Category Archives: cocktails

Grown Up Egg Creams

cocktails April 3, 2018 Leave a comment

Anyone who grew up in America the mid-20th century – or at least visited a diner – has had an egg cream. It’s fizzy and sweet, and technically contains neither eggs nor cream.

Made with milk, seltzer, and typically, chocolate or vanilla syrup, this sweet classic is thought to be developed in New York City by Eastern European Jewish immigrants. I love them and order them in lieu of milkshakes in an effort to be “healthier.” Hahahaha.

As I’ve gotten older, though, I consume sweet things less and less in a health effort and because my tastes have changed up a bit since I was a kid (not unusual).

But I still crave them from time to time, and the other night, I decided I wanted one…but I lacked chocolate syrup, milk, and the desire to go out and buy any. But I did have a chocolate cherry liqueur and heavy cream left over from a recipe. So I improvised.

I used these three ingredients:

img_3777

First, I poured in about 2 oz of chocolate cherry liqueur:

img_3778

Next, I added about 2 oz heavy cream. The cream looks like a lot more than it is due to the fact that the cream seems to smush the liqueur. I know. I’m sure there’s a scientific explanation for this, something about density or buoyancy or whatever, but I don’t know what it is.

After that, I mixed them with a spoon:

img_3780

And finally, I added the seltzer:

img_3781

Look at all that foam!

Ok, I lied, I also garnished it with a sprinkle of cocoa powder…although, only because I didn’t have any maraschino cherries.

I’ve made these for my family and so far they really like them – like me, they like egg creams but wish for something slightly less sweet.

The really fun part of this is that you can pretty much use any liqueur you like. I used chocolate cherry liqueur, because 1. I love that combo, and 2. my seltzer happened to be black cherry. But you can use Kahlua, or a straight coffee or chocolate liqueur, or peppermint/mint, or whatever you enjoy.

Cheers!

My Bloody Mary

cocktails February 3, 2018 Leave a comment

I haven’t done a cocktail post in quite sometime, but I never stopped drinking. I decided to jump back into the cocktail posts with one of my staples: a good bloody mary.

I’m a sucker for a good bloody mary. They’re delicious, they’re versatile, and although they’ve been unjustly labeled as a breakfast/brunch drink, I drink them pretty much any time of day. AND YOU CAN TOO!

The coolest thing about bloody marys is how varied they are. Everyone has seen those instagram accounts and pinterest posts dedicated to the most elaborately garnished bloody marys. They’re meals almost in themselves.

But! A bloody mary is, first and foremost, a drink. And no matter how many wacky garnishes you add to it (I’ve seen everything from the traditional celery to a whole fried chicken), if your drink isn’t very good, you aren’t going to enjoy it very much.

Like any good meal, the key to a good drink is good (fresh, if possible) ingredients. I don’t have any fresh tomato/vegetable juice, so I use V8. Typically I use the high fiber or low sodium versions for personal health reasons, but you can use whatever you like. Campbell’s puts out a tomato juice that a lot of people like. That’s another cool thing about bloody marys – they can be tweaked to your taste, almost endlessly.

The other thing that makes a drink good: quality liquor. Sure, there are times when plastic bottle vodka and supermarket brand orange juice from concentrate serve their purpose, but as you get older, and you’re drinking socially, and not just to be wasted, you want something that gets you pleasantly buzzed and doesn’t also taste like it was an experiment concocted in a Russian prison.

I make bloody marys with two liquors: vodka or tequila. I’ve had one where a whiskey was used, but I didn’t enjoy it as much. The taste just wasn’t right. So I stick to vodka and tequila.

I’ve found a recipe that works for me, more or less, every time. You can adjust as you wish, but here is how I make mine.

1.5 – 2 oz vodka or tequila. For this particular morning, I used this:

img_3449

This is Tanteo Jalapeño Tequila, and it is delicious.
I also used:

6 – 8 oz high fiber V8
the juice of 1 whole small lemon, or 1/2 one large lemon (limes work too, I just prefer lemons)
1 tablespoon horseradish (for me, this is key!!!)
4-5 dashes Worcestershire sauce
Old Bay seasoning
(the airtight jar is filled with pickled jalapeños – more on that later)

My ingredients looked like this:

img_3451

(Ignore the brown bananas. They’re for banana bread later this weekend.)

