Passenger Cocktail

The only thing you probably need to know about the Passenger Cocktail is that it is so good that it almost made Kathy like gin.  Almost.

I had this in Austin at Perla's Seafood and Oyster Bar on South Congress in Austin.  Outstanding place to eat.  Right next to Hotel San Jose (expensive), and a block or so from the Austin Motel (cheap), both great places to stay when you are in Austin.

You will note that there is no mint in this picture.  I didn't have any today when I took the picture. The Passenger Cocktail is much better with mint, but a splash of Peychaud Bitters is pretty good if you don't have any mint on hand.

The Passenger

Almost good enough to turn Kathy into a gin drinker.

Yield: 1 cocktail

Ingredients 1 1/2 oz Dry Gin 1/2 oz St. Germain 1/2 oz Fresh Lime Juice San Pellegrino Aranciata (a type of orange soda) Mint

How to Make Pour into an ice-filled Collins Glass and top off with San Pellegrino Aranciata. Stir and garnish with a sprig of mint.

Source: Perla's Seafood and Oyster Bar in Austin

Bourbon and Ginger

Bourbon and Ginger Ale is a good old standby when you're too lazy to make a real cocktail.  And it feels right, too -- I have vague recollections of the men I looked up to when is was little drinking them.  "I'll just have a bourbon and ginger", they would say, and it must have stuck way back there in my earliest memories.  I still have one on occasion, but my tastes now go to something a little more adventurous, a bit more spicy.


So I recently tried a couple of recipes I came across in a site called Creative Loafing Tampa, which I think must also be the name of one of those rags that you find in the little free racks by the real estate flyers in restaurants and mini marts.  Amazing what you can find with Google.


Both recipes use bourbon or rye (please don't use any of the good stuff for these -- they have enough citrus and sweet to offset anything but serious rotgut).  They are both really good, one surprisingly so, since it calls for maple syrup for the sweetener!!!

Ingredients for the Nor'easter.

I put both recipes together on one page because I thought you might throw the Nor'easter recipe in the trash without even trying it, like I just about did.  (Sounded just about as bad as recipes that include Southern Comfort or Malibu Rum, but I digress.)  Anyway, by the name, and the fact that it uses maple syrup, I will attribute the recipe to some creative sole in Maine or maybe Vermont.   And in combination with lime and a nice spicy Ginger Beer, the maple flavor  makes a very nice cocktail.  I hope you will give it a try and let me know what you think.

Ingredients for the Cablegram.

The other drink is called the Cablegram and it sounded a bit tastier before trying it.  Still tart from citrus, this time lemon, and spicy from ginger beer, and I like it a little better than the other one.  


Both cocktails are keepers, so don't go cutting the Nor'easter off the page when you print these out.

Hemingway Daiquiri Update

Here is an update on my previous post about the Papa Doble (Hemingway's Daiquiri).  This new Hemingway Daiquiri recipe, from a post in the Houston Press by John Kiely, is less sweet, more tart, and a lot better than my previous recipe.  I think an excerpt from Kiely's post describes the experience very well:

Whoa. The Papa Doble shut down my face for a long 10 seconds, and put my tongue's sour buds on blast. The second taste wasn't much easier, but halfway through, I enjoyed it, and by the end, I preferred it.

Why so tart? Hemingway's father suffered diabetes, so Ernest simply avoided sugar in his drinks. Brilliant move, at any rate. Once your palate adjusts to a lower level of sweetness, the flavor of liquor and other ingredients take up the slack, usually resulting in a better cocktail.

I went through my menu of sixty-nine cocktails, removing sweetness wherever possible, but ironically, not so much from the Hemingway Daiquiri, just half of a teaspoon of simple syrup, as Maraschino keeps the tartness at bay. Thank you, Ernest Hemingway.

I think this is now one of my favorite cocktails...

Stone Sour

If you haven't figured it out yet from previous posts, Kathy and I are partial to cocktails made with rye whiskey.  If you like a good cocktail, and have not experimented with it yet I would highly recommend trying it - either a Sazerac or a Manhattan would be a good place to start.   

