Tag Archives: mixology monday

  • Mixology Monday LXXIII Cocktail: The Strawberry Witch

    May 20, 2013

    8 Comments

    The Strawberry Witch cocktail.

    The Strawberry Witch cocktail.

    Wow, time flies. It’s Mixology Monday again. It seems like we just made our CSA Gin cocktail for the last MxMo and here we are. Happily, we have another theme that is close to this wannabe farmer’s heart, “the witch’s garden”. Here are the details from this month’s host Cardiff Cocktails (an excellent site, worth a visit):

    mxmologoAs far back as we can look, the use of fresh herbs have been prevalent in the world of mixed drinks. From the early days of the julep, through Williams Terrington’s 19th century Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks, to Don the Beachcomber’s ahead of their time Tiki drinks, fresh herbs have always been at the forefront of mixology. So lets take influence from the bartenders that once ruled the world of mixology, raid your herb garden that too often gets neglected, and start mixing. I don’t want to put too many limits on this theme so get as creative as you please, want to use roots, spices or beans as well? Sure thing. Want to make your own herbal infusions or tinctures? Sounds wonderful.

    witchwitch1Well, we certainly have herbs here at the farm. Mint, thyme, basil, tarragon, oregano, sage, marjoram, lemon verbena, parsley and rosemary are all in full swing. But we also have strawberries that need to be used and we wanted to play with Strawberries and thyme for a while. So we chose these as the basis for the cocktail. We also took the name of the challenge to heart and immediately looked at our bottle of Strega (“Strega” means witch in Italian) as a potential ingredient.

    witch2witch4If you are unfamiliar with Strega, it is an herbal Italian digestif that features a rich yellow color (from saffron) and sweet herbal flavors. Strega, is usually enjoyed by itself, but we have been trying to get it into our cocktails. To our tastes, Strega has mint, juniper and citrus notes, so gin seemed like a good match (and one more herbal ingredient). But we were a bit concerned about too many herbal notes, so we added some lemon juice and a splash of sparking wine to brighten, and lighten, the overall flavor of the cocktail.

    witch5So how does the Strawberry Witch taste? In a word, herbal. But in a good way. Strawberries and thyme play very well together, the Strega sweetens without being cloying and the gin, lemon and champagne add the expected bright notes. The sip is tart, with mint and thyme flavors followed by some of the lemon and sweet notes of the Strega. The strawberries do more for color and aroma than flavor, but we are OK with that.The finish is very clean, almost dry.

    witch6(One last note here. Thyme can be strong stuff. At first we muddled it along with the strawberries and some lemon peel. This was a bad idea- the thyme got harsh and bitter. The next time around we muddled the strawberries and lemon first, then added the thyme and gave it just a few nudges. This worked way better, plenty of thyme flavor but not too much. Fresh herbs vary widely in strength and flavor, but be warned, you may want to do a quick test run before you muddle your herbs.)

    witch8Thanks again to Cardiff Cocktails and Fred Yarm at Cocktail Virgin Slut for another great MxMo!

    The Strawberry Witch:

    Ingredients:

    • 3-4 medium strawberries
    • Lemon peel
    • 2 sprigs fresh thyme, plus some extra for garnish
    • 1 1/2 oz dry gin
    • 3/4 oz. lemon juice
    • 1/2 oz. Strega
    • 1-2 oz. sparkling wine or Champagne

    Assemble:

    1. Place the strawberries and lemon peel in the cocktail shaker. Muddle until the strawberries are a smooth purée. Then add the thyme springs and lightly muddle a few times.
    2. Add the gin, lemon juice and Stega to the cocktail shaker. Add some ice and then shake until well-chilled. Double-strain the mixture into a coupé or flute. Top with the sparkling wine and garnish with a thyme sprig. Serve.
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  • Mixology Monday LXXII Cocktail: CSA Gin

    April 23, 2013

    24 Comments

    The CSA Cocktail.

    The CSA Cocktail.

