drinks

I have been trying to learn to make drinks.

I am relying heavily on Robert Hess's book: The Essential Bartender's Guide and it's been great for me because I really wanted to learn old-fashioned ways of making the drinks, and he is insistent on the basics and the originals.

I started with the old fashioned, one of the original cocktails. It contains sugar, bourbon, water, and bitters. Garnish is orange peel and a cherry (sometimes more than one in my case.) I have been drinking a lot of these since I started this quest in the fall:



Next up, a dry martini, in my only (at the time) martini glass:


A margarita, very simple, just cointreau, tequila, and lime juice:



Tonight, I decided to get fancy, and I made two drinks that aren't "basic" - I did a modification of a Hemingway Daiquiri and a drink called "Harvard" maybe "Harvard Cocktail" is better?



I served them up in my new cocktail glasses, which are just new to me, since I got them at the antique market.

The Hemingway Daquiri calls for grapefruit juice and maraschino liqueur. I had ruby red grapefruit juice and no maraschino, so I went with it. It has: white rum, rupy red grapefruit juice, simple syrup, and lime juice. Shake with ice, strain into glass!



The Harvard seemed fun since I happen to work there, and also because I wanted to serve it to roommate kristen, who loves the Harvard pens I bring home. Also, I thought it would go well with her High Life.

The Harvard is brandy, sweet vermouth, grenadine, lemon juice and angostura bitters:

aquavit! part 2

sarah emily here. as a non-norwegian, I wanted to chime in about aquavit. once you taste it, you will immediately understand why it is the beverage of choice when eating rotting fish. this will sterilize you. the first time I tried it, the taste reminded me of the dentist. I can't explain it more than that. it's actually not bad, though. I wouldn't call it good, but it does have a very peculiar charm.

benedictine tastes like apples cider

After dinner today we decided to try the Benedictine that my dad cryptically gave me last year after learning that my plan for boozing up the apple cider was Wild Turkey. We hadn't opened it but finally decided to try it.

It smells like spicy rubbing alcohol and cough syrup. It tastes like very sweet cinnamonny alcohol syrup, but when you put it in cider it tastes like... sweet cinnamony cider that will get you drunk. I don't know if that's a good thing, but it is certainly interesting.

We strongly discourage doing shots of Benedictine, drinking it straight, or smelling it - ever.

The wikipedia article reads, in part, :Every bottle of Bénédictine has the initials D.O.M. written on the label. Mistakenly thought by some to refer to "Dominican Order of Monks," it actually stands for "Deo Optimo Maximo"; "Deus" is Latin for God, "Optimus" is Latin for "best" and "Maximo" is Latin for "greatest" - you could in English interpret this as "To God, most good, most great".

And, my favorite part:

Burnley Miners' Club in Burnley, United Kingdom is the world's biggest single consumer of Benedictine liqueur thanks to the Lancashire regiments that acquired a taste for it during the First World War. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9n%C3%A9dictine

pasta sauce with red wine

Today I made some rotini and I made some sauce with whatever was left in the fridge. It came out pretty good!

some olive oil in a saute pan
1 very pungent yellow onion (they were crying in the dining room), coarsely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
I put that on low heat, onions first, then garlic.

EDIT: Then I added a big handful of pine nuts. This is key!!!

Then I chopped a little red pepper that I had from the farmshare (the garlic is from the farmshare too) and dropped that in.

Next I chopped up some farmshare kale that had been sitting in the fridge for awhile and put that in. Then I put the water in.

Then I realized that spices are good, and I added salt, pepper, oregano and garlic powder.

Then I went into Susan's cupbard and got a can of no-salt-added diced tomatoes and put that in too. At this point we are on medium heat.

once the pasta was in the boiling water, I took the $4.99 bottle of chianti from Trader Joe's that we were drinking and added a whole bunch to the sauce. Then I turned the heat up to medium high so that it would bubble and burn off the alcohol, drank some more wine, and drained the pasta (which was not quite al dente, but turned out fine).

once the sauce had bubbled viciously for a few minutes I turned it down to a simmer and added just a little more oil and let it thicken for a few minutes. Then I put the rotini in a white bowl and poured the sauce on top and stirred. It was good!

We followed it with mint chocolate chip ice cream (excellent) and Benedictine Liqueur (weird).