Add the liquor, vegetable juice, lemon juice, horseradish, and Worcestershire sauce into a cocktail shaker. Shake to combine. Pour into glasses, either over ice or without, according to preference. Sprinkle Old Bay Seasoning over the top. I used the pickled jalapeños for garnish. I have also muddled them up and used them to add flavor when I used plain vodka instead of jalapeño tequila.

img_3454

 

So that’s my basic recipe for a bloody mary, minus the pickled jalapeños. Sometimes I change it up with crumbled bacon or some olive juice or a flavored vodka/tequila, but basically, that’s it. As I said, there are a million variations you can use to make a bloody mary. Some people like a really spicy one or don’t like Worcestershire sauce. Whatever. It’s up to you.

BUT! I always use horseradish in my bloody mary. As mentioned, it’s key. I prefer it to Tabasco or any other hot sauce for two simple reasons

  1. It adds a unique taste that hot sauce doesn’t have (although my husband likes adding both horseradish and hot sauce).
  2. It adds texture. I love texture. You can adjust spice by adding more or less horseradish, or using fresh. In my experience, fresh horseradish is very potent. Don’t use the purple horseradish, which has beet juice in it. Well, I guess you can, but I don’t like it, haha.

And like I said, I drink these at all hours. My version is quite popular with my family (we’re drinkers and they’re my favorite test audience because they don’t lie – if something sucks, I hear about it). Serve with brunch, dinner, afternoon tea. Enjoy.

Bloody Good Punch

cocktails, non-fiction March 9, 2015 Leave a comment

I am obsessed with blood oranges.

I don’t know why, or how this happened. I didn’t eat a lot of blood oranges as a kid, but I am obsessed with them.

So when I came across a punch recipe calling for the use of blood oranges, of course I had to make it, and I tested it on my family at a birthday party. Because what is family good for if not to be used as guinea pigs in your experiments?

This recipe actually required to make two recipes, but was actually ridiculously simple to make. I had to half the recipe, because I wasn’t making punch for THAT many people

bloody good punch recipe

easiest recipe ever.

First, I had to make the sour mix. There are a number of different types of sour mixes to make in this book, but the variation I used was the blood orange mix (as required by the punch recipe).

sour mix recipe

As you can see this required the fresh blood orange juice. Thank goodness I decided to squeeze the blood oranges the night before. It took 45 minutes and was a huge mess – blood colored spattered juice everywhere, including on me. I could have been Carrie’s body double.

Further, it was exhausting. If I’m going to be squeezing oranges en masse in the future, I need a juicer that isn’t mechanical and is electric.

And most aggravatingly at all, 6 lbs of blood oranges yielded – NO JOKE – 2 cups of juice.

blood orange juice

45 minutes hard labor and all I got was two lousy cups of juice! To be fair, it was delicious.

The sour mix was basically simple syrup with juice and orange zest. I also had to skip the lemon juice. I only had one lemon, and it was practically mummified, and I wasn’t going out at 1:00 AM to go get new lemons.

I was also supposed to use bourbon, but was out of it (lol) and used regular whiskey instead.

I put the whole thing together in the morning, except for the prosecco, which I’d add when I got to my destination, both to make travel easier and to not kill the bubbles. Prosecco is (basically) champagne without being officially French. It usually tastes better as well (I haven’t enjoyed any champagne I’ve had except the champagne at my cousin’s wedding, which was probably very expensive because it was his WEDDING). Most of the of prosecco I’ve had, though, has been delicious.

bgp mix

Mixture pre-prosecco. the oranges I zested for the sour mix, I sliced up and used as garnish.

I didn’t get to take a picture of the finished product, because I was too busy serving it.

Now, I didn’t have an ice mold to serve this in, and it really needed to be cold, so I added 2 ice cubes to each cup. It also didn’t hurt to be watered down just a bit, because it’s a strong punch. That is obviously to taste. I didn’t want everyone wasted because I wanted birthday cake, so I had to take it easy.

