And now, the ladies of Liquor and Libations bring you…

PEDRO’S FESTIVUS HOLIDAY RUMTINI !!

Ingredients:

– 4 ounces dark rum – nothing too acidic.The poorer the country and better the packaging, the better.
– 6 ounces fresh squeezed (sweet) tangerine. In the boxes. Yumtini !! I use my garlic press. If it’s clean it won’t affect the taste.
– 6 ounces festive holiday nog. Soy nog can work also for vegerans and anti-lactite hermaphrodites.
– 1 splash of lime cordial. Sweet.
– 1/4 cup fresh strawberries. Or not fresh. Sweet.

Shake heartily in a martini shaker (perhaps shrink quantities by 80%, add 19 of your favourite albums of 2007, and voila! Pedro’s Festivus Holiday Rumtini.

Hope you all have a fabulous holiday season with those you know and love.

From the original post:

Tart Gin Cooler ver. 2

• 2 oz gin
• 2 oz fresh grapefruit juice
• 2 oz tonic water
• Peychaud’s bitters to taste

Build in a collins glass filled with ice and serve.

A revelation! This is a great drink. I put a good sight more Peychaud’s bitters in the drink than in the first version (4-5 dashes) and I believe the reduction in tonic water serves the drink very well. The finish of the drink was much cleaner and crisper and the whole experience was improved from top to bottom of the glass. I still used London Dry gin even though it doesn’t specify it to keep the comparison as even as possible. The additional bitters also provides an additional pink hue to the drink that makes it more attractive (Peychaud’s is a deep rose color). It was also extremely refreshing and perfectly suited to a hot August dusk under the Magnolia.

Now make yourself up a glass of this, and go sit in the sunshine. Happy Mixology Monday!

So, to send you off on this holiday weekend, we bring you a truly Canadian drink – the Caesar. I’ve been told it’s called a Clamdigger in the US, so if you thought I was talking salad, this name might be a little more familiar to you.

Here’s my favourite way to make it, although everyone seems to have their own variation, whether it be the amount of spice or the type of garnish:

The Caesar

Ingredients:
– 2 oz. vodka
– 5 oz. Clamato juice
– 4 dashes Tabasco sauce
– 4 dashes Worcestershire sauce
– Celery or seasoning salt
– black pepper (fresh ground only please!)
– A wedge of lime
– A pickled green bean or pickled asparagus

Rim the glass with the lime wedge and celery salt and then add lots of ice. Add vodka, Clamato, Tabasco, Worcestershire and stir. Then grind fresh black pepper to taste and garnish with green bean or asparagus.

I’ve seen many variations of Caesar garnishes. Celery is standard, but I like the pickled vegetables best. I also like mine spicy and strong, so there are two shots of vodka and lots of Tabasco and Worcestershire in this recipe. If you’ve never made it before, you can stick with a couple of dashes to start and then tailor it to your taste.

So where exactly does the Caesar come from?

The cocktail, known in the U.S. as a clamdigger, was invented by bartender Walter Chell at the Owl’s Nest Bar in the Westin Hotel in Calgary, Alberta, Canada in 1969, to accompany the opening of a new restaurant, “Marco’s”. In its original form, it contained tomato juice and mashed clams; Clamato had only just been released (with the assistance of Chell) by the American Mott’s company that very year, and was not yet widely known or available. Link Wikipedia.

I would hazard a guess to say that the caesar might be the closest thing to Canada’s national drink (although Molson’s would like to have you think we all drink Canadian and run around shouting about it), or it is at the very least, a cocktail we can be proud of. It’s tasty, like the martini it inspires great debate about the best way to make it, and it has quite a kick. They’re also a hangover good cure, and if you’re up in Canada for a visit, don’t be surprised if you see a caesar on the Sunday brunch menu. Happy Canada Day!

From the Epicurious article Gin Blossoms:

How gin is made
Gin begins very much like vodka ends — as a neutral grain spirit — but then is flavored with a world of seeds, spices, herbs, fruits, and roots that are known collectively as botanicals. Some gins are made in the belly of the still; the botanicals are left to soak in the base spirit. As soon as they’ve imparted their flavors, the spirit is distilled and then cut with water to a drinkable strength. Others are made by boiling the base spirits and passing the resulting vapor through a chamber that holds the mix of botanicals. When the steam is cooled back into liquid, it’s gin.

Typically, common flavorings such as angelica, coriander, and lemon peel take a backseat to the piney aroma and flavor of juniper berries, gin’s defining characteristic and the very root of its name. (The word gin is a distortion of genever, the Dutch word for juniper.) Gin’s restored popularity, however, has spawned a flood of new brands, including some — cucumber-and-rose-petal-spiked Hendrick’s Gin, for example — that challenge the dominance of juniper.