    Another Mixology Monday is here and (hopefully) we got this in under the wire. This month’s theme is “Drink Your Vegetables” and is hosted by Rowen at the Fogged In Lounge (a very good cocktail blog, worth a visit). And thanks, as always, to Fred Yarm of Cocktail Virgin Slut for keeping this whole shindig going. So here are the details of the theme:

    csa2Want to get more vegetables but you’re always eating on the run?… Well then, how about a vegetable cocktail? No, not that nice little glass of red stuff Grandma put at each place setting—we’re talking something with a kick in it. You can definitely start with the little glass of red stuff and expand it to a Red Snapper-style drink like a Bloody Mary. Or how about a cucumber-scented cooler like a Pimm’s Cup, or maybe a cocktail featuring a vegetable-based ingredient like Cardamaro or celery bitters? Maybe you’ve been wondering if you can get more mileage out of that juice extractor before consigning it to the garage sale. However you get them in that glass, be prepared for the most fun with vegetables ever.

    csa3csa4So you would think that a “farm” blog would have this one in the bag, right? Not so, my friends, not so. We struggled mightily. It’s a good theme, and certainly we like our veggies, but somehow it took a bunch of time for us to formulate anything remotely original, interesting or blogworthy. And we aren’t big Bloody Mary fans, so no fallback there, either.

    csa5So what to do? Two things. Firstly, we chose to use fennel, one of our favorite ingredients (we may change the name of our blog to “Fennel Farms”). Secondly, we decided to use veggies to actually craft the base spirit and the cocktail. In this case we use veggies, fruits and spices to make “gin” and then formulate a cocktail.

    csa6And since gin often features the anise and citrus flavors we find in fennel and some gins (Hendrick’s) favor cucumber, we figured we could start with the traditional juniper and build a “gin” with veggies, herbs, citrus and spices. In the end, we used juniper berries, cinnamon (cassia), baby fennel (more citrus notes), fennel fronds, cucumber slices, rosemary, lime peel, lemon peel and Cara Cara orange peel. We muddled like crazy, then added some vodka (a good use for vodka, you could never predict how gin would respond to all these new flavors) and then muddled some more. And then it got interesting.

    csa7Right out of the shaker we got the cinnamon, cucumber and a touch of the rosemary. Good, but not like gin. So we let the mixture steep for 6 hours and the citrus and fennel stared to kick in, while the cinnamon faded. Better, but not there yet. 12 hours later we got more of the fennel, citrus and the sweetness of the cucumber. Basically, we ended up with a ligher (albeit cloudier) version of Hendrick’s. We can live with that. We had to live with that, time was running out.

    csa1Now that we had our “gin”, we made the CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) cocktail. With all the flavors here, we didn’t add much. A little lime, a little agave syrup and a few dashes of Angostura. The CSA cocktail opens with  cucumber and citrus nose followed by a sweet cucumber and agave sip. Then you get the lime and finish with the fennel, rosemary (we got more rosemary than juniper, we think) and cinnamon. Not bad, and it certainly would beg the question; “is this cucumber vodka or Hendrick’s?” And that will have to do. Rowen, you made us work on this one.

    The CSA Cocktail:

    (Serves 2)

    • 6 juniper berries
    • 1/2 cinnamon stick
    • 2 or 3 rosemary needles
    • Zest / peel of 1/2 lime
    • Zest / peel of 1/4 lemon
    • Zest / peel of 1/4 orange
    • 1/4 cup baby fennel, roughly chopped
    • 1 fennel frond
    • 4 slices cucumber
    • 6 oz. vodka
    • 1/2 oz. lime juice
    • 1/2 oz. agave syrup
    • 4 dashed Angostura bitters
    • 2 lemon twists for garnish

    Assemble:

    1. Add the juniper berries, cinnamon stick and rosemary to a cocktail shaker. Muddle thoroughly. Add the citrus peels, chopped fennel, fennel frond and cucumber. Muddle some more. Then add the vodka. Muddle again.
    2. Pour the entire mixture into an airtight container and put in the fridge for at least 6, and preferably 12, hours.
    3. Place the entire mixture in a large cocktail shaker with ice. Add the lime juice, agave syrup and bitters. Shake until well chilled and double strain (at least once, maybe twice) into a chilled cocktail glasses, flutes or coupes. Garnish with the lemon twists and serve.
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  • Mixology Monday LXXI Cocktail: The 20th Century

    March 15, 2013

    16 Comments

    The 20th Century Cocktail.

