Posted by Anita on 11.17.06 6:39 AM
Fancy seasonal cocktails with convoluted ingredient lists can be lovely if you’re entertaining at home, but when you’re limited to the contents of a friend’s or relative’s liquor cabinet, it’s better to be prepared for elegant compromise.
This cocktail classic’s easily made with supermarket ingredients — or even the contents of your hotel minibar, should it come to that. And what’s more perfect for Thanksgiving than cranberries?
The Cape Codder
1-1/2 oz. vodka
3 oz. cranberry juice, or to taste
lime, for garnish
Combine vodka and juice in an ice-filled highball or old-fashioned glass. Garnish with a lime wedge and/or a few reydrated cranberries, for a seasonal touch.
Drink of the Week, drinks, holidays & occasions, recipes
5 Comments »
Posted by Cameron on 11.10.06 6:48 AM
You can pick your friends—the saying goes—and you can pick your…um… poison, but you can’t pick your family. Happily, I have been blessed many times over through both blood and marriage. And so, while this Drink of the Week post is inspired by Mixology Monday #9 (bitters), it is dedicated to my brother-in-law Matt, who introduced me to a delightfully civilized drink: The Manhattan.
I had always been suspicious of The Manhattan, put off by crappy bourbon, unpredictable proportions, and those nasty, nuclear pink, jarred maraschino cherries that people actually eat instead of sticking on top of car antennas, where they belong.
But one night during a holiday visit many years ago, Matt commandeered the cocktail shaker and went to work with sweet vermouth, Angostura bitters, and Wild Turkey. I think. I’m a little blurry on the precise brand of bourbon, probably because we knocked off most of a bottle of whatever it was over the course of a gregarious evening.
In any case, my prejudice melted, and if I never sought The Manhattan out, neither did I avoid its presence. Those awful cherries, though. Ugh. Not a chance.
The next stage in my journey came this fall, when Murray of the Zig Zag Cafe promised us that if we brought a bottle of Carpano Antica vermouth on our next trip to Seattle, we’d be rewarded. When Murray speaks on things of a spiritous nature, my friends, I listen. Bottle in hand, we wafted in out of the northern night to be greeted by a Manhattan made with Carpano Antica, Rittenhouse bonded rye, and Bitter Truth bitters. Magic.
Since then, I (heart) Manhattan. It’s a drink that rewards customization with different ingredient styles and (carefully!) proportions. You’ll find recipes that recommend anywhere from one-half to two ounces of vermouth for two ounces of bourbon or rye. These days, I feel like anything less than a 2:1 ratio tastes like a shot, not a cocktail, but as I have written before, I am pigheaded, uncultured, and have displayed questionable drink-ordering skills.
The recipe below produces a very smooth drink, and is doubly appropriate for this particular MxMo, as it contains two bitter ingredients: orange bitters and Carpano Antica. The Bulleit bourbon lends body without calling attention to itself, and the fruitiness of the orange bitters (of which the Hermes is a difficult-to-find but excellent example) balances the extra bite of the Carpano Antica, which you could replace with regular sweet vermouth for increased mellitude. If you need fruit, soak dried Bing cherries overnight in whatever suits your fancy. I used brandy and…POW! Drunken Cherries.
Cheers, Matt! (And happy 5th Anniversary to you and P…)
Old Manhattan
2 oz. Bulleit bourbon
1-1/4 oz. Carpano Antica vermouth
2 dashes Hermes orange bitters
Stir with ice. Strain into a cocktail glass and garnish with a Drunken Cherry.
Drink of the Week, drinks, family, Mixology Monday, other blogs, recipes
13 Comments »
Posted by Anita on 11.03.06 8:01 AM
This one’s a nod to this weekend’s destination: the City of Angels…
The Los Angeles Cocktail
1 oz. fresh lemon juice
1 tsp. sugar
1 egg
1-1/2 oz. rye (or bourbon)
1/4 oz. sweet vermouth
Shake with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass.
