one egg and a few gratings of fresh nutmeg, or a pinch of the pre-grated.  

Start to make the lasagna by ladling a bit of the sauce into the bottom of a long, shallow casserole dish.  Top with three lasagne noodles and begin to layer sauce, ricotta mixture, and mozarella with the noodles until you use up the lasagna noodles.  Top with a layer of sauce and a healthy scattering of mozarella and basil.  Bake at 350 for about a half an hour.

*****************

The glory of this dish is that you can get it done before anyone shows up for dinner, and enjoy having a drink or just some good conversation with your company while it bakes.  If you're an organized person, you can even have all the pots and knives and such that you used to prepare this meal cleaned before you put the lasagna in the oven.

This meal is good with a green salad and some good Italian bread, after just about any cocktail except the Tiki silliness ones (which have their other uses).

The Lovely Sound Of Shaken Ice Cubes

I'm thinking about the Nick and Nora movie where Nora summons Nick home from blocks away by shaking a cocktail.  Sitting on a park bench, Nick suddenly lifts his head--message received.

Now, this is Not Healthy according to contemporary thought.  I mean, have you ever counted how many drinks those two went through in a movie?  Yikes.  These days, she'd just pull out her iPhone, anyway.   Of course, a Nick and Nora era cocktail was about a quarter of the size of contemporary martini glasses.  But really, says the Voice of Reason, isn't it better to be additive-free?    

There's nothing wrong with additive-free.   And virtual cocktails can be just as effective as the liquid kind, anyway.  A free-form radio show is kind of a cocktail in and of itself.  By the way, there's also nothing wrong with free range, or the 100 mile diet, or...well, I won't go so far as endorsing low-fat because I think it MAKES  you fat.  Hmmm. I seem to have wandered off the topic.  I do that.

But this blog is going to be on many topics, so it's all OK.  Besides: it's MY BLOG.  And it's MY BLOG about my radio show on RandoRadio.com, Cocktails with Chris.  And also about the other Rando show of which I am proud to be a part, Roots 'n' Ruckus.  On that show, I'm the perky older  gal announcer being overrun by the incredible 17-year-old Hank Williams-esque energy of Ed Croft and his pal Greg  Schettino.  You have to listen to that show, my dear. I'll say more about it in another posting...

Meanwhile, I'm basking in the joy of having a copy of Steam Powered Aereoplain by John Hartford once again.  I've played it on a couple of my shows lately.  Speaking of blasts from the past, I was super-happy to download a copy of Nils Lofgren's "authorized bootleg" Back It Up!  I--um--sorta knew someone from the late, lamented WRNW (as in he's my ex-husband) and we had a vinyl copy of that one.  So cool that something that was first released only to radio stations is now available to us all!  And you've probably also figured out that I really, really, really like the latest Steve Earle record.  And Robyn Hitchcock's take on "Copper Kettle" on the Sex, Food, Death...and Tarantulas EP download is just wonderful.  And also, I have to find out more about Prem Joshua.  

Pausing for a breath...

I guess I should also 'fess up to being a poet with an internet forum at which I'm the head moderator, The Gazebo.  It's at alsopreview.com .  I also have a slender collection of verse called Zero Degrees At First Light which is published by David Robert Books (davidrobertbooks.com).  I think it's pretty darned good, but that's me.  I tend to keep the DJ end of my life and the poetry end of my life separate.   

So we know each other, now.

And RandoRadio is FINALLY streaming!!  Do join me--and us--on this cool adventure.  I promise there will be plenty of refreshments along the way.