    The 20th Century Cocktail.

    Another Mixology Monday is almost here, but it looks to be a busy weekend, so we are posting on Friday. This month’s edition of the online cocktail party is hosted by Scott Diaz of the excellent cocktail blog Shake, Strain and Sip. Thanks Scott. And as always, thanks to Fred Yarm of Cocktail Virgin Slut, for keeping the whole Mixology Monday thing going, it is great fun and the source of some very inspiring cocktails. So here is Scott’s theme:

    mxmologoThe evolution of the cocktail has been a wondrous, and sometimes, frightful journey… But with all this focus on “craft” ingredients and classic tools & form, it seems we have become somewhat pretentious.  The focus on bitter Italian amari, revived and lost ingredients such as Batavia Arrack or Crème de Violette, the snickering at a guest ordering a Cosmopolitan or a Midori Sour has propelled us into the dark realm of snobbery… Remember, the bar was created with pleasing one particular group in mind: the guest. As such, this month’s MxMo theme… will focus on concocting a craft cocktail worthy of not only MxMo but any trendy bar, using dubious and otherwise shunned ingredients to sprout forth a craft cocktail that no one could deny is anything less.  There are a plethora of spirits, liqueurs, and non-alcoholic libations that are just waiting for someone to showcase that they too are worthy of being featured on our home and bar shelves.  So grab that bottle of flavored vodka, Jägermeister, cranberry juice, soda, neon-colored liqueur, sour mix, or anything else deemed unworthy of a craft cocktail, and get mixin’!

    20-2Create or find a drink that uses one or more ingredients that are not considered “craft”, but are used in a “craft” cocktail.  Sweet & sour, coffee, cranberry juice, most flavored vodkas, Midori, X-Rated, Alize, almost anything starting with creme, etc., are all game.

    20-1Hmmm. At first, we simply had to laugh. We spend a few years building a bar without “crass” ingredients, and now we need to go buy some. We had visions of Midori dancing in our heads (and back in the day there was plenty of Midori…and headaches). But before we bought anything we decided to use what we have, and we still have the back of one cabinet set aside for “all that other stuff” (you know, the stuff we don’t show off). And the first thing we saw was some Dekuyper White Creme de Cocoa. Yup, crass enough.

    20Dekuyper makes many of the most crazily named, colored and flavored liqueurs you can find. They are responsible for “Sour Apple Pucker”, “Razzmatazz”, bottled “Sex on the Beach” shots and dozens of other types of flavored booze. It may all be decent stuff, even fun, but it certainly ain’t “craft”. (But you should check out the cocktail recipes at their website for Spring Break classics like the “Banana Whammer”, “Apple Spazz” and the “Juicy Screw”. And the list goes on, check it out for a quick smile.)

    20-7So what to make with our very sweet and somewhat artificial-tasting Creme de Cocoa? The 20th Century, of course. Created by British bartender C.A. Tuck in 1937, and immortalized in the classic Cafe Royal Cocktail book by William Tarling, the 20th Century combines gin, Lillet blanc or Cocchi Americano (to mimic the “original” Lillet), lemon juice and white Creme de Cocoa. Think “Corpse Reviver #2 with Creme de Cocoa instead of Cointreau”. And while your first thought may be “gin and chocolate, yuk”, it does work very well. The chocolate plays well with the herbal gin, sweet fruit of the Lillet and the sour notes of the lemon. If you get the proportions right, there is just a very pleasant hint of chocolate to finish a tasty gin, Lillet/Cocchi and lemon sip.

    20-8 Continue reading »

  • Weekly Cocktail #43: The Jezebel

    March 1, 2013

    21 Comments

    The Jezebel Cocktail.