If you would rather have something citrusy, here's another rye drink to add to your collection. The Stone Sour is a whiskey sour variation from California, but don't hold its origin against it - it is very good. Best with one of those homemade cocktail cherries.

If you don't have any rye in the cupboard, I'm sure this would also be good with bourbon.

Summer Treats - Mojito

It's really a little too late for summer treats, but here in Texas and a lot of the south it still feels like summer.  And with recent rains I was reminded of that by the sudden explosion of peppermint and spearmint that we grow in pots on our patio. (Remember that we do not have a vegetable and herb garden because of the various beasts that frequent our yard - as one of our dear departed neighbors used to say in her Texas twang "It's a regular Jooo-rassic Park out there". But I digress....)

Anyway, we grow the mint for one purpose only - making Mojitos, one of our favorite summer treats.  It is a very simple, refreshing cocktail of rum, mint, and lime, and it is perfect for sitting out on the patio watching beasts on a hot summer afternoon. 

It is not at all traditional, but the drink is also pretty good with one of those cocktail cherries!

With the recipe linked above, I have included a post from Spice Lines, one of my favorite food blogs.  In it, Courtenay Dunk, the author, gives a bit of history and her take on Mojitos.

I hope you enjoy Mojitos as much as Kathy and I!

Summer Treat - Fitzgerald Cocktail and Other Refreshing Gin Drinks

My recent posts have featured some of my favorite summer treats, and today I decided to talk about another one.


It's been a little while since I posted a cocktail of the week -- sometimes I just want to drink one of the old standards, or maybe even not have a cocktail. So this week after my cocktail of the week hiatus, I picked one of my favorite summer spirits - Gin.  Especially Bombay Sapphire Gin.

Gin and Tonic is maybe the best, most refreshing, summer drink of all times.  Imagine some British officers in India in their idle times, standing around in a rather fancy officers' lounge with pith helmets under their left arms and drinking cocktails served by guys in turbans. But I digress...  No recipe really required - a couple of ounces of Sapphire gin, about 6 ounces of good quality tonic water, and a big twist of lemon, served over ice. Sitting outside on a shaded back porch with friends on a hot summer day, trying not to imagine guys in pith helmets. 


This week's cocktail of the week is a nice change, though. And it is good enough that Kathy offered that it is probably the best gin drink she has tried. (That does not, however, mean that she now likes gin.)


The Fitzgerald Cocktail was invented by Dale DeGroff, author of The Craft of the Cocktail, my favorite cocktail book.  As you can tell from the linked recipe, it is really just a Gin Sour with a splash of Angostura bitters.  (Also, if you use lime instead of lemon, the Fitzgerald would become a Bennet Cocktail.)


Click on the picture to get a closer look at how pretty the drink is.  You can almost smell that wonderfully refreshing gin / lemon combination.  Enjoy!

My First Attempt at Cocktail Cherries

I finally got around to cracking open one of those jars of my homemade cocktail cherries, and I'm pretty proud of how they turned out, especially for the first try.  No more of those bright red maraschino cherries with all the deadly chemicals. 

I made the recipe up after doing a lot of looking at different versions I found on the internet.  The only requirement I had in advance was that I wanted to use Luxardo maraschino liqueur, made from Marasca cherries the basis of the original maraschino cherries made before the current dayglo commercial version was developed.

I am sure I will be experimenting with the recipe over time.  I especially want to try using sour cherries instead of the sweet ones I used this time. 

These will be a great addition to those Manhattans and Old Fashioneds, but they may also show up in some unusual places for a cocktail cherry to be -- like this mojito (this weekend's cocktail of the week).  Isn't it pretty?  And no dye or chemicals added.

Pomegranate Cosmopolitan

Kathy and I don't like this week's cocktail of the week so much.  We knew going in that vodka is not one of our favorites.  But we had some pomegranate juice that we got on special at our grocery store (it was free with our store's coupon), and we decided to experiment with it.  The resulting Pomegranate Cosmopolitan was very pretty.


I know, though, that several of my family and friends do like vodka, so I will keep this in our collection for them, and I'll be happy to serve it any time one of them comes to visit.


And if any of you decide to try it, I hope you will let me know if it is good.


