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 . . .

If By “If Necessary It Can Be Stored, Corked And Refrigerated, For Up To One Week After Opening” You Mean Forget About It In The Lower Door Shelf Of The Refrigerator For More Than A Year, Then I’m Right There With You

There was a little bit of manzanilla sherry in the refrigerator from “a while ago” so I Googled a cocktail around it and found this slideshow idea, which doesn’t actually use manzanilla sherry but rather amontillado but which I thought that, in the spectrum of sherry, was close enough. In effect, it’s a cutting-corners recipe.

OK, so we didn’t use the basil leaves the recipe called for, nor did we use the amontillado sherry. And we substituted an off-brand Grand Marnier for Cointreau. And of course we omitted the orange twist, but that’s like every night, because who really keeps citrus fruit around just to construct twists? If you’re doing that you clearly don’t really drink.

So given all that: Dry sherry, Rye whiskey, Grand Marnier (or some such), lemon juice and orange bitters. It was tart and, as Jen mentioned, you kind of wanted more of that nutty sherry flavor. I was intrigued by the way the rye disappeared; not sure how that happened except that everything else piled on could easily blot it out. This is when I think there should be a Likert Scale of relative cocktailia happiness but of course there isn’t.

On Lamb

This Melissa Clark recipe for Lamb-and-White-Bean Chili was good. Full disclosure: I omitted the two poblano peppers (and two small green peppers substitute for the two poblano peppers), the cilantro (both the finely chopped stems and the leaves for garnish) and the two small jalapenos. Also, I switched the white beans for some very old white tepary beans I had in the cupboard and had been meaning to get rid of. I skipped the lime, as well, but we added dried mint afterward. So I sort of made this recipe.

How many recipes does this happen with? For me, it’s probably 90 to 95 percent of them.

Jen has been wanting to eat more lamb, so we tried chili with lamb. I think it’s kind of great: beans love fat, or more accurately, people love beans that commingle with fat. Speaking of oozing lamb fat, there was a good tip in this recipe, which was to brown the meat and let it rest on a paper towel on a plate, which soaked up a lot of fat.

For a cocktail, we tried a Jack Rose, which Jen read about in the new, improved Sunday Motherfucking Times Magazine. The hook in this particular piece in the new, improved Motherfucking Magazine was “the classic cocktail that never got invited to the oldies reunion.” It was OK. To be fair, we used the Applejack on hand and not the Laird 100-proof straight apple brandy in the recipe. But as they say, don’t let the accurate be the enemy of the available.

Blood and Sand (Cherry Liqueur, Cont.)

Too lazy to flip through the Mr. Boston for whiskey recipes that use Cherry Heering so I googled it. Found this recipe for a Blood and Sand: 1 ounce blended Scotch, 1 ounce orange juice and 3/4 ounce Cherry Heering. It was good but wanted it more boozy (perhaps that’s because of using the lower alcohol Nalewka Lwowecka). As a rule I avoid orange juice because alcohol and orange juice reminds me of a screwdriver, but this was definitely not too orange-y. For what it’s worth, I used Grant scotch, which isn’t the cheapest one on the bottom shelf, but it’s close. The bottle does have a charming triangular shape that I like to think is somehow space saving. I haven’t found a cheap go-to blended scotch mixer — part of it may be my ideas about what constitutes “cheap”; my go-to cheap bourbon has been Evan Williams and cheap mezcal has been that thing with the gnarly worm . . . [googling] . . . Monte Alban. Here are About.com some more recipes that look good; also, seems like there are variations on Blood and Sand.