Hasta La Gadget!

When he’s not busy running the cocktail program at New York City’s Maialino, Erik Lombardo is giving Food52 the rundown on all things spirits — and showing us the best ways to drink them. 

Today: 6 simple (and cheap) ways to perfect your at-home cocktails. 

Let’s face it: The drinks you make at home may not be as good as the drinks you get in your favorite cocktail bar. The reasons for this are many, not the least of which is the fact that you probably aren’t a professional bartender. Let the following 6 tips help to close the gap, and you’ll be stirring and shaking your way to inebriated bliss in no time. 

1. Use better ice. Ice matters: It accounts for close to 1/3 of the final product, so this is really one of the fastest ways to improve what you’re making at home. Right off the bat you should be using ice cubes that measure at least 1 inch per side. The crescent-shaped ice that comes out of automatic ice machines in fancy refrigerators is no good, ditto the mini cubes. These Tovolo ice cubes are perfect for highballs, but for drinks you want on the rocks, you really want a huge chunk of ice, just big enough to fit in the glass you’re serving it in (these and these work well, or try making your own at home). This maximizes volume to surface area, giving you the most chilling power and control over dilution.

2. Chill your glassware. You spend all that time to make the perfect cocktail and get quality ice, then you pour it into a glass that has been sitting in a cupboard over your oven. Cocktails are best when ice cold, so do yourself a favor and throw your glassware in the freezer when you start to prepare you drink. Take it out only when you’re ready to fill it with your delicious cocktail. 

3. Know when to shake, and when to stir. Enough said. 

4. Treat your ingredients appropriately. Vermouth and aromatized wines need to be refrigerated to prevent them from oxidizing too quickly. If you have a dusty bottle of vermouth on the liquor shelf, throw it out and buy a fresh one. It may seem like a waste, but the real waste would be thinking you don’t like dry vermouth in Martinis because the dry vermouth you used was produced the same year the Matrix was.

5. Juice and zest to order. Resist the urge to juice a whole bunch of lemons and limes at once. You may think you’re saving time, but lemons and limes begin to react with oxygen almost instantaneously. Do yourself a favor and invest in a citrus juicer like this one, or this one (if you’re super fancy). Cut and juice your fruit as you go so that you can get the freshest flavors into you cocktail. Also: If your juice comes out of a plastic fruit, I don’t know you and you don’t know me.

6. Measure appropriately. Some people think that bars use jiggers in order to cut down on waste, and to be sure that’s a nice benefit. But the actual reason your favorite cocktail bar uses jiggers is to ensure consistency — they want to be positive that you get the same exact cocktail every time you order it. To ensure that you’re making quality cocktails at home, get a jigger, find a recipe you like, and write it down (don’t be shy to ask your bartender what their specs are — tell them you want to make it at home and they’ll likely be flattered). If you measure correctly and use the right technique, you’ll enjoy that cocktail at home as much as you do in the bar.

Photos by James Ransom 

This article originally appeared on Food52.com: 6 Ways to Instantly Make Better Cocktails at Home

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My longest dysfunctional relationship has been with food. I was a short, chubby kid who then became a short, chubby tween. At 12, I was shopping for a bat mitzvah dress when clothing made me cry for the first time. You know what the fashion industry doesn’t account for when designing dresses for 12-year-old girls? A C-cup. So while all my flat-chested friends wore adorable dresses, I wore a sweater and lace skirt. A sweater — in August. In Florida.

At 14, I hit bottom in the Loehmanns dressing room. It was my equivalent of waking up in an abandoned alley face-down in a pile of coke. Except it was in a mirrored room surrounded by elderly women trying on cruise wear. Nothing fit right, or at all. It was my first experience with self-loathing. It was the introduction to mirror-avoidance. Most importantly, it was my introduction to what would become a life of dieting and a life of disgust with self.

The thing is, I love food. I am not a foodie. Not at all. I can’t read a recipe to the end. I never cook. I have no idea what to do with rosemary, thyme or basil — It all looks and smell like weed to me (which makes me happy in a different way). So I don’t/can’t cook, but I love, love, love food. I love eating it. I look forward to meals the way people look forward to vacation. What could’ve just been an endearing, quirky quality eventually spiraled into a food obsession that alternated with extreme dieting and purging.

I am an amazing binger. I can binge with the best of them. I can disconnect entirely from my surroundings and be “in the food” the same way an alcoholic tosses back bottle after bottle of wine. The problem with a binge is that it always ends the same way: Disgust. Physical and emotional revulsion. Fast-forward the tape to the same ending. Head in a toilet bowl puking up Fruit Loops.

