For my third guest-blog post in Married ...with Dinner's illustrious Drink of the Week feature, I unveil a new cocktail concocted for Reese's birthday party, the Levriero. After all, I simply had to do something with all that pompelmocello. Read on!
The end of the year is a natural point of reflection. Lately I've been thinking back on some of the more delicious memories of 2007, new and interesting experiences all. I'll present them here, in no particular order:
* Indicates items that I experienced while in the company of other Bay Area food bloggers.
Last weekend, my darling husband hosted a cocktail party in my honor of my thirty-somethingth birthday. I had a lovely time, mingling with my bestest friends and nibbling on nummy noshes courtesy of DPaul. I received several lovely gifts, but chief among them was Anita stepping in to act as mixologist extraordinaire. She had two signature house cocktails at the ready, carefully sidestepping my patent dislike for both gin and orange. One, the refreshing and complex Rosemary Five, immediately became my new favorite cocktail. That is, until I tasted the second: The Oh, Henry, which she has now posted as the most recent Drink of the Week. Now, we love us some bourbon, and the combination with Benedictine and a good, strong ginger ale elevates it to new heights; the star anise garnish does so much more than merely decorate as well. Do go check it out, and enjoy one as much as I did, and still do. Anita gave me the gift not only of a housefull of well-watered friends, but of two newfound favorite tipples as well. Who could ask for more?
Seems the drink du jour in the media these days is the michelada. Aside from the beauty shot in this month's GQ, there's equally mouthwatering references on pretty much all my favorite boozy blogs:
The timing was good. With an upcoming visit to the in-laws in Kentucky (where we are now) this struck me as the perfect beverage to ply on less-than-experimental palates. With an ingredient list of un-scary and familiar ingredients -- Mexican beer, lime, Worcestershire and Tabasco, basically -- it promised nothing less than refreshing goodness for the inevitable hot, muggy days.
Alas, my cool micheladas were met with a tepid response. No one -- including DPaul -- liked the flavor the Worcestershire sauce imparted. To which I say, ¡más micheladas para mí! Personally, I thought the balance of sour-salty-hot was perfectly delicious, and certainly slapped a hearty coat of red lipstick on the Corona pig. It's a quaffable, refreshing brew that I could happily kick back more than a couple of on a sultry afternoon. Still, I will admit it pays to have a light hand with the Worcestershire.
I look forward to trying this again with Negro Modelo, my preferred Mexican beer. I would have used it this time, but our options out here in the wilds of Kentucky are ... limited. And for DPaul, I'll just pull back on the Worcestershire and Tabasco for the classic chelada. (Actually, he rather liked the Tabasco. So does that make it a semichelada?)
Loyal readers know that I'm prone to making my own vodka infusions. I find most commercial flavored vodkas have a chemical, artificial flavor. DPaul and I have experimented with many permutations, sweet and savory alike, but even my Mad Scientist tendencies have their limits. Fortunately for me, the concoctionists at Hangar One are not so constrained.
We visited the Hangar One distillery on the former Alameda Air Force base Naval Air Station a few months ago, along with a couple of other local food bloggers. It's a recommendable excursion, though I would prefer to return and experience it when they are actually doing something; on weekends (and, for that matter, many weekdays -- it's a small-batch operation), it's basically a huge, cavernous warehouse with a big, pretty alembic still perched in the middle of the floor. Still, it's interesting to see where they do what they do, and to hear their philosophy about making top-notch infused vodkas.
Infused. That's the operative word here. Whereas big-name industrial distillers like Grey Goose, Smirnoff and Absolut flavor their vodka with chemical extracts, Hangar One's vodkas derive their flavors from direct contact with the actual ingredient they are meant to taste like. (Interestingly, Chow's panel outwardly disliked both Hangar One and Charbay, both artisanal, fruit-infused products. I know from personal experience that vodka infusion deconstructs the flavors of the source ingredients, sometimes resulting in some intensified notes and others suppressed; it is surely easier, or at least more effective, to build a better -- i.e., more generally palatable -- flavored vodka chemically. But count me among the stalwarts who prefer a true infusion.)
The other thing I respect about Hangar One is their tendency to sidestep the obvious. Everyone else makes lemon; Hangar One opts for the otherworldly and highly perfumed Buddha's Hand. Lime is de rigueur; but Kaffir lime adds an exotic edge.
