Food & Drink

In the mood for something different from the usual eggnog? Try the Puerto Rican version, “coquito.”

In the video embedded above, author Michele Carlo shows off her mixology skills with a tutorial on how to make the drink. Carlo published her memoir, Fish Out of Agua: My Life On Neither Side Of The (subway) Tracks in August. Carlo was recently spotted at the “In the Flesh” erotic reading series.

While extremely generous with her rum pour, she doesn’t give measurements. For more exact instructions, click here.

Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

April is National Poetry Month and to celebrate, the Academy of American Poets arranged poetry-inspired cocktail specials at five bars in New York.

The participating bars are Back Forty, Freemans, Mayahuel, PDT and Savoy. And here’s the recipe for one of the drinks, made by William Tigertt at Freemans and inspired by the Denis Johnson poem “Heat”: 2 oz Plymouth gin; 3/4 oz lemon juice; 1/2 oz lavender-infused honey.

Perhaps to get you in the mood, Poets.org has a lengthy list of poems about drinking. (Over at Poetry.com’s blog Harriet, they’re celebrating National Poetry Month in a soberer way, by inviting back a couple dozen of their past contributors to blog with them. Today: Rachel Zucker and Amber Tamblyn.)

Anyway, we’ll be checking out these cocktails one at a time this month, and we’ll report back. Know anyone crazy enough to hit up all five in a Poetry Month bar crawl? Let us know.

We recently heard from former GalleyCat co-editor Andy Heidel about his new venture—he’s opening a bar in Prospect Heights called The Way Station that promises to be “Brooklyn’s First Steampunk Bar and Performance Venue.” The bar had a “secret” opening last Saturday, and will be sprucing up its steampunk look with a photo shoot in mid-October, followed by a Halloween party… and by then, Heidel told us, he expects he’ll be hosting steampunk readings every Monday night.

What do you drink with your favorite book? Over at Bookninja, readers are comparing drink recipes to accompany their favorite books. The blog includes Sex on the Beach for reading Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle and a $1,500 bottle of Chateau Petrus for reading Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero.

After a long week of layoffs and cutbacks, GalleyCat pondered other whiskey-related recommendations: Wild Turkey with Hunter S. Thompson and Cutty Sark Scotch with Haruki Murakami.

Add your favorite author and drink pairings in the comments section. If you need a reference library, check out Book Examiner‘s boozy literary feature and Jeff VanderMeer’s on-going authorial mixology. Maybe we should all follow this Bookninja reader’s advice: “Forget how to write books. I want a how to drink like an author book. Maybe not as useful to one’s craft but, after enough research, who cares?”

Book Club Girl has a great idea today, pairing wines with books! Who doesn’t love to settle into a cozy chair with a glass of Merlot while re-reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. They’ve set up a deal with wine.com for 1 cent shipping on french wines till the 18th. I’ll drink to that. Vive La France.

It seems like there’s a holiday for every day of the year and I’m going to try to find a way to relate them back to publishing. Today’s installment will give you an idea of what to make for dinner courtesy of the The Gourmet Cookbook. And while the cookbook was sixty years in the making, today’s dish only takes about 45 minutes to make (although you’ll be best off marinating the pork for up to 8 hours so you might want to consider making this tomorrow).

Here’s what Ruth Reichl and her staff have to say about the tasty tapas:

In Spain’s Galicia region, innumerable tapas bars serve small plates of seafood in vinaigrettes, tiny green peppers, and portions of big round fish or meat empanadas. This Galician tapa was created by Penelope Casas, a renowned authority on Spanish food. It makes a great first course, and it would be a terrific addition to a buffet party as well.

recipe after the jump.

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