Most mornings, I stop in to Long Island City’s Sweetleaf before work for a cup of coffee and a scone. Sweetleaf does a fine job of baking scones that achieve a good sweet/savory balance; this weekend, I decided to give something similar a shot.

To make these, I followed the basic scone recipe from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. I added a tablespoon of chipotle pepper, half a cup of sliced almonds, about a cup of queso fresco, and a teaspoon and change of Mexican vanilla. The result was lighter than expected and just spicy enough, with the cheese fairly blended in but still tempering the chipotle.

So: I spent my Sunday afternoon at the Astor Center, taking a class as part of the Manhattan Cocktail Classic. This was my first time attending, and I didn’t entirely know what to expect: would it simply be an overview of cocktail-related lore, or something more hands-on?

The event I attended was — as the photograph above suggests — a look at assorted bars and clubs across nearly seventy years of film. Nora Maynard covered a series of films, ranging from Laura to Almost Famous, with four cocktails to be consumed over the course of the afternoon. (Two came pre-made; two were assembled in the space.) It was a very enjoyable way to spend ninety minutes, and it reminded me that I really, really need to watch Hannah and Her Sisters.

After the course, we headed into the main space, in which assorted spirits companies had bars set up at which cocktails could be made. It was there that I tried the drink pictured below, made with vodka, grapefruit and lemon juice, and topped with freshly-ground salt and pepper. Which was not something I’d have previously thought to put into a drink, but which worked remarkably well.

Up at Vol.1 now is a short essay about my one and only attempt at eating crawfish: in this case, in Austin in 2006. It didn’t go particularly well.

I found a restaurant called the Boiling Pot on Sixth Street, sat down, and ordered a large meal in which crawfish were in fact the primary ingredient. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to eat them: were the shells removed, like the lobsters that they somewhat resembled, or left on? I glanced around as best I could, hoping to get some indication of how to proceed from diners at adjacent tables. I felt like an interloper into Cajun cuisine, and it was that unease that kept me from doing the obvious and logical thing – which is to say, flagging down one of the servers and saying. “Look, how exactly do I eat these?” I feared a public shaming, basically.

I haven’t tried my hand at crawfish-eating since then — I was tempted later that same year, while on vacation in Helsinki, but quickly learned that an inexpensive food in the southern US is, as it turns out, a luxury dish in northern Europe.

On a walk through Hell’s Kitchen after work today, though, I came across The Delta Grill; on a chalkboard outside, a crawfish boil was advertised. Perhaps it’s finally time to see what they taste like sans shells.

Besides the end of a year, last week brought with it visitors — friends old and new, both in town from scenic Eugene, Oregon. This, then, reminded me of an establishment in said Oregonian city called Off the Waffle, at which I dined for the first time in the spring of 2010. It was, as the photograph above might suggest, a ridiculously delicious experience.

Subsequently, I’ve been craving liège waffles pretty fiercely. Specifically, though, I’ve been craving Off the Waffle’s particular ability to do interesting things with the savory/sweet divide. New York has the Wafels and Dinges truck, but from what I’ve seen, their wares generally fall mainly on the sweet side of the spectrum. I suppose what I’m looking for is some sort of waffle equivalent to Greenpoint’s Paulie Gee’s — which I realize is an unlikely combination. Still, it’s a big city out there, and one where the food options never fail to surprise.

I haven’t done a “recommended” post in a while. Here’s hoping this pair of takes on hand-crafted food and drink helps to remedy that.

• Warren Ellis on the hyper-concentrated coffee known as The Black Blood of the Earth.
• Scott Gold on the meat and butcher shops of North Brooklyn.

And in the “writing from good folks” category, a new food-related website called Table Matters has launched. Among its writers is the esteemed Scott Gold, who contributes a piece on lapsed vegetarians. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should probably mention that I’m one of the interviewees.)

Managed to fill the apartment with smoke as a result of cooking a chicken breast with some jerk spices earlier. Now: waiting for some clafoutis to finish baking (recipe via Quinn) and listening to Flying Saucer Attack.

May have made too much clafoutis for one person to consume. Damn. The perils of living alone…