Drinks...

Saw this online:

In the April issue of Esquire, drinks correspondent David Wondrich offers another handy formula for creating cocktails on the fly—one that calls for two ounces of spirits, one ounce of a fortified wine, a teaspoon of liqueur and a dash or two of bitters. Ancestral relatives of the Manhattan and the martini often follow this formula, with excellent results, and best of all, it’s amazingly versatile.

In addition to your standard players in the liquor aisle, you can introduce fortified wines ranging from port to sherry to vermouth to Madeira; while the wine-plus-spirit match may not be perfect, a little teaspoon of Cherry Heering or Chartreuse (or most any liqueur you can lay your hands on), along with a dose of bitters (Angostura is probably your most useful candidate here), tends to smooth everything out and make all the flavors get along.

Definitely sounds interesting! I am not a very sophisticated drinker really but definitely sounds worth a try, I will let you know when I try it out (though probably one with something other than the cherry heering since I generally can't stand anything artificially cherry flavored).


I also had no idea what Chartreuse was when I read this (like I said, not a sophisticated drinker) so I wiki'd it and found that it was a French liqueur composed of distilled alcohol flavored with 130 herbal extracts. Will need to try that one :) Also in looking it up I found this - Some drinkie's blog... He talks about a drink with raw egg in it o_0 (doesn't sound great but hey I'll give it a try some day), but actually more interesting for me was this:

The technique of fat washing is an example of what I mean: you take some bacon, for example, and steep it in bourbon for a while. Remove it, fine strain out the solids, and then freeze the bourbon. The spirit itself won’t freeze, but the fat that’s suspended within it will rise to the top, which makes it easy to remove and discard–or reuse, I suppose, if you’d like some bourbon-flavored lard for any reason. Think about chilling a chicken stock after you’ve made it; same thing happens with stock that happens with bourbon.

He is referring to this, which I haven't read yet but want to soon. Sounds like an interesting thing to try, sort of a food + science or Molecular Gastronomy kind of thing and anything Molecular Gastronomy sounding interests me haha, anyway, Enjoy :)