Intriguing!!!

An Ode To All My Very Intriguing Friends.

I do love nothing more than to receive house gifts. Two of our friends stopped by the other day and brought with them a very considerate surprise. One that I, personally, wouldn’t have ever imagined before.

White Truffle Liqueur.

True, I have been known to occasionally enjoy a wee dram every now and then. And I have to admit that both my wife and I share a peculiarly strong fondness for truffles - whether grated onto pasta or infused into olive oil (which is quite nice on a steak or some salmon, by the way). But the scent of truffle overlayed onto a cocktail?

Intriguing.

But before opening the bottle to sample my first taste of truffle liqueur, I started to wonder. How is one supposed to drink truffle liqueur? Does one merely poor a shot and then knock it back? Or (more likely to my thinking), does one mix the truffle liqueur with something else? And if so, what?

Intriguing and more intriguing!

Fortunately for me, I happen to have more than my fair share of very intriguing friends - just the sort of people one may turn to with intriguing questions like “what do you mix with truffle liqueur to make a white truffle cocktail?”

Obviously my first thought was to contact my two high school buddies who (for privacy sake) I will simply refer to as “C and S.”

S, in particular, struck me initially as the perfect one to ask, thanks to his expertise as a private chef. All of his friends refer to S as “the Evil Saint.” The Evil Saint is the kind of high school buddy you hang out with mostly whenever your wife is out of town on a business trip. Not that C is any better behaved. Even C’s own mother (a straight-laced, proper lady whom you could justifiably mistake for a high school principal) refers to him the same way all his friends do. The “Chimp.”

When I first clapped eyes on this shiny, new bottle of truffle liqueur, I immediately thought back to one particular escapade (one of many) involving the Evil Saint and the Chimp. This one, like most of the others, commenced with an urgent and breathless phone call.

“Dude! You need to come over here RIGHT NOW!”

“What time is it? Are you kidding me? It’s 3:00am, man.”

“Hurry!”

The Evil Saint was back in town, freshly unemployed after his most recent yachting debacle. A few weeks prior, somewhere on the coast of Vanuatu, his boss had caught a 30 pound coconut crab and presented it, in a large plastic garbage bin, to the Evil Saint. The instructions were simple: cook something made with the crab.

But how does one… well…. “dispatch” a 30 pound crab with nearly impenetrable crustacean armour? No ordinary kitchen knife would do the trick and so, resourceful as ever, the Evil Saint went to the ship’s armory, retrieved a Glock 9mm pistol, took the coconut crab in its plastic garbage bin on deck, took careful aim, closed his eyes, turned his head away and then proceeded to open fire. I should add that the Evil Saint has likely never held a firearm in his entire life. So, in spite of the maelstrom of hot lead, the crab was left completely unscathed. The wooden deck of this one hundred million dollar yacht? Yeah, not so much.

No formal resignation from his latest job was required.

Anyway, when I arrived at the Evil Saint’s 4 story East Village walk-up, I was unsurprised to find that the Chimp was already there, freshly returned from his latest photo journalism trip to Cyprus. And the Chimp had brought with him a special gourmet surprise.

“Dude. Check this shit out.”

I looked at the aging, dusty bottle with the peeling, chipped, yellowed label. There was stuff floating around in the murky, milky liquid. “Intriguing,” I thought. In my hands was an old bottle of ouzo, a licorice liquor that is very popular in the Mediterranean… only this one was enhanced. The enhancements in question? Tincture of wormwood and laudanum.

“Opiated ouzo?”

The Chimp and the Evil Saint were giggling like a pair of little school girls.

I turned towards the Chimp. “How did you get this? I mean, is this even legal?”

The Chimp explained that one does not simply buy antique opiated ouzo at any old liquor store in Cyprus. Rather, after one of the Chimp’s photoshoots, “some guy” told him he had a bottle of opiated ouzo that he was willing to sell. The Chimp agreed to follow him into a dark, dead-end alley to complete the deal. Whereupon he packed the bottle into a suitcase, flew home to NYC and promptly made a beeline to the apartment of the one person who is literally guaranteed to zealously appreciate a stiff drink of something unusual at 3:00am on a Tuesday morning.

I found myself somewhat less convinced that this would be a good thing to try at any hour of the day.

“… so, according to Google, it looks like one of the side effects of drinking laudanum is… uh…. it can stop your breathing.”

The Evil Saint waved off any such concern and eagerly set to work excavating the crumbling cork out of the bottle. The Chimp went to the kitchen to retrieve three shot glasses from the overflowing sink of dirty dishes and washed them out using hand soap. For a private chef, the Evil Saint’s kitchen is remarkably light on basics, including dishwashing detergent.

The Evil Saint and the Chimp downed their shots on one fell swoop. I pawed at and fiddled with mine. “How much of this are you even supposed to drink in one sitting?”

By the time they’d tossed back three shots apiece, I was still nursing and sipping at mine. The taste was fairly similar to that of any other licorice liquor that I’d had in the past, but more bitter. And then I began to notice that time itself seemed to be moving at a slower cadence. I felt a warm, floaty sensation.

The Evil Saint reclined back on the couch and closed his eyes. “This shit’s amazing.”

After what felt like a ten minute pause, the Chimp replied “yeah…”

Alas, it didn’t take long before the sensation of “warm and floaty” was replaced by a vague twinge of distant nausea bubbling up on the horizon. I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in the mirror. My skin looked grey and clammy.

“Uh, hey Chimp?”