But why stop at pedestrian fruit flavors? Last year, they kicked off their Alchemist Series, extremely small batches of more experimental flavors, with a wasabi-infused creation, which I unfortunately never had the pleasure of trying. (Our tour guide at the distillery recounted that, as wasabi is a member of the mustard family, it combined with vodka, a volatile solvent, to form, well, mustard gas. The distillers had to wear gas masks while developing the infusion.)
This year, it's chipotle. So when the manager at Plumpjack Wines told me they had just gotten their small allocation of the stuff in, I bought it on the spot. As I proudly unsheathed the bottle from the brown bag when I got home, DPaul's eyebrows rose.
First up, a taste, straight up. I poured the barest drizzle into two shot glasses, and sipped.
From the instant the liquid -- nay, the very vapors -- hit the palate, a searing burn and almost meaty smokiness pervaded my mouth. Tears welled in my eyes. I hacked out a couple dry coughs.
In other words, delicious. But clearly, not a spirit meant to be taken lightly, or alone. Bloody Marys are the obvious application, and no doubt what inspired this invention, but here's the thing: Neither DPaul nor I particularly care for them.
So what to do with this literal and figurative firewater? I wasn't the first to come up with a cocktail showcasing the vodka's incendiary qualities, but I found little else. My mind immediately drew to complementary flavors in Latin and Southeast Asian cooking -- a little tropical fruit for some sweetness to temper the burn, some lime for sour to balance the flavors. Perhaps a little salt to round things out. After all, how does it go -- Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet?
I am no mixologist, but a little experimentation yielded some surprisingly delicious results. We produced two cocktails, of similar proportions but of slightly different ingredients, each with distinctive character. The smoky chipotle flavor remains assertive, yet never overpowers -- no mean feat that. The names are arbitrary and whimsical -- one of them dubbed by our neighbor. I look forward to tweaking these recipes further; no doubt we'll reach smoky cocktail nirvana right around the time the last bottle of chipotle vodka is plucked from the shelves.
Today I'm guest blogging over at my good friends' site, Married ...with Dinner, for their Drink of the Week feature. I'm discussing the unfortunately named Raspberry Cosmimosa, which tastes far better than it sounds. So what's in a name? Find out now.
What a difference when I manage to get my photographer and natural-born food stylist husband to contribute, no?
After my last hurricane-based concoction, I decided that the cocktail would benefit from some grenadine, both to red it up a bit and make it less unappealingly brown, and to add a little sweetness. My hunch paid off. Just a small amount of grenadine created a much more balanced drink: Fruitier, less tart and with a mellowing effect on the boozy burn of rum.
Again, I made my own sour mix, and this time I made my own grenadine as well. No doubt if you used commercial grenadine (and if you do, be sure to get real grenadine and not the carcinogenic red-dyed corn syrup that passes in most home bars), undoubtedly the end result would be even redder and sweeter than mine.
I'm tagging this post for the current Mixology Monday event. The theme is Goodbye, Summer, and I can think of nothing that heralds the finality of summer like hurricane season. As I noted last time, there are at least as many variations on the hurricane cocktail recipe as there are hurricanes themselves, so I dubbed my previous cocktail the Florence, as that was the active hurricane at the time. Now, a new variation merits a new name, so I'll call this one the Gordon just in time for him to expend his last fierce breaths like the Big Bad Wolf of the Atlantic. Recipes after the jump.
It started out as a dinner party. Our friends Steve and Domonick (and their adorable schnoodle, Sophie) have relocated to the Bay Area from New York City, and we wanted to show them off. But why have a dinner party when you can have a lovely cocktail party with heavy hors d'oeuvres? Vodka is a vegetable, sweetie. It's made from potatoes.
We love to entertain, and have thrown events ranging from groups as small as four people to as large as 75 or so. We've even taken groups on the road, once renting an entire hotel in Palm Springs for a big Mardi Gras fête.
The cocktail party is its own beast with its own rules. Ten to 12 people is usually best. We like to make one house cocktail by the pitcher for easy service; we then offer standard boozes and mixers -- for our crowd, vodka and gin for liquor and tonic and cran for mixers -- as well as wine and beer for those who prefer an alternative. For this event, I decided to make a hurricane, in part due to its seasonal relevance and in part because we have too damn much rum in the house. My derivative version, dubbed the Florence, follows after the jump.