As for me, I think I'll be having something made with rye.

Cocktail Cherries

There are a lot or cocktail recipes that call for a maraschino cherry or two. They mostly make the drink pretty, and I guess if you get used to them, they even taste OK - I usually manage to eat them.  Just don't try to fool yourself that they actually taste like cherries. In fact, as early as 1911, a New York Times editorial described a maraschino cherry as "a tasteless, indigestible thing, originally to be sure, a fruit of the cherry tree, but toughened and reduced to the semblance of a formless, gummy lump by long imprisonment in a bottle filled with so-called maraschino."  Almost a hundred years later after the turn of the century, another Times item described them as "the culinary equivalent of an embalmed corpse", and that might be a fitting description given what they contain.  The cherries shown in the picture above are pretty decent as maraschino cherries go, but they contain all kinds of things that I have reservations about eating: corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup, Red #40 dye, and several types of chemical preservatives.

Lately, I have been seeing quite a number of articles about alternatives that taste better, and any number of recipes about making your own cocktail cherries.  Chief among the commercial recommendations is Luxardo Gourmet Maraschino Cherries which you can buy through Amazon.com for about $18.  When I saw some fresh cherries at the grocery store today, though, I decided I would try to make some of my own. Aft looking at a bunch of recipes I found on the internet, I decided to use ideas from a number of different versions, and canned my own recipe using sweet bing cherries, Luxardo Cherry Liquor , Brandy, lemon juice, and turbinado sugar.  Two pounds of cherries yielded 6 half-pint jars. 


They need to sit for a few days, so I can't tell you yet how they turned out.  I suspect they will be a little too sweet, but far better than standard maraschino cherries. Next time, I'll try to find some sour cherries, possibly frozen, or I'll use Trader Joe's Morello Cherries, which were recommended in a couple of recipes I saw. 


If this batch turns out good, though, I'll publish a recipe in a couple of weeks.

Sazerac Cocktail

To the best of my recollection, I had my first Sazerac after my Mom and Dad returned from one of their regular visits to New Orleans.  When they went, they liked to enjoy the Commander's Palace in the Garden District, which on their recommendation became one of my favorite restaurants anywhere.  Commander's food is excellent (and my mouth is watering as I write this), but it is the way they treat you that sets them apart. It is a place where it still feels right to wear a jacket at dinner, and where they make you feel important even though you are not. A place where you want to be with your family on special occasions, and where you take important business associates.

When my folks went to Commander's, they enjoyed a Sazerac cocktail.  One time when they were there, the bartender shared his Sazerac recipe - written on a napkin (I think in 1982, but the writing is not real clear) - and my Dad brought it back and made it for me the next time I visited.  It was wonderful. 

The Sazerac is one of the old traditional cocktails of New Orleans. I couldn't even come close to describing its history in the way that Chuck Taggart does in his Gumbo Pages web site, and I recommend it highly for everything New Orleans. You should definitely read his Sazerac history as you enjoy the cocktail for the first time.

Not many bars and restaurants know how to make a Sazerac, or even what one is.  But I sometimes ask for, and am rewarded with one when I go to good restaurants. I have not found one yet, though, that makes this simple drink as well as you can at home.

Some recipes call for Bourbon (as does the Commander's recipe given to my Dad) and others for Rye whiskey, and some call for using both Angostura and Peychaud's bitters, but the traditional version uses only Peychaud's.  In our experiments, Kathy and I have decided that the traditional Rye whiskey and Peychaud's only is the way to go.

The traditional New Orleans Rye is Old Overholt, but most reviewers think that Sazerac brand and Rittenhouse are probably a bit better.  My biggest surprise, though, is that the Jim Beam (ri)1, the overpriced Rye that I had spoken poorly of of when I talked about Manhattans in an earlier post, is really good in a Sazerac. I think we might have to keep some around just to dedicate for that use.

As I have been writing this (and enjoying the Sazerac shown in the picture), I have also been thinking about how much I would like to have a nice meal at Commander's, ending up with the Whiskey Bread Pudding Souffle. Anybody want to make a weekend trip to New Orleans?