Drink of the Week, recipes, SoCal, travel
1 Comment »
Posted by Anita on 10.27.06 7:40 AM
With Hallowe’en right around the corner, I figured you’d be up for hearing about a hauntingly good cocktail like this one. You shouldn’t have to do a lot of shopping for specialty ingredients, nor remember any tricky measurement ratios.
We like it as a way to use up some of the less-attractive brandied cherries we concocted for a recent project: Although the dark-colored ones look lovely, the paler specimens are frankly quite creepy-looking and resemble little bloody brains… eww. (But how appropriate!)
If you don’t want to throw off the flavors, rehydrate a few pale dried cherries in Pernod, or simply give the brandy-soaked cherry a good rinse.
Corpse Reviver #2
3/4 ounce gin
3/4 ounce lemon juice
3/4 ounce Cointreau
3/4 ounce Lillet blanc
a dash of Pernod, or other pastis
Shake all ingredients with ice, and strain into a well-chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a homemade booze-soaked cherry … preferrably one of the creepy, pale-colored ones.
Drink of the Week, drinks, holidays & occasions, recipes
3 Comments »
Posted by Anita on 10.20.06 6:09 AM
Wanting a little refreshment before dinner, I gave Cameron a list of four or five ginger-beer-based cocktails, and asked him to pick one that sounded appealing. I’m glad I left the decision up to him, because I almost certainly would have chosen one of the drinks that marries a brown liquor with this spicy soda. Which would have been a shame, because the Moscow Mule is a lovely cocktail, a spicy-tart variation on a gin and tonic, but without the bitter aftertaste.
Usually, the drinks dreamed up by PR flacks are gawdawful messes. But the story of the Moscow Mule shows that — just like a million monkeys banging away on a million Smith-Coronas might eventually produce Shakespeare — sometimes these misbegotten concoctions turn out just fine.
A quick Google on “Moscow Mule” turns up a few variations on the story of the drink’s genesis, but most sources agree that representatives of Smirnoff vodka and Cock n’ Bull ginger beer put their heads together and came up with a way to market their slow-moving beverages. Someone designed a cute copper mug to serve it in, and they quickly made their way into mixological history.
As you might expect, much depends on the quality of your ginger beer, so steer clear of the Canada Dry and seek out something with a bit of bite, and not too much sweetness. Locally, our new friends down at City Beer sell Cock n’ Bull’s modern incarnation, and BevMo stocks a surprisingly wide selection of ginger brews.
Moscow Mule
2 ounces vodka
3 ounces good, spicy ginger beer
1 ounce fresh lime juice
Combine ingredients in an ice-filled old-fashioned glass (or, more traditionally, a copper mug). Garnish with a lime wedge.
Drink of the Week, drinks, recipes
4 Comments »
Posted by Anita on 10.13.06 8:24 AM
Meeta at What’s for Lunch Honey? is hosting this month’s Mixology Monday:
Topic for this event is Exotic Drinks — from the Bahama Mamas you order while on vacation to the ongoing exploration of Grog Log, this event is for the colorful, the relaxing, the vibrant.
Careful observers will note that today’s actually Friday, but DOTW traditions must go on! Just call us slightly ahead of the curve.
Picking our favorite exotic cocktail is easy: We stumbled — perhaps a bit too literally — onto the Painkiller during our first trip to Tortola, ages ago, at a beachfront bar called De Loose Mongoose (pictured above) The running joke as we mixed them up on the guest-house porch of Mermaid Villa was “hey, go easy on the orange juice!”… because the rum was so damned cheap and the OJ was imported by air from Puerto Rico.
The Painkiller
4 ounces unsweetened pineapple juice
1 ounce orange juice
1 ounce Coco Lopez coconut cream
2 to 4 ounces dark rum (preferably Pusser’s)
whole nutmeg
Mix all ingredients together, then pour into a highball glass filled with ice. Top with a grating of fresh nutmeg, and garnish with a wedge of pineapple, if desired.
Drink of the Week, drinks, Mixology Monday, other blogs, recipes, travel
6 Comments »
Posted by Anita on 10.06.06 7:13 AM
Since tonight marks the beginning of Sukkot and the Chinese Autumn Moon festival, I suppose it’s futile to pretend that it’s not yet fall. Even though we live in a place where we don’t really see the leaves falling from the trees, all this rain makes it pretty obvious that Indian Summer is, at last, behind us.