And while you can’t go wrong with classics like the martini or the much beloved gin and tonic, the wealth of gin recipes out there should be enough to get even the most seasoned gin drinker inspired to try something new.

The fact that they named this case the liquid lunch is pretty hilarious. I don’t know about you, but the 3 martini lunch certainly wouldn’t fly around my office, and I work with a bunch of laid back programmers and tech types.

Now all the need to create is another case for you to cart around your booze.

We wandered around the whole exhibition, but ended the afternoon at the tasting pavilion and beverage stage. Two things that really caught my eye were Domaine Pinnacle Ice Cider and Desperados tequila flavoured beer. The ice cider was very tasty, a little too sweet for me (not surprising considering the sweetness of ice wine), but had a great rich flavour. The tequila flavoured beer was like nothing I’ve ever tasted before. It was a lot better than I thought, but I can’t say I’ll be drinking it regularly. It did inspire me to start thinking of tequila-beer cocktails, so maybe something good will come of it.

One of the highlights for me was a man on the beverage stage opening champagne bottles with a large machete-like knife. I thought he was crazy until I was searching around Wikihow today and found this fantastic post on how to Open a Champagne Bottle with a Sword, which promises you will:

Amaze everyone at your next social function with le sabrage, or opening a bottle of Champagne with a sword. Napoleon’s officers did it — you can, too! Teaching yourself to “behead” a bottle of champagne isn’t hard, but takes a little practice (and a case or two of cheap bubbly) to perfect.

Sounds exciting, and may just be an idea for my next camping trip – I think a few rounds of practice outdoors might be in order before my next social function.

One final note on Eat Vancouver, congrats to friend of l&l Pekka Tavela, pastry chef at A Kettle of Fish, who placed third in the Belcolade Chocolate Competition. Yay Pekka!

cork’d is a free site for wine enthusiasts that let’s you rate and recommend what you are drinking. Started over a year ago by a couple of wine loving designers, the site is easy to use, very well designed, and provides a great jumping off point to learn more about wine. The site now has over 20,000 users and was recently acquired by Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV.

If you love wine and you haven’t yet checked out cork’d, go set up your free account and get tasting. Here’s how it works:

Keep track of wines you’ve tried in your Wine Jounal. You can rate, review and tag wines, and these “tasting notes” end up attatched as comments to each wine in our database. You can also build a Shopping List of wines you’d like to buy (think of this like you would a Netflix queue), and a Wine Cellar for wines that you own. Keeping track of what your friends are tasting is as easy as adding them as a Drinking Buddy. You can also recommend wines to your buddies after you’ve rated and reviewed a bottle.

Whether or not you’re a wine fanatic, a heavy participant or a lurker, you will find something of interest on this site. If nothing else, one look at Cork’d before you hit the wine store, and you’ll never have to choose blindly again.

A mere five hour drive from Vancouver, the Gorge is an excellent reason on its own to inspire a roadtrip. But the icing on the cake is the fact that along the way you can visit some of the many excellent wineries that have been cropping up in Washington state over the last decade, making it the second largest wine producer in the USA after California.

At about the same latitude as the Bordeaux region in France, Washington has many areas suited to wine growing but the one best explored on the way to the Gorge is the Columbia Cascade region. Heading east from Everett through Stevens pass, the road travels through snow capped peaks and lush forests on to rolling sagebrush hills ideal for vineyards.

In the Lake Chelan region Tsillan Cellars is the winery of choice. Designed and developed by Dr. Robert Jankelson, the winery provides “an unmatched venue to enjoy the Italian art of living enhanced by fine wines.” Sounds good to me! Try the ’03 Bellissima Rossa, a Cab Sauv, Merlot and Cab Franc blend which won the double gold at the 2007 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.

Don’t miss Leavenworth, the cutest little Bavarian Village in the state. Try the boutique Eagle Creek Winery, full of old-world European charm to prepare your taste buds.

To round out the trip, be sure to visit the easily accessible Chateau Faire Le Pont in Wenatchee (only an hour from the Gorge). The name means “Bridging the Gap” and refers to when a holiday falls mid-week but you continue right through to the weekend. We should adopt this motto more often! Not to be missed, the Cabernet Sauvignon, the Pinot Noir, and the new 2003 Tre Amore.

For more information check out www.washingtonwine.org.

Happy road trip!

In Japan, Calpico goes by the rather unfortunate name of Calpis, which according to Wikipedia, comes from combining cal from calcium and pis from Sanskrit sarpis (good taste). So what exactly is in Calpico? Mostly water, nonfat dry milk and lactic acid. The drink is non-carