SIN CITY TWILIGHT

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Dinner on the porch tonight, homemade beef stew, cheap red wine . . . twilight in Sin City, more accurately described as Silly Town.

I never look out my windows, even after seven years here, without thinking, “Where the hell am I?” I guess that’s sort of the point.

SATURDAY NIGHT

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A pound of shrimp, boiled in beer and salted in the shell, a few Papa Dobles and a Manny Paquiao fight. I will freely admit that there are better ways of spending a Saturday night — but not many.

The fight was good, the decision was absurd, the shrimp and the Papa Dobles were deicious. And so it goes.

THE NEVADAN

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Before they teamed up with Budd Boetticher to make some of the greatest Westerns of all time, Randolph Scott and producer Harry Joe Brown made a lot of very good Westerns with other, lesser directors. They featured interesting characters and situations and superb location shooting — a cut above the usual B-Western fare. The Nevadan, now available from the Warner Archive, is one of the best of them. Its cast includes a very vexing Dorothy Malone in one of her earliest leading roles.  Her character gets the hots for Scott’s character when she sees how he handles a half-broken horse he’s tricked into riding — which is, as they say west of the Pecos, comme il faut.

If you’re a fan of Westerns, ignore the poster, one of the ugliest ever used to promote a film, and check this one out.

LESS OLD-FASHIONED

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Purists frown on adding a maraschino cherry to an Old Fashioned cocktail, though this is how it’s typically served these days. The traditional recipe calls for a little pure cane syrup, a dash of Angostura bitters, a bit of orange peel, Bourbon and four ice cubes.

In New Orleans recently I discovered an interesting variation. At the restaurant Herbsaint I ordered an Old Fashioned and it was served with small peeled slices of orange and a couple of dried cherries which had been marinated in cherry liqueur. The marinated cherries were delicious, way more interesting than a bland, over-sweet maraschino cherry.

They added a distinct flavor to the drink — actually made it too fruity with the addition of the sections of orange — but on their own with just the traditional orange peel they would make a good substitute for a maraschino cherry, if a cherry is something you want in your Old Fashioned.