The Chimp gazed at me with bleery, red eyes and a waterlogged, sagging complexion. “I don’t feel very good.”

“Me neither.”

Yet it was the Evil Saint who was the first to start throwing up. He did so copiously and all over the floor. The Chimp, by contrast, somehow made it to the bathroom in the very knick of time to barf explosively into the toilet. For my part, I got most of the way towards the kitchen sink before ralphing all over the counters, floors, cabinets (and probably the ceiling too).

Nor did the gut-wrenching agony let up from there. The nausea and delirium only got worse and seemed to go on for hours. “How long can this go on?” I wondered. I glanced with forlorn misery at my watch, and then realized with horror that I was due at the office in just a few hours. And the waves only kept coming.

“BAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRFFFFFFF!!!!!!”

In the end, I opted to ask neither the Chimp nor the Evil Saint for advice on how to drink truffle liqueur. I didn’t need to. I had the perfect alternative expert gourmet friend in mind to ask. I will refer to him only as “D.”

What do you get when you cross an adrenaline junky with a fancy food enthusiast? The answer is… D. Armed with an IQ of of 156 and a profound fluency in computerized trading algorithms, D moved to Lisbon several years ago with his wife. We’ve been close friends ever since. D is a remarkably curious person, anxious to sample all that life has to offer - particularly when it comes to food. In fact, it was D who first took me to try a Portuguese delicacy: percebes. Or better known in English as “goose barnacles.”

A Portuguese food enthusiast myself, I had never tried goose barnacles before but always assumed that like most Portuguese seafood, percebes would be prepared with a strong dose of fresh garlic and plenty of olive oil. So I was quite surprised when the plate of uncooked goose barnacles arrived, plucked fresh from the rocky shores of Ericeira.

“Intriguing,” I thought to myself, as I tried not to notice the similarity between goose barnacles and some form of mesozoic-era dinosaur genitalia.

Of course a food daredevil like D didn’t so much as hesitate. He deftly tore into barnacles, expertly removing the stringy, chewy, raw, wriggling, sinew-like wormy insides, chewed and proclaimed “oh man! These are DELICIOUS!!!!!”

I picked at one and nudged it with my fork.

“I think it’s alive.”

D nodded. “Absolutely! These are as fresh as they come!!!”

Not particularly reassured, I eventually did manage to try one. It was salty, chewy, and filled with sandy ocean water. I don’t feel any urgent need to try one ever again.

But the whole madcap misadventure seemed to convince D that like him, I too am an exotic foods aficionado. So, the next week, D invited me to drive up to the town of Tomar, about two hours north of Lisbon. Why Tomar in particular? Well, D explained, they are famous for a particular seafood dish in Tomar; stewed lamprey cooked in lamprey-blood-infused rice!

Maybe it’s my dyslexia acting up, but I’ve always been more of a visual guy than a verbal one. So, before taking up D on his kind invitation to go sample some classic “Arroz de Lampreia,” I decided to do a Google Image Search. What is a lamprey?

Here is, more or less, the image of what came back.

Sorry. No. I am not going to eat that. Uh uh. Nope. No way.

Truffle liqueur is far, far, far more my speed, but as I reflected on some of my more exciting meals with D, I began to doubt the wisdom of asking him for advice on what to put into a truffle liqueur cocktail. Knowing D, it would probably be something from the ocean, maybe something raw, and definitely something better described not as “intriguing” but rather “challenging…” or even worse…. “advanced.”

Thankfully, I know the PERFECT PERSON to ask about how to make the best use of truffle liqueur. Our dear friend “W.” W is one of my wife’s best friends from business school who, as it happens, is currently on one of her frequent visits to Lisbon. W is a bona-fide gourmand. She has been known to literally get on a plane, fly from Arizona to Japan specifically for the sole purpose of eating dinner at a particular restaurant. And to then fly back home the next day. I texted her to let her know we had just gotten a bottle of white truffle liqueur as a gift, but didn’t know what (if anything) to mix it with. W’s food-junky credentials have never been in doubt. She immediately wrote back with a river of intriguing concepts - pistachio nuts! Strawberry juice! Vanilla ice cream!

In the end, it became obvious that the only solution to this problem was for W to come over to our house and try the truffle liqueur with us. She heartily agreed to do just that and promised that she would bring a special surprise with her when she came.

And so, just a day after receiving the gift of white truffle liqueur, W was at our doorstep with her famous brown paper grocery bag. She brought some organic chorizo and pata negra and an aged Azeitao cheese for dinner. But the real showstopper she had in mind was desert. W bought some fresh pasteis de nata - a true Lisbon classic. She scooped out the creamy, sweet fillings which she put into a bowl. Next, she mixed in a healthy dollop of mascarpone cheese. Noki and I stood next to her and watched in awe as W crumbled in some ground pistachios (I’d been hoping they’d somehow feature into whatever surprise she said she’d bring). Last of all, she mixed in a rather generous splash (or two) of white truffle liqueur and then mixed, mixed, mixed the contents together. Then, she replaced this filling into the shells of the pasteis de nata, and “plunk!” She dropped a fresh raspberry on top each one.

Why wait? We all decided to eat dessert before dinner. And “Intriguing” is hardly the word to describe the earthy, rum scented glow of these creamy, smooth, luxurious desserts. SUBLIME. Absolutely sublime.

On the cocktail side of things, I experimented by mixing some white truffle liqueur with pear cider. Pretty damn good! Much better than intriguing, but in all fairness, nowhere near as exquisite as the white truffle liqueur pasteis de nata.