Smash Kid
Rosalie Checca
Clearly I have a thing with stone fruits right now. Yesterday I hit you with my peach caprese salad and today I am hitting you with a cocktail featuring a friend of the peach, the plum. I feel like plums sometimes get left out, or at least in our house they do. I'm not sure why because when ripe they are sweet and juicy and I happen to be quite fond of them. Is it because all of the other fruits at the market sit with more vibrant colors, obnoxiously calling out to me as I pass "pick me, pick me" and the plum sits quietly, patiently waiting for the right customer to know it's value? Well whatever the case, I went for the plums this week and I think I'm going to continue to give them the attention they deserve. My plum and thyme prosecco smash highlights these beauties in the best way and is the perfect drink to serve for brunch over the weekend!
One of the things I miss most about brunch on the weekends is a great cocktail. It's such a treat isn't it? To have that bloody mary or bubbly at 10 or 11 in the morning...just starts the day off right. I'll be fixing my plum and thyme smash with sparkling water while I serve the real deal to the hubs, but at least I won't feel so left out. I know, small sacrifices for growing a human...
This cocktail is easy to make and what I love about it is that it can be served at brunch of course for a fancier alternative to the mimosa, but it would also be lovely at happy hour or at your weekend dinner party! A cocktail that can turn from day to night without hesitation is a cocktail that I want to be drinking!
Mix your ground chicken, scallions, ginger, garlic and fish sauce, making sure everything is combined well. Then scoop up a heaped spoonful of the mixture and press it into a thin layer on each mini tortilla.
Heat a little oil in a large frying pan or skillet, then cook the tacos, meat side down, until golden. Then flip and crisp up the other side. Spoon some spicy mayo onto the taco, then top with the pickled carrots and cucumber, a big pile of fresh herbs, a good drizzle of the nuoc cham dressing and then I like to sprinkle over some toasted cashews or peanuts to finish. Serve with more spicy mayo on the side.
This was a hit with my husband and two kids (10 and 12) and it has inspired me to try your other smash taco recipes! My two pieces of feedback: 1. This meal takes a lot longer to prep than 10 minutes. 2. I think there was too much ginger between the pickled vegetables and the chicken. I will probably leave it out of the chicken next time. Otherwise, really great recipe! We spiced it up with sriracha on top.
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Smash Boom Best is a debate show for kids and families from the makers of the award-winning podcast, Brains On! Every episode takes two cool things, smashes them together and lets you decide which is best. Our debaters use facts and passion to make their case -- teaching listeners how to defend their own opinions along the way.
In a blender or using an immersion blender in a wide-mouth jar, combine all of the Jalapeo Ranch ingredients and blend until smooth. Refrigerate until ready to serve. This keeps well for 5 to 7 days in the fridge.
Place 4 burger balls onto the hot griddle. Working quickly, firmly smash straight down into a thin patty. Season the patties with a pinch of salt, pepper, a drizzle of yellow mustard. Cook for 2 minutes on the first side, or until seared and juices start to come to the surface.
Scrape under the burger with a sturdy spatula and flip. Cover and cook for 1 more minute. Top half of the burgers with American cheese, and half with the Monterey Jack cheese. Transfer the cooked smashed burgers to a platter and continue until all of the burgers are done.
Place one American cheese-covered smash burger on the bottom of the bun, then top with a Monterey Jack cheese-covered smash burger. Top the double patties with the onion and pepper mixture and then a very generous drizzle of the Jalapeo Ranch. Serve and enjoy!
To make a cocktail: Use a fork to remove a few macerated peach slices from syrup and place in the bottom of a glass (ours are 8.75 ounces) with a few mint leaves. Muddle them together, smashing them into smaller pieces. Add syrup from peaches and bourbon and stir. Add ice cubes and finish with seltzer or ginger beer.
Deb, I grew up doing ice duty for the fam with trays just like this. I turned them upside down and ran tap water over the bottom of the trays for a few seconds before cracking and that usually did the trick. Nothing works as well as these old metal ones!
I made the syrup and brought it to a family picnic where we mixed it with ginger ale, it was wonderful.
The next evening I mixed some leftover with bourbon and ginger ale.
To be honest I preferred it without the bourbon. (
I love a great whiskey recipe, and this one did not disappoint! So happy to see this before I headed to the farm stand to pick up pickling cucumbers and beets. This was my reward for canning three batches of pickles. Yum!
