So, recipes

I promised I'd get them up tonight. Well, technically it's tomorrow morning already, but close enough. This last weekend I served four beverages at a party that I ran in Columbus, OH:

The Fountain of Youth

Really just a variation on the Aviation cocktail, the Fountain of Youth was:

Eight parts lemonade (actually, closer to 7.6 parts lemonade, but that's the kind of crap you have to deal with when half your recipe is calculated in metric and the other half in imperial)
One part violet syrup
One part maraschino

I mixed 2 oz of that with roughly 1.5 oz vodka, over ice, and topped with seltzer and garnished with a slice of lemon.


The Ashes of Amour

This one was a bit more complex.

I took:

2 cinnamon sticks
1-1.5 teaspoons cloves
2 tablespoons culinary lavender
a 4-5 inch hunk of ginger, cut into 1/4-inch slices

and added all of that to right around 2 cups of water. I brought it to a high boil, then down to a simmer for about 10 minutes, then I removed from heat and allowed to steep for... well, until I needed it, but typically around 20-30 more minutes. All ingredients in the above portion of the recipe were measured via dead reckoning, so they may be wildly off -- I tend to play things by ear, which is why I'm such a terrible pastry cook.

I added that liquid (carefully strained, of course) to a can of Minute Maid limeade concentrate and about 36 ounces (three of the concentrate can's worth) of no-sugar-added Concord grape juice. That became my punch concentrate.

I mixed 2 oz of that with around 1.5 oz of vodka, mixed with ice and topped with ginger ale. Garnish was a slice of lime.


The English Garden

Hendricks gin
English cucumber
Mint leaf
Rose syrup

I took a 750 ml bottle of Hendricks gin, and to it I added about a foot and a half of peeled, diced english cucumber and around... 4 oz (I think? I honestly can't recall) of shredded fresh mint leaf. I let that steep, covered, for around 4 hours or so before straining out all the solids. I would have let it steep chilled and covered but did not have a fridge in the hotel room. I then pressed the solids using a makeshift press consisting of an ice bucket and a plastic bag (you can probably use a french press, or a ladle and a strainer (like you do with a bisque)) to extract as much liquid flavor as I could from them, which was added back to the gin.

Ideally I would shake this gin in a cocktail shaker with just a splash of rose syrup for color and the barest hint of floral sweetness, pour it into a tumbler and top it with seltzer, but since I lacked a shaker at the party I just poured it over ice and stirred in the rose syrup and seltzer. I garnished with a slice of cucumber and a sprig of freshly-plucked mint.


Teetotaler's Friend

The last drink I made was a booze-free punch. It was simply lemonade, plain seltzer and violet syrup (in an approximate 8-4-1 ratio), mixed with some ginger root and rosemary, decorated with edible flowers. I would like to have muddled and steeped the lemonade with the rosemary and ginger, but I had neither time nor resources, so in the end the whole rosemary sprigs and ginger slices just ended up floating in the punch. They looked festive, but the flavor wasn't exactly what I was looking for.

(no subject)

I am a huge fan of the terrorist comedy Four Lions, opening here in the US later this week. As comedies go, it is as black as the blackest black thing, and equal parts hilarious and sad. You should go see it when it comes out.

Only tangentially related, Xeni Jardin interviewed Chris Morris, the movie's writer/director, and he had this little gem to share:

Look, the cartridges that were bombs, that were intercepted in the FedEx parcel bombing attempt last week—the guy who made those bombs turned his brother into a bottle rocket last year. That whole group are basically displaced Saudis in Yemen. They don't like the Saudis. This guy wanted to blow up a Saudi prince. And he persuaded his brother to use a suppository bomb. The suppository bomber turns up at the Saudi prince's place, says hello to the Saudi prince, pulls out a trigger, fires off the bomb, then blasts himself vertically, straight through the ceiling. The Saudi prince picks himself up and says, "Right, now then, where was I?" And that's the end of that. It's a perfect sight gag. For everyone other than the guy's mother, it's a funny story.

That is some hilarious shit right there.

My enthusiasm can only be adequately conveyed by a noise only dolphins can hear

Eeeeeee! Eeeeeee! Doc Martens store opens in Soho! Eeeeeee! Eeeeeee!