It was a big hit, even though it was a bit strong. I wasn’t sure they’d like it, but my family usually surprises me about stuff like this. This punch will be made again (with bottled blood orange juice!) if I have a big party. I will also use a sweeter Prosecco to help balance out the smokiness of the bourbon/whiskey.

Pumpkin Bourbon Eggnog & Coquito

cocktails, non-fiction January 25, 2015 Leave a comment

So I realize I’m a month late with this particular post but my life took a turn for the discombobulated. I apologize. Here we go.

We begin with this ONE simple fact: my domestic engineer ideas are usually terrible. … Ok, the ideas aren’t terrible, I’m terrible at executing them.

I decided my contribution to Christmas would be this pumpkin bourbon eggnog recipe I’ve been dying to try. Like most of America these days, I love all things pumpkin. I also like all things bourbon. And I like eggnog. And I was doing all this before it was cool (especially the pumpkin thing).

This recipe was about 57 million times easier than the the recipe used in my Rompope experiment.

PBE recipe

So here’s what I learned about eggnog:

IT USES RAW EGGS.

Everyone freaks out about raw eggs, which I don’t fully understand, because everyone USED to consume raw eggs, and nobody was worried about salmonella THEN. Still, I didn’t want to kill everyone at Christmas, so I checked it out further.

In the United States, salmonella poisoning is most commonly caused by two types of bacteria, called Salmonella serotype Typhimurium and Salmonella serotype Enteritidis. This bacteria, as well as other forms of bacteria that make you sick that you can pick up from eggs, does not occur naturally IN the egg. It’s ON the egg SHELL, which becomes contaminated during processing/handling due to the unsanitary conditions that Big Agriculture allows in the name of making a prophet.

Usually, salmonella will get into an egg when the shell is cracked and the egg comes out. How do you avoid contamination? Well, obviously no method short of fully cooking your eggs is a 100% guarantee, and the risk of salmonella poisoning is small anyway, but you can take precautions to help further reduce risk. If I have to use raw eggs, I clean them. First, I let them sit in a white vinegar and warm water bath for 5-10 minutes. Then, I rinse them in warm water with a gentle, non-toxic soap – I specifically use Method soap.

After that, I crack them and do whatever I have to do, and so far, no gastrointestinal disasters 😀

Anyway, I was having some kind of issue with the eggs. I could.not.separate.them.

The yolks kept breaking, which meant I had to keep starting over, because if any of the yolk gets into the whites, the whites won’t whip into a meringue.

A LOT of eggs later, I finally managed to separate the right number, all at once.

This recipe is super simple. Basically, you heat the pumpkin, spices, milk, cream, and bourbon in a pot, then later add the egg yolks.

PBE pot

egg & pumpkin mixture

Then, you whip the egg whites into a meringue…

PBE merengue

meringue!

…and then fold the egg whites into the pumpkin mixture.

The taste was good, but I didn’t love the texture of the meringue folded into the mixture. I suppose it’s possible I done fucked this up, but nobody loved the mixture.

PBE plus egg whites

finished product

It looks grainy, it was too foamy, it just…wasn’t perfect. Not anything I’d serve at Christmas.

I decided to store it in the refrigerator overnight in the hope the meringue would kind of…deflate…no such luck, but the taste was even better after letting it sit overnight, so….

I made it again! Minus the meringue (which made dealing with the eggs a lot easier). I also cut the bourbon. A lot of my family is elderly and won’t drink anything too strong. It’ll mix with their medication and I’ll be staring down the gun at the more handicapped, psychotic version of ‘All in the Family.’

The texture was much better this time.

PBE minus egg whites

finished product 2.0

And the taste was better after leaving it overnight. However.

It stopped being a liquid and became a little too viscous. A lot too viscous.

PBE day 2 spatula

it barely dripped off the spatula

I had to enlist my mother’s help here. I don’t like doing this, because she tends to take over and do it a thousand times better than I ever could (to be fair, she’s got 30 years experience on me). But I couldn’t come up with a way to reheat the eggnog without breaking the cream (keeping it from curdling).