    The Jezebel Cocktail.

    After a thoroughly enjoyable time hosting Mixology Monday, we are back to our regular weekly cocktail. Although in this case our weekly cocktail is really just a holdover from our MxMo experiments. And while it didn’t make the cut (for purely technical reasons- we had no photos) the Jezebel is a delightful cocktail that we will make any time we have some blood oranges on hand.

    jezebel3The Jezebel is a riff on the classic cocktail the White Lady, a simple combination of gin, lemon juice and Cointreau (some recipes include egg white for extra body). But for this drink we substitute blood orange juice for a bit of both the lemon juice and the Cointreau. And the extra berry notes, acidity, tartness and color of the blood oranges makes big difference (better than the original, IMHO).

    jezebel2Yes, we are on a bit of a blood orange kick (we are a seasonal food blog, after all). But it has been a tremendous season for blood oranges here in California, and we simply can’t resist one of our favorite fruits (and a number of MxMo participants seemingly agreed and used blood oranges in their recipes- very cool). And what makes this even more fun is that orange juice is traditionally a difficult citrus ingredient for cocktails. Flavors and acidity vary, and oranges are often just too sweet (and watery) to balance the base spirits. There are some classic exceptions like the Bronx cocktail, the Monkey Gland (horrible name) and the Screwdriver, but generally oranges are a difficult cocktail ingredient. Blood oranges are a whole different story, the only bummer is limited availability based on the season. But if it’s winter, go get some and start making drinks (the juice is great on its own, btw).

    jezebel4As for the name of the drink, we have the MxMo theme of “inverted” and one of our favorite blogs, Silver Screenings (a fantastic blog about classic movies, we can’t recommend the site enough) to thank. We wanted to invert the White Lady and decided that blood oranges would work, and the drink tasted great. Happily we were looking at Silver Screenings and asked, “what about using a classic movie name” and, of course, we immediately thought of the 1930′s Bette Davis movie “Jezebel“. We won’t give away much of the story, but we will say that respectable young ladies in the 19th century shouldn’t wear red to the ball when all the other bells wear white. In the 21st century, we may have cut Jezebel a little more slack, or maybe even bought her a drink….

    jezebel1The Jezebel Cocktail:

    Ingredients:

    • 2 oz. dry gin
    • 1/2 oz. Cointreau (or quality triple-sec)
    • 1/2 oz. blood orange juice
    • 1/2 oz. lemon juice.

    Assemble:

    1. Put all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake until well-chilled. Strain (or even better, double-strain) into a chilled cocktail glass, coupé or flute. Serve.
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  • Mixology Monday LXX Roundup: Inverted

    February 22, 2013

    46 Comments

    Stir and Strain’s El Jardin de Mi Abuela.

    Another Mixology Monday has come and gone, but this time we were hosting. Thanks again to everyone who participated and to Fred Yarm at Cocktail Virgin Slut for reviving and maintaining Mixology Monday.

    mxmologoThe theme was “inverted”, and we will spare you the full back story (post here) and just say the theme was intended to see if we could “flip drinks on their heads” any and all possible ways. And the Mixology Monday crowd certainly delivered. We saw drinks “inverted” on name, spirits, solid/liquid (ice was well used), colors, layers and temperatures. All good stuff. We are “working” our way through as many of the cocktails as we can, and many are very good.

    As for us, we found this theme somewhat more challenging than expected. We created two drinks, but also failed repeatedly to make our third, a champagne-based cocktail that tasted and looked like Napa Cabernet (some things simply aren’t meant to be, and who wants a cocktail to taste like wine anyway?). Oh well. In any event, here are all the cocktails (mostly) in the order we got them:

    BarFlySF gave us three cocktails that invert classics using light instead of dark spirits. We like their use of homemade limoncello as a substitute for darker liqueurs. Their Union Square inverted the New Orleans classic the Vieux Carre.unionsquare1

    BarFlySF then took up our challenge to invert the Manhattan and created the Nemo.