I made the peach vinegar on Saturday 7/20. It is in my fridge right now! The plan was to have friends over Tuesday night, but alas the dinner party got pushed till Monday 7/30, do you think the shrub will last? Will it still taste okay 10 days later?
Yessss! Shrubs forever! I have 2 steeping in the fridge right now: blueberry ginger and a strawberry black peppercorn! I gave up alcohol over a year ago now, but still love special occasion fancy drinks. I love to mix mine with seltzer water, fresh herbs, and yes to bitters! Totally delicious and thirst quenching.
Traditional shrubs have more vinegar so they keep for months. Here is a recipe that I could easily find and that I can vouch for -shrub-and-cranberry-shrub-cocktail-recipe/ (both the shrub and the cocktail)
I have made a blueberry one as well (but cannot find the link) and used that as the basis for a peach shrub a few years ago. I ran out of it (in a few months) before it went off.
Shrubs! We grew up going to this lovely old school restaurant with my father that served grape juice shrubs as an appetizer. We would have shrubs and Dad had a Rusty Nail. I will definitely experiment with your recipe. Thanks for sharing!
Hi Deb, While I thought your previous cocktail recipe for a Boulevardier was outstanding (and I shared it with many a friend over the winter months), your Bourbon Peach Smash has become the OFFICIAL cocktail of summer here in my neck of the woods. Refreshing and hitting all the right taste buds on a hot summer day. And here I thought you were extremely gifted in the food department. Now I hold you in highest regard in the cocktail world. Keep on blogging, girl!
My sister in law is a lot trendier than I am. She finds nifty projects on Pinterest all the time and actually does them. Who does that? Last Christmas, she introduced me to Smash Books. She had recently moved to Maryland to take a job teaching English, and she was showing me the beginnings of her Smash Book from her first few months away from good ol' CNY.
Smash Books came to mind today as I was reading Vida y muerte en la Mara Salvatrucha, another novel from Fluency Matters. It's different than any of the other popular readers in that the chapters are extremely short, and each one recounts one moment or memory from the fictitious narrator's life. Written from the first person perspective, it feels like you are reading a diary. Instead of assigning a traditional post-reading assignment (ex: a list of comprehension questions), creating some kind of a journal or diary entry as a processing activity seems to fit the tone of the text.
While it might not be practical to create a Smash Book page for each chapter (finding resources to tape/glue/etc onto the page doesn't pay dividends in language acquisition, after all), but perhaps a less Smash-y and more Doodle-y version could work. Yes... a Smash Book meets Doodle Notes would be perfect!
Let's consider the novel 48 horas by Carrie Toth. 48 horas is a suspense-filled upper-level novel that is based on the real life experiences of Dr. Frank Sulloway (and published with his blessing).
It could be similar to the image posted above--a comic strip with a reflection and an action list of how the main character is going to move forward. You could give students time to "smash doodle" in a journal after reading each chapter--creating a diary as though they were the main character--and/or you could dedicate one day a week to putting together more elaborate smash books (generating news articles using the page linked above, finding images to print, taping and pasting in things that they've brought in from home). This could be done for homework, too, if your classes have homework.
I've had the most success explaining that students are going to use words, drawings, and design elements like lines, shapes, etc. to create a visually interesting, one-page poster that represents all or part of the story or information. You could also compare it to an infographic that you create on paper instead of on the computer, or a scrapbook page that you create with drawings.
NOTE TO THE READER: Vida y muerte is an upper-level novel that invites students to consider the complex factors related to gang membership that impact individuals and communities. A primary goal of many language teachers is to challenge stereotypes by inviting students to see multiple perspectives on a topic. While many teachers choose to combat the stereotype that "Latin America is full of cartels and gangs" by excluding the study or mention of gangs and cartels in their classes, others choose to combat the stereotypes by addressing the topics in depth. Both approaches can be valid, but the latter must be done with intention and awareness. I have always defaulted to the second, but I have not always done it with intention and awareness, nor did I consider whether I was actually qualified to lead such a study, based solely on my academic experience and without personal reflection or specialized training in facilitating critical conversations. When I wrote this post in 2014, I did not consider how heartless and harmful it might be to ask Outsider students (students that are NOT part of the community being studied) to put themselves in Insider's shoes and try to transform that individual or community's trauma into a learning experience for the student. While I developed the idea for the Smash Doodle activity as I read Vida y muerte, I changed the remainder of this post to explain the activity using 48 horas instead.
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