Lynchburg Lemonade

This is what Lynchburg Lemonade is all about.  Chillin' out after a hard day of working in the garden. So good you drank it all and now are waiting for your hosts to give you a refill....

I was going to wait a bit longer before posting this recipe, but Lisa and Joe's work day and cookout with Bourbon Brined Porkchops prompted this to be "Cocktail of the Week Bonus Saturday".  Enjoy! 

This cocktail is designed for Jack Daniels, but bourbon does great as well.  Just don't spoil any really good bourbon making this drink.

Manhattan

The Manhattan must be one of the simplest cocktails of all times, and one of the very best.  I discovered it at the insistence of my sister-in-law, Paula, and I thank her for that.  Two ounces of whiskey, one ounce of Italian Sweet Vermouth, and a couple of splashes of Angostura Bitters, garnished with a cocktail cherry - how easy is that?  It's a cocktail that needs no recipe, and even grandpas like me can remember how to make one.

But it may also be one of the most flexible cocktails ever.  First you get to pick the whiskey.  Kathy and I like to use Rye, but Bourbon makes a great Manhattan, too.  I understand that some people even use brandy instead of whiskey, but I'll not be trying that any time soon. 

The Manhattan I just made for this picture used a rather overpriced brand of Rye in a too fancy bottle, called (ri)1, which is made by Jim Beam.  I have to tell you that it is good, but not good enough to justify the price, which I am embarrassed to have paid.  Old Overholt, a cheap brand and a standard in New Orleans, makes a good one, and I have read that Sazarac and Rittenhouse brands are excellent at a fair price. Perhaps there will be further experimentation at a later date.

Then there is the vermouth.  Brother John suggested a tiny little splash of dry vermouth with the sweet vermouth, and I think that does a lot for the drink.  And you can choose to use French vermouth instead of Italian, as I did for the one in the picture, and I can attest to how good that can be. 

There are a lot of variations that have official names, and they undoubtedly are good, but I suggest you experiment, and don't be swayed from what you like by cocktail snobs that want to tell you that you are not making a Manhattan correctly.

Grapefruit Cocktail

The idea for this Grapefruit Cocktail came from a recent issue of Fine Cooking, and I have included their version with my recipe.  Kathy and I tried theirs, and it was good, but thought we could make one a little more to our taste.  After a number of tries, we figured out it out. (Maybe anything would have been good by then?) 

This is another good summer cocktail -- not too sweet, and very refreshing.  Since we first tried it and the Hemingway Daiquiri, I have been surprised to learn how many people like grapefruit juice.....

Be sure to use a good 100% blue agave silver tequila.  These were made with Patron, but there are a lot of others out there.

One last thought - a blender wouldn't hurt this drink a bit!

Papa Doble (Hemingway's Daiquiri)

Thinking about Cuban Sandwiches also made me think about Black Beans and Rice, Chicken and Yellow Rice, Filete Salteado (all on my list to talk about sometime) and Caribbean cocktails.  And what more appropriate than this week's cocktail, the Papa Doble or Hemingway's Daiquiri.  It was served to Ernest Hemingway at El Floradita Bar in Havana, although the version served to him was said to have been made with 6 ounces of rum.  A variation on a standard daiquiri, it contains grapefruit juice and a hint of cherry provided by maraschino liqueur in addition to the standard white rum, lime juice and simple syrup. I have provided two versions, and both are excellent, but you will have to experiment and decide whether you like the sweeter version or the one that is more tart.

I like 10 Cane Rum, which is made directly from sugar cane juice, instead of the more common molasses, and the maraschino liqueur is Luxardo, made in Italy using the flesh and pits of marasca sour cherries cultivated exclusively by Luxardo.

Summer Margarita

 I thought that with the grilling and chilling season just getting underway, it might be a good idea to start off this blog with a Summer Margarita.  The recipe came from Rick Bayless of Chicago's Frontera Grill, and is among my favorite summer drinks.  The usual orange liqueur is replaced by cucumber, and the result is very light and refreshing. Be sure to use a good 100% blue agave silver tequila, because you will want to drink more than one, and you don't want to be punished for cheap tequila by tomorrow's all-day headache.