We left it out at room temperature, but that didn’t help either.

By this point, Christmas was approaching very fast. I think it was two days away, and I was doomed, because I couldn’t make the eggnog the night before, like I wanted, and there was no way to make it and serve it Christmas day without inconveniencing those doing the cooking.

So I did something risky.

I moved on to a different (but similar) recipe entirely. Enter Coquito. We had been gifted Coquito by someone at work. It’s apparently traditional in South American and Hispanic cultures, and one of my coworkers passed out her mom’s homemade version as a gift.

coquito recipe

Similar recipe, less work, but really risky because hey I’d never done it before and when it comes to stuff like this, I need practice.

I had to go out and buy ingredients (although I thankfully I already had rum, the liquor store was a madhouse), but it turned out really great, even after refrigerating it…it was still a liquid, for example. I added drained, sour cherries to marinate and soak up some of the alcohol (good move!).

Annnd EVERYONE liked it. Or they were too nice to say they didn’t. But considering everyone came back for seconds, I think they liked it, and my aunt kept the leftovers.

Everything worked out! Christmas miracle 2014!

Variation On A Theme: Mulled White Wine

cocktails, non-fiction November 30, 2014 Leave a comment

What do cloves, pepper, tree bark and the wings of dead lady bugs have in common?

…

Give up yet?

…

You can mull wine with them!

Having read mulled wine recipes on the internet from the time I was old enough to drink…and, er, several years earlier…I’ve drawn the conclusion that you can mull wine using almost anything you want.  I wouldn’t suggest tree bark or lady bug wings, but you CAN do it, and that’s the point.

Anyway, I was home from work early due to snow and really couldn’t get to the store, so I decided that instead of trying a new drink, I’d try a variation on the old one.

The original mulled wine recipe I used calls for pear eau-de-vie (aka pear brandy) and a pear. I didn’t have pear eau-de-vie or a pear, so I substituted apple brandy (Laird’s Applejack, specifically) and an an apple.

mulled white wine recipe

The original recipe also calls for a bottle of white zinfandel, but I didn’t have that either, so I substituted a bottle of moscato, the other sweetest white wine I’m personally aware of that isn’t a liqueur.

This recipe went a lot smoother for me than the rompope recipe. I didn’t spill anything, nothing boiled over, there was no straining of paste, I was done in under half hour.

First, the pepper and clovers sit in the pot on medium heat until fragrant – a minute or two, it doesn’t take long.

Next, add the the wine, small bunches of fresh sage & thyme, lemon juice, lemon rind, and sugar and let simmer for 10 minutes. When that’s done, strain out the solids, pour back into pot, add sliced up apple and the apple brandy, and let simmer another 8-10 minutes until the apples are “fork tender.”

mulled white wine simmering

this smelled sooooo good.

I forgot to strain the solids before adding the apple and brandy. Siiiigh. I left them in for the last simmering. Nothing terrible happened…for me, that’s kind of a switch. Usually, when it comes to food & drink, what I decide “really can’t hurt” usually ruins everything, so this was a pleasant surprise.

mulled white wine mug

not poisonous!

And it turned out well!

mulled white wine katherine

my sister, ladies and gentlemen!

If you want you can leave the apple in – my apple was particularly mushy, so I strained it out – and have a nice winter warmer on a cold, snowy day! You might even have a surprise guest.

mulled white wine guest

 

Rompope

cocktails, non-fiction November 23, 2014 Leave a comment

I bought a book called Winter Cocktails: Mulled Ciders, Hot Toddies, Punches, Pitchers, and Cocktail Party Snacks by Maria Del Mar Sacasa at TJ Maxx for super cheap. Pro Tip: ALWAYS check out the cheap books in non-bookstores. You’d be surprised at what you’ll find.

As I mentioned in my update, I am testing cocktails for both practical reasons and love of alcohol and glamor. Considering my friend and I  want a seasonal cocktail menu in our future speakeasy, we’re currently running at winter at full speed (it’s November), and I love visiting liquor stores…here we are.

