Sarah Karnasiewicz
No more gin and tonics!
Labor Day is still weeks away and our summer cocktail repertoire is getting tired. Only you can help! Send us your favorite summer drink recipes -- and we'll pick a winner.
Sometimes an icy alcoholic beverage is the only remedy for the sticky, sweaty, late-summer blues. But what to pour? Rum and cokes? They’re so freshman year. Gin and tonics? Sophisticated, but a snooze. Summertime needs some new classics — and we need your help. Send Salon your favorite warm-weather drink recipes by cocktail hour on Friday, Aug. 10, and next week we’ll select the top contenders, assemble a panel of discerning drinkers to sample them, and declare the winners.
To enter: Submissions must be sent to skarnasiewicz@salon.com and should include both a recipe and an introductory paragraph describing the drink’s origins or inspirations, suggested food pairings, and most important, how many is too many. All cocktails will be evaluated within the following four categories: gin, vodka, rum and other. (Go wild!)
Recipes and photos of the winning cocktails in each category will be featured on Salon, and one grand prize winner will also receive a copy of “The Backyard Bartender: 55 Cool Summer Cocktails,” by Nicole Aloni.
So, readers, start mixing — and cheers!
Life beyond the lens
New novels frame two of photography's most compelling legends, Edward Curtis and Edward Steichen.
The most fascinating person in any given photograph is usually the one whose face is cut off, out of focus or turned away. We can smile and say cheese all we like, but it’s these mistakes, the shots snapped a half-second too late, that truly reveal, hinting at the unguarded lives beyond the frame. Two new novels — “The Shadow Catcher,” by Marianne Wiggins, and “The Last Summer of the World,” a debut by Emily Mitchell — zoom in on this periphery to explain and expand on the lives and loves of two of photographic history’s most complicated and compelling characters, Edward Curtis and Edward Steichen.
Continue Reading CloseWhat else we’re reading
Rosie O'Donnell, stillborn birth certificates and one mother's expensive summer vacation.
Rosie O’Donnell, radical hero? In the years since leaving her Emmy Award-winning talk show, Rosie O’Donnell has become the “most visible lesbian in the country” and single-handedly opened up daytime television to candid dissent, writes Kera Bolonik in the Nation. But until she stops cracking Chinamen jokes and cleaving to 9/11 conspiracy theories, says Bolonik, she won’t be the public critic the left needs.
Continue Reading CloseSummer reading, summer eating
Elizabeth David's classic "Summer Cooking" is as fresh and enchanting today as it was 50 years ago, when seasonal food was still a subversive idea.
There’s nothing like midsummer in New York to make a person acutely aware of the deprivations of city life. Does anyone grow up and move away, only to yearn for swarms of roaches and sweltering subway stations? For this country-mouse transplant, summer and the city are a cocktail that provokes the sincerest kind of longing; campfires, salty corn on the cob, fried clams and cans of beer sipped while dangling your toes in a dark lake — these are the fabric of my summer fantasies. But short of a fairy godmother with a shore house, I’ve found only a few quotidian treats capable of breaking the humid gloom: a midnight thunderstorm, maybe, a mound of lemon ice in a paper cup — and a little yellow cookbook by Elizabeth David.
Continue Reading CloseFinale wrap-up: “The King of Queens”
The long-running sitcom ends its reign with a flurry of bickering, boxers and babies -- and, yes, a few misty eyes.
Monday night, after more than 200 episodes and nine seasons on CBS, “The King of Queens” stepped down from its sitcom throne. A scrappy outer-borough survivor, somehow “King,” despite chronically lackluster reviews and musical chairs time slots, outlived both its dumpy cousins, like “Yes, Dear” and “Still Standing,” and its overshadowing elder sibling, “Everybody Loves Raymond,” to be the last live-action comedy of the 1990s still on the air. The exterior of Doug and Carrie Heffernan’s modest brick Rego Park town house remained unchanged until the series’ final scene — and inside, our two protagonists were still going at it — but the door won’t be opening for us again.
Continue Reading CloseGoing whole hog
Is the impressive new cookbook "Pork and Sons" a contemporary charcuterie classic or just piggy porn? I cooked a swine-inspired feast to find out.
“You want a heart? We got them every day. Every part of the pig. We got the ears — I keep ‘em in the freezer — we got the head …” The butcher continued rattling off his inventory on the other end of the receiver, but I’d heard all I needed to hear.
I’d had swine on the brain for days, ever since “Pork and Sons,” chef Stephane Reynaud’s homage to all things hog, landed on my desk. Part cookbook and part memoir of his upbringing in the mountains of France among a community of butchers and farmers, “Pork and Sons” details the life and times of some very pampered pigs from youth to slaughter and sausage to saucier. The volume is already a bestseller in Reynaud’s native country — in 2005, it won the Grand Prix de la Gastronomie Française — but the release of the U.S. edition feels right on cue, too: timed to coincide with both the lunar “Year of the Pig” and the porcine renaissance that has been sweeping the American culinary community. (Here in New York, a local chef was recently celebrated in the paper for serving a pork cocktail. Can we really still call it the “other white meat”?)
Continue Reading ClosePage 2 of 21 in Sarah Karnasiewicz