Bourbon

The Maryland Wine Festival will celebrate its 21st birthday when it returns to the Carroll County Farm Museum next weekend. The festival will be held from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday, and from noon to 6 p.m. Sept. 19. Tickets are $20 for adults age 21 and older with valid identification; those younger than 21 are admitted free with a paying adult. Paid admission includes a 2004 logo-engraved wine glass, 12 one-ounce samples of Maryland wines, and Wine Education seminars. The festival features more than 50 juried craft vendors selling handmade items and more than 30 vendors offering hamburgers and pizza to gourmet crab dip, crab cakes, deep fried vegetables, fried cheese cake and coffees.

If certain flavors sing of the holidays -- nutmeg and cinnamon, ginger and cloves, a dash or two of good bourbon -- cardamom is certainly not on the list. But, dear baker, this is a mistake. Take a chance, just once, with a batch of butter cookies or maybe a dish of ice cream. Cardamom adds a powerfully sweet, somehow magical note to the simplest pastry or dessert. It's deeply, transportingly aromatic; somehow, cardamom seems celebratory. In Scandinavia and Germany, cardamom traditionally is used in cakes and breads and cookies.

I'm having a dinner party for my brother-in-law and would like to make a bread pudding with bourbon sauce. Do you have a recipe that you can share? Your brother-in-law has great taste if this is his birthday request. He must know that there is nothing like a good bread pudding, and it's a great alternative to the old birthday cake. I'm passing along a chocolate bread pudding recipe with bourbon sauce. It's not the kind of recipe you would have found in medieval Europe, where bread pudding evolved.

MOUNT VERNON, Va. - George Washington was a great president and an extraordinary general, but his whiskey was so strong it would make your neck hair stand up straight and come to attention. I say this after sampling some of our Founding Father's liquor, a batch made at Washington's homestead by some of the nation's top distillers from a recipe researched by some of the best brains at Mount Vernon. The whiskey sipping, as well as a smoky re-enactment of the whiskey-making process used by Washington's workers, was part of a joint effort by Mount Vernon and the Distilled Spirits Council of America to raise funds for the restoration of Washington's original distillery.

The cookbook Half-Scratch Magic by Linda West Eckhardt and Katherine West DeFoyd (Clarkson Potter, 2003, $17.95) claims to help make meals like Grandmom used to make, but in half the time. The mother-daughter team describes half-scratch meals as those that let the food manufacturers do more than half the work. The 288-page cookbook combines ready-made food items such as rotisserie chicken or frozen stir-fry with pantry staples like tomato soup or long-grain rice. Half-Scratch Magic's only photo is the pasta dish that graces the cover.

He's a man after my own heart. Damon Lee Fowler believes a good splash of bourbon can improve just about anything. In his New Southern Kitchen (Simon & Schuster, 2002, $26), Fowler adds this magic ingredient to many of the basics of the Southern pantheon -- oysters and leeks with cream, poundcake, macerated strawberries, sauteed mushrooms -- always to good effect. With or without bourbon, however, these are appealing recipes. True, it was the pork tenderloins with bourbon-mustard glaze that spurred a cooking frenzy in my kitchen.

They can be festive and appealing, but many summer cocktails can pack as big a wallop in calorie count as in alcohol content. Recognizing this drawback to the warm weather social scene, the Distilled Spirits Council is offering some suggestions for lightening up some favorite seasonal drinks. The council's Beth Davies suggests that adults can enjoy cocktails and still lead a healthy life, as long as they drink in moderation, exercise and watch what they eat. Sounds reasonable enough.

The camp chair went for $9.99 at Sunny's, one of these sling-back green polyester affairs that slips from a shoulder pouch and unfolds in a heartbeat, opening its arms to possibilities. Because this is America and the terrorists have not yet won, there's a cup holder at the right hand where the glass of bourbon goes. Spending so little on the chair leaves a few more dollars for a bottle worthy of the occasion, seeing as how the universe allows us in a lifetime only so many quiet summer evenings.

Donna Degen of Rapid City, S.D., has been seeking a bourbon-chicken recipe for some time. She writes that she went on the Internet looking for it and found many people who were also seeking this same recipe. "I know it is served at the Cajun Cafe as well as many restaurants, but I can't find it and sure would appreciate your assistance in this matter," she wrote. Antonia Hartnett of Timonium responded with a recipe and a note. "Enclosed please find the Cajun Cafe Bourbon Chicken recipe I found on the Internet at www.kitchenlink .com.

A great horse race needs a drink worthy of the occasion, but for a lot of race fans, the Preakness' Black-Eyed Susan always seemed a bit slow out of the gate. "It was like drinking locomotive water," grumbles one self-described "old man" as he recalls trying the old bourbon-based drink. Things are looking up, though. Last year, Pimlico introduced a new, retooled version. Reviews have been good and sales are strong. Brian Handleman, president of Maryland Turf Caterers Inc., says the new vodka-based recipe is more upscale and appeals to a new generation of drinkers who prefer clear spirits over darker liquors like bourbon or rye, the traditional choices for the Preakness drink.