Timing is everything for a cocktail party. Passed hors d'oeuvres make for a convivial atmosphere, so you have to plan ahead to keep the stream of food steady yet diverse. Some of the highlight appies, with pics (courtesy of my husband) and recipes, also after the jump.
Everything went smoothly ... except one thing. Inspired by Sam's Bakewell tarts from the Food Bloggers' Picnic, I thought they'd make a lovely little sweet treat, ideally bite-sized for party fare. I'm not much of a baker, so this was kind of going out on a limb. Sadly, the results were unservable. My short crust didn't set right, and the resulting tarts were gummy and sticky on the bottom, and the tartlets exploded as I tried to extract them from the pan. Ah well, that'll teach me to experiment on the day of an event. I roped in our friends Nick & Russ to make an emergency pastry run for me, so everyone was treated to a lovely CItizen Cake confection. No one complained.
Because my watermelon infusion experiment was predicated on the assumption that the melon's flavor is extremely delicate and easily overpowered by underlying flavors, I began tasting at the three-day mark, fully two days earlier than I normally do with fresh infusions. On that day, all I tasted was vodka and sugar. Days four and five were little changed, and by day six I figured it had gotten to wherever it was going, so I strained.
On the bright side, it tastes nothing at all like cantaloupe (as was my concern). On the other hand, it tastes little like watermelon, either. DPaul insists he can taste watermelon, and I suppose I can, too, but it's certainly ... subtle.
It is a lovely blush color, though, and some of the pulp of the fruit even managed to work its way through the coffee filter, which is unusual. Speaking of the pulp, I of course tasted it post-strain, and the verdict is: Blargh! Rather than firming up the texture, as was the case with the other infusions, the spent watermelon was flabby, like too-old raw beef, and utterly devoid of flavor.
So. We'll see how it fares when chilled. I'm sure it will be lovely in some lemonade or a cosmo or something. This much I know -- I went through the trouble to infuse it, strain it and make a fastidious little label for it, so it's sure as hell going to get drunk. So I guess I know what I'm bringing to July 4 festivities!
Typical of me and DPaul, we managed to skip all the big stuff this past Pride weekend. No parade, no parties ... we even missed Pink Saturday, which we rarely if ever do. It's not that we didn't do our fair share of fun things over the weekend, it's just that most of them didn't involve being surrounded by thousands of drunk gays and lesbians. It did, however, mainly involve being surrounded by just a handful of drunk people at any given time. Oddly enough, come to think of it, we were mainly surrounded by drunk straight people. Hm, whatev.
Anyway, the point is that on the night of Pride proper, we had a few friends over, and I was too damned drunk lazy to make dessert. While at the market, I saw watermelons and thought, perfect!
I'm guessing this year's wacky weather was not so impactful on melons, because the box of watermelons outside Bell was full of gargantuan beasts bigger than basketballs. It wasn't until I got home and checked the receipt that I realized I had just hefted home 15 lbs of fruit. On my shoulder, like a second head. For three blocks. Oy.
It's a good thing I didn't actually *make* dessert, because Jim & Matthew showed up with a box of goodies from Tartine. Well, that beats watermelon any day! Unfortunately, I was left with a fridge full of juicy red fruit. (Which I had to quarter just to get it into the fridge!)
I didn't really get watermelon until about two years ago. I loved all other melons, and it's not that I didn't like watermelon, I just thought of it as the pedestrian filler fruit of the melon world. But then, one summer, I had a few remarkable watermelon preparations and the lightbulb went off. Most memorable was the watermelon sorbet in cucumber soup with pink peppercorns at Aziza, which I promptly recreated for DPaul's birthday that year. Yum.
Now, we have done infusions of several melons in the past, watermelon included. Disappointingly, they all turned out tasting just like cantaloupe. Not that there's anything especially wrong with that. I love cantaloupe. But when you put watermelon in and get cantaloupe back, well, you're disappointed.
This time will be different, I thought. As I have such a monstrous surplus of watermelon, I can be selective, only using the juiciest, reddest, watermeloniest part for infusion. The rest of it, well, more on that later.
So, gentle readers, my hope is that, by using only the choicest bits, I can extract enough pure watermelon essence to overcome the evidently overpowering cantaloupiness that lies within. Stay tuned!
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