When Cocktails Were Larger And Filled With Fruit

Continuing the foray into The PDT Cocktail Book, I alighted on the Eclipse Cocktail (page 113), which involves tequila, Aperol, Cherry Heering and lemon juice. As any good bartender will tell you, the first rule of mixology is to use ingredients you have; we had those ingredients.

The combination is good (most cocktails are “good” though, aren’t they?), less sweet and more nuanced than last night’s Persephone. Still fruity, but good. Tonight it occurred to me that we might be living a sort of cocktail time capsule in this book though — it was published in 2011, and I wonder if the trends from four years back were more fruitacious than today. The few times I’ve been out at real-life cocktail places recently it seems like the drinks were more angular and challenging than fruitacious. (“Angular” just popped into my head; I remember guitars being described as “angular” in days of yore; I have no clue what that means.)

To go back to the Eclipse, the proportions kind of blow the typical three-ounce cocktail out of the water: 2 ounces tequila and 3/4 ounces of each other ingredient adds up to [thinking] 4 1/4 ounces of beverage: yikes!

They Act Like “Tasting Like Fruit Punch” Is A Bad Thing

I’ve neglected what seem to be very useful tomes about cocktails, mostly because we have too many books around and they get piled high on their sides versus shelved up and down like you’re supposed to with books. Which is how I forgot about Jim Meehan’s The PDT Cocktail Book. I’ll leave it out to find some new recipes. Tonight we had a Persephone (page 207), mostly because I knew I had all the ingredients. I know Persephone is some Greek thing or something but I have no idea about the meaning because I’m mostly uninformed (or forgetful) about such things.

It caught my eye for the sloe gin, which I got a bottle of at the good (cheap) local liquor store. This was the Llords — two Ls — stuff though, not the fancy British sloe gin that gets produced but which is ten times the price of that which is branded with two Ls, like it’s getting ready to apply for a summer internship at a white-shoe firm or something. I kept coming across sloe gin in the Mr. Boston but it wasn’t until after I got a bottle that I realized that it was used for only a few recipes.

Also, they call for the fancy Dolin sweet vermouth, which isn’t happening. Instead, there’s that Tribuno stuff, which I know by look and had to go to the liquor cabinet just now to read the label.

The main ingredient is Laird’s Apple Jack, which we actually had.

So it’s mostly Apple Jack, then sweet vermouth then the sloe gin followed by lemon juice and simple syrup. It’s all good — except it’s scary how much it tastes like fruit punch.

Like Drinking A Tree

We came across mastic liqueur — also known as “mastika” or “mastiha” — at MP Taverna, which has this cocktail they call the “Elizavet” that uses it along with mint, lime juice and tonic. It’s fantastic — tastes like a herbaceous resiny mint julep. The mastic liqueur they use is Skinos, which has made a splash lately around the liquor stores with some kind of campaign, but there are other (cheaper) mastic liqueurs that taste similar.

The resin from a Mediterranean tree, mastic has a super distinctive flavor — when in alcohol form (we have some mastic gum in the herb/spice portion of the cabinet) it’s hard to describe, but I liken it to a really delicious ash tray. I understand that’s not a great endorsement, but you have to try it to see.

After MP Taverna and then seeing Skinos at the liquor store, we bought some and replicated that cocktail, but we also came across this great recipe that has been in the pantheon of go-to cocktails for nearly two years now. It’s roughly four parts mastic liqueur to two parts gin to one part lemon juice with a, uh — can’t figure out the parts now — little simple syrup and a dash of Angostura bitters. We skip the cucumber because it’s silly to put cucumbers in stuff when you’re drinking at home.

Part of putting this all down is that I’ve relied on my browser to remember the above link — which doesn’t seem like a smart way to save recipes (but is often my main method for doing so). That’s not good enough for this drink, which is really a wonderful cocktail.

Goober got this Skinos “Little Book of Cocktails” at the liquor store, by the way — they include a version of the “Skinos Fresh” recipe above (which must be where that above one comes from) except that instead of 2:1 Skinos-gin ratio it’s one for one. I like the taste of the mastic liqueur, so I think the above recipe is a little better. We’ve also had the 2:1 ratio reversed; I don’t like it as much . . .

You Screw Things Up Enough, It’s Bound To Go Right

I had been thinking about the almost baked pate-kebabs from lamb we made the other day so when we were at the store the other day I picked up a pack of meatloaf mix (pork, veal, beef), which obviously isn’t lamb but which I figured might work anyway. Conceptually, it was something along the lines of “South Asian Meatloaf Ke-balls.”

So today I pull out the copy of At Home With Madhur Jaffrey and opened it to what I thought was the recipe I mangled and after I prepped the paste that the meat gets mixed into I realized that I was using the wrong recipe. I had the book open to the Lamb Kebabs with Mint recipe (page 116) and had dutifully measured out all the requisite cumin, coriander, cayenne and ginger and was going to mix it into the ground meat when I noticed it said “Mix well and prob the lamb cubes with a fork.” Hrm. It took me a while to figure out what the original recipe was, and only after referring back to this post was I able to reconstruct what happened — which is why I want to get this down in the first place.

One thing I changed was switching out plain yogurt for ricotta cheese, which we always have around. So: Ricotta cheese, lemon juice, salt cayenne pepper, ground cumin, ground coriander, two scallions (in place of an onion), ginger, the meat, and skip the mint but add the butcher parsley they always include in the meatloaf. Who eats that stuff? you might ask. We did. Tonight. It actually came in handy.

And then I turned the page to the actual recipe I mangled before which was when everything collapsed into itself. The only remaining issue was how long to cook the balls. The answer, I now Googled my way into, was 400 degrees for about 30-35 minutes.

The second part of the meal were the sous vide carrots (you know, those things), except this time I experimented with adding mushrooms. That part worked, too. Also, we used ghee instead of butter.

You Need A Chicken Salad Recipe

Because what else are you going to do with shitty chicken? I am very susceptible to top Google rankings, and especially Alton Brown, and I’m pleased to report that this Food Network recipe worked well. Of course the recipe wasn’t “poached” chicken, because that would defeat the purpose of reusing “old” chicken, and this time of year precludes fresh herbs, not that we were successful last year with dill anyway. Also, “homemade mayonnaise”? Seriously? What’s wrong with Duke’s?

Asparagus side dish from the other Internet behemoth. I’m sure those eggs and chives would have been great, but unfortunately I succumb to what I believe may be a hardwired repulsion to combining a chicken and its eggs in a single meal. I will be happy to overlook mayo on a chicken sandwich, obviously. So what do you want?