I started last weekend with the relatively simple mulled white wine recipe. Due to a communication mixup, I didn’t actually have any brandy or pear eau-de-vie so I substituted triple sec…which worked well enough, although I’m going to try it again.

This week, I went with the Rompope recipe, which I’d never even heard of until opening this book.

According to this book, ‘rompope’ is a derivation of the Spanish ‘ponche de hueve’ (egg punch) and first brewed by 17th century nuns in Mexico. Rompope and Conquito (another recipe later in the book) are milk punches. It can be served warm or cold – I went warm.

Now, this recipe isn’t that complicated…
rompope recipe

and the final result was delicious…
rompope mug

but it was labor intensive – it took the better part of three hours including prep & cleanup. AND THERE WAS A LOT OF CLEANUP. You can’t even see the huge mess the stove is in this photo.
rompope mess

First, the recipe calls for blanched almonds. I had trouble finding these in stores, so I blanched my own. Blanching and hand skinning the almonds took about 25 minutes by itself. This only becomes a big deal because the rest of the recipe takes forever. After finishing that up, I used the food processor to grind the almonds and sugar into paste…which is where I would go back later and write in “Shortcut 1.” More on that later.

Next, you bring the milk (and lemon rind, vanilla extract, baking soda, and cinnamon sticks) to a boil then allow them to simmer. You know what you don’t do? TURN YOUR BACK FOR 30 SECONDS. I had the Islanders and Penguins game on in the background and I had JUST checked the pot when I heard the Isles’ goal horn. In the 30 seconds it took me to watch the goal, the pot boiled and spilled over everywhere, burning on the stove. AWESOME.

After doing the best clean up I could without burning off my finger prints, I got back to work. I let the pot simmer for 20 minutes. Carefully following the directions, I whisked the almond paste with the egg yolks and the rest of the sugar…which is where I learned “don’t use a whisk.” The sugar, almond paste, and egg yolks only balled together inside the whisk, like a bright yellow ball of sugary sunshine in a cage. I had to jab it out with a butter knife.

Anyway, after taking the milk off the stove and removing the solids (lemon rind & cinnamon stick) and confirming the milk at the bottom of the pot got burned, I poured the useable milk into the yolk/sugar/almond mixture, mixed it together with the spatula and put it back in the pot, where it would sit on the stove 5-7 minutes on low heat, “thickening.”

7 minutes later, there was absolutely no thickening. I had a feeling that maybe the “almond paste” was getting in the way. Remember Shortcut 1? Shortcut 1 is “Buy almond paste.” My food processor could not get the almonds fine and pasty enough to dissolve in the milk mixture…or be something you could drink, anyway. Since at some point I’d figured out that I was basically making liquid custard, I realized that the heat wasn’t high enough and the almond “paste” probably wasn’t helping, so I strained the almond paste out of the liquid with a tea strainer. That took 5-10 minutes. I cranked the heat up to medium (rather than low) and let go for another 7 minutes.

I knew at about minute 5 that I’d made the right move, because it coated the back of the spoon, which was a hint to “it’s ready” in the recipe.

The stuff was delicious, and with the rum mixed in, it was very good.

Unfortunately, there was tons of it. I had a mug, I handed out a mug to everyone in the house, and the pot was still half full. I poured the leftovers into a tempered glass pitcher. The book says Rompope keeps for a month in a sterilized glass bottle, but I didn’t have one of those, so I went with the pitcher. If I die of some kind of bacterial gastroenteritis, you’ll know why. I won’t have leftovers around that long, but who knows how fast bacteria can kill you?

The finished product was sort of a twist on egg nog. Different taste, same texture, but it was really good.

So, Rompope, which was delicious, was a 3 hour milk punch trial by fire that I just wasn’t ready for. Part of that was my own fault (pot boiling over) and part of it was OMG SIMMER IT FOREVER. There was also a lot of it. Only use this particular recipe if you’re having 4-6 people drinking it.

This is also a recipe you don’t want to try for the first time when guests are coming over. Unless you are some kind of liquid custard whiz, I suggest trying this before making it in case you have anyone you don’t want seeing you embarrass yourself. I also suggest making it days ahead of time, which can be done too.