    nemo

    And finally, BarFlySF, added another post and inverted the classic Brandy Sidecar and created the Pisco Pedicab. Extra points for use of blood oranges.pisco1

    ——

    Shake Strain and Sip took the inverted theme to another place altogether and put the drink inside an ice-cube. The Alice’s Looking Glass is a very cool, and very tasty, creation with rye and Aperol in the lead. (We made it with regular ice, still great).——

    901 Very Good Cocktails managed to create a cocktail, discuss the Butthole Surfers (a band from our youth, yes we are that old) and even promote the idea of moderation. We are all for moderation….in moderation.  The Shah Sleeps Cocktail inverts standard cocktail proportions and leads with Amaro Montenegro.Shah

    ——

    The Shorter Straw applied the inverted theme to the Super Bowl (we would still like to invert that outcome) and gave us the 35th Minute. The lights went out during the 35th minute of the game and we certainly would have liked to sip this beautiful Rhum Agricole-based cocktail while we waited.

    ——-

    Continue reading »

  • Mixology Monday Cocktail #2: Elmer Fudd’s Revenge

    February 16, 2013

    21 Comments

    Elmer Fudd's Revenge Cocktail.

    Elmer Fudd’s Revenge Cocktail.

    Mixology Monday drinks are due this Monday, so we are adding another recipe for our “inverted” theme. The last week we spent a good deal of time looking at the bar and pantry and asking “can we invert that?” And the answer always seems to be “yes”, as long as we are willing to stretch the definition of “inverted” (and we are certainly willing to do that). And this cocktail, the Elmer Fudd’s Revenge, does fulfill the theme, even if the connection is a bit ridiculous tenuous.

    elmer4So if you want to understand how the randomness “creative process” works here at the farm, here is how we created the cocktail:

    • We saw a bottle of Laird’s bonded applejack looking lonely on the bar.
    • The first drink we thought of was the Applejack Rabbit (good stuff).
    • Maybe we could riff on the Applejack Rabbit for MXMO.
    • We thought of famous rabbits and Bugs Bunny came to mind.
    • Elmer Fudd never catches Bugs Bunny. Poor Elmer.
    • So what could we “invert”? How about Elmer catching Bugs?
    • If Elmer caught Bugs it would be a bloodbath. (Elmer has some pent-up frustrations.)
    • Hey look, we have some Moro blood oranges.
    • How about an Applejack Rabbit with blood oranges?

    And that’s how we think before we start drinking….so the experiments began. The traditional Applejack Rabbit combines applejack, lemon juice, orange juice and maple syrup. It’s a sweet drink with just enough sour from the lemon juice to tame the maple syrup and orange. But when we used blood oranges, with their tart and berry notes, the maple syrup didn’t play as well. So we used simple syrup. That worked, but we lost the extra character of the maple. We fixed this by subbing 1/2 ounce of rye whiskey for some of the applejack. The spicy rye and blood oranges (surprisingly) play very well together.

    elmer3Elmer Fudd’s Revenge combines applejack, rye, Meyer lemon juice, blood orange juice and simple syrup. This is a dryer cocktail than the Applejack Rabbit, with the applejack and rye in the lead and a bright, tart finish and a touch of berry flavor from the blood oranges. This is a very refreshing sip and an excellent way to use blood oranges in a cocktail, as the color and flavors make the drink, but don’t dominate. The only issue with this drink is that it goes down very easy…But after catching that “wascally wabbit”, Elmer deserves more than one to celebrate.

    elmer1OK, one more “inverted” recipe to go (it’s been in the works for 10 days, not quite there yet).

    elmer5Elmer Fudd’s Revenge:

    Ingredients:

    • 1 and 1/2 oz. Laird’s bonded applejack
    • 1/2 oz. rye whiskey
    • 3/4 oz. Meyer lemon juice (or regular lemon juice)
    • 3/4 oz. blood orange juice
    • 1/3 oz. simple syrup (use 1/2 oz. if not using Meyer lemons)

    Assemble:

    1. Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Shake thoroughly. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass, flute or coupé. Serve.
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