Then, the dysfunction continues with weeks of diet and exercise. It’s all so exhausting. And so constant. I wish I could be one of those women who embraced their bodies, love handles and all, with acceptance and love. I can’t. I can share posts about doing just that. I can give great advice to my friends to do just that. But I can’t do it myself.

I can tell my daughter that nothing is as beautiful as her little body exactly as it is no matter if she is tall, short, big or small. But I am sure she sees through my platitudes. Because she sees a mom who is always on a diet. She sees a mom who looks in the mirror and sighs. She hears her mom tell her friends what she can and cannot eat this week. She hears her mom and her sisters talk about how much weight they still need to lose. She sees her mom fight with a pair of Spanx and lose.

I wish she could see a mom who looks in the mirror and sees a belly that grew three children. Thighs that squat down with kids in public bathrooms. Hips that were meant to birth 12 children. Upper arms that held them through the night.

These are the things we want our daughters to see. It has to start with us, Mamas.

It has to start with us.

Nobody has more reason to enjoy a wedding than Sylvia Weinstock, at 84 still personally delivering cakes that cost thousands, even tens of thousands. Among her clients have been Michael Douglas, Mariah Carey, the Saudi royal family and Donald Trump, whose loyalty card surely has enough punches to qualify him for a freebie. A recent article in The New York Times about the return of luxurious wedding cakes reveals that Ron Ben-Israel, another baker who doesn’t skimp, has prepared a $30,000 cake more than once and delivered a 5-foot-high cake (for 550 people) from New York to Palm Beach in a refrigerated truck.

Throwing elaborate weddings has become competitive enough to qualify as an Olympics event. Instead of a “save the date” card, two San Francisco attorneys had a production company rent a helicopter and create a music video with them as flying hip-hop stars. It ended with, “formal invite to follow.” Anything short of Taylor Swift showing up at the door to sing the invitation would surely seem chintzy.

For me the highlight of any wedding is the pigs in blankets, which explains the mustard stains on all my dressy clothes. But what makes a wedding memorable is experiencing the love and values of the couple, trusting them, their union, their social consciousness. I am impressed by them and not that the bartender was flown in from Paris. I would be yet more disdainful of those who choose to throw away exorbitant amounts of money on a party except the money might otherwise go to another party: the Republican one.

There are wedding planners, invitation consultants, specialists you can hire for just about everything, but missing from this group are “get real” therapists to point out that the wedding should be about you. That sentiment extends to my choice of gifts, which is why I’m excited each time someone commissions me to design a uniquely personal wedding gift, a vase, picture frame or kitchen caddy with photos of the couple and snippets from their invitation embedded in pique assiette mosaic. We collaborate to honor the newlyweds and commemorate their day. These and others can be seen on my site, www.sybilsage.com.

I’m From Driftwood is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit archive for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer stories. New stories are posted on the site every Wednesday.

New Yorker Mathew Shurka came out at the age of 16 to his initially supportive father, who promised to love his son no matter what, and to always stay by his son’s side. However, his father’s thinking became more and more influenced by homophobia and harmful stereotypes surrounding the gay community:

[M]y father started to build his fears about homosexuality — what it actually meant and what it looked like for family, my career, possibly being discriminated and being bullied against as a high-school student — and he came across a conversion therapist. My father was told that there’s no such thing as homosexuality and that everyone is a heterosexual. There are certain people who believe they’re gay but they’re just suffering from a psychological condition that can be cured and that can be resolved, especially at a young age. So, at 16 years old, I began conversion therapy.

Thus began some of the most tumultuous and trying years of Mathew’s life. He describes his experiences in conversion therapy and the effect that the therapy had on him and his family:

[The conversion therapists] wanted me to spend a lot of time with other men. So, as a 16-year-old, it was spending as much time with the other boys at school as possible. Simultaneously, I have to avoid women. And the reason they don’t want you to be with women, ’cause one, they don’t want you to pick up effeminate behaviors. This included my mother and my sisters. I did not talk to my mother and sisters for three years, and I lived with my mother and my sisters, and I was very close with them, and to not talk to them for three years started the breakdown of my family.

After courageously ending his conversion therapy and deciding to be open about his gay identity, Mathew found that his life changed for the better. It was during this time that he began some of the greatest relationship of his life thus far, and he realized that at this point in his life, he was finally being himself for the first time:

I was estranged from my father for five years. I was so angry. I was so resentful. He always took care of me and gave me whatever I needed and was a great father, and when I actually considered that, it made me put aside my resentment for him.

After Mathew found the root of his father’s fear, he also found forgiveness, leading the relationship between father and son to mend almost immediately.

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For more stories, visit I’m From Driftwood, the LGBTQ Story Archive.