This Audrey Saunders cocktail — a favorite of our Seattle crew — requires a bit of shopping, but the end result is well worth it. If you try it, I suspect that you’ll enjoy making it well into the holiday season.
Falling Leaves
1 oz. Clear Creek pear eau de vie
2 oz. Trimbach reisling
1/4 oz. honey syrup (equal parts of honey and water)
1/2 oz. Orange curacao
dash Peychaud bitters
Measure all ingredients into cocktail shaker, add ice, and shake well. Strain into a cocktail glass, and garnish with a whole piece of star anise.
Drink of the Week, drinks, recipes, Seattle
4 Comments »
Posted by Anita on 09.29.06 9:47 AM
About a year into our Great Northwest Experiement, we were both desperately homesick for all of our friends in San Francisco… and utterly sick of trying out restaurants that “everyone” said were great, but that were either nothing special or unspeakably terrible. I think it was Cameron who first started posting on Chowhound’s Northwest forum, looking for better food; I soon joined him, posting reviews of places we tried and hated (usually) or loved (occasionally).
One fine day, a CH poster called MsRamsey sent me an email and told me to check out eGullet. Once we landed on eG, we found a fantabulous crew of like-minded souls — people who knew where to find the really good stuff and weren’t satisfied until they found even more of it. We became great friends with many of these folks over the course of the next couple of years; they became our primary social circle. (The ultimate irony is, of course, we miss the Seattle crew now at least as much as the people we left behind in San Francisco.)
Not long after, three of our foodie friends invited me our for “drinks with the girls” at Zig Zag Cafe, a bar I’d never even heard of, much less visited. Little did I know that I was in for a life-changing experience. I met a man named Murray Stenson that night — a man who would become a friend and a mentor. He made me a drink that night that opened my eyes to the wonders of cocktails beyond plebian Gin & Tonics and Whiskey Sours.
This, ladies and gents, was that drink. It remains a favorite of mine — and retains its place on the Zig Zag menu — to this day.
Last Word
1/2 oz. gin
1/2 oz. Maraschino liqueur
1/2 oz. green Chartreuse
1/2 oz. lime juice
Shake with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass.
bar culture, Drink of the Week, drinks, food boards, recipes, Seattle
2 Comments »
Posted by Anita on 09.19.06 7:56 AM
Matey, don’ tell me ye din’t knows today were Talk Like a Pirate Day?? Avast!
In honor of this fair occasion, Drink o’ the Week be moving to Tuesday. We raise ye a fyne tipple from Sir Rrrrobert of Hess.
Jolly Roger
2 ounces dark rum
1 ounce orange juice
1/4 ounce Falernum (or simple syrup)
dash of bitters
Shake with ice, and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with an orange twist.
Drink of the Week, drinks, holidays & occasions, levity, recipes
5 Comments »
Posted by Anita on 09.15.06 7:33 AM
Tonight is Noche del Grito, the big celebration on the eve of Mexican Independence Day. Now, I know you probably think that Cinco de Mayo is the equivalent of our July 4, but we gringos concocted that caca del toro… probably in order to sell more Cuervo and Coronas.
When I was in Puebla last May and mentioned that norteamericanos celebrate May 5 as a Mexican holiday, the poblanos were understandably perplexed.
But el 16 de Septiembre is the real deal, so it seems only fitting to make up a batch of Margaritas. Don’t touch that blender, Sancho: The real thing’s served either up or on the rocks, and made with lime juice… none of that sicky-sweet “sour mix.”
Margarita
2 oz. good-quality silver tequila
1 oz. Cointreau
1 oz. freshly squeezed lime juice
Shake all ingredients with ice. Strain into a chilled, salt-rimmed cocktail glass, or serve on the rocks in an old-fashioned glass. Garnish with an orange twist or a wedge of lime.
Drink of the Week, drinks, Mexican, recipes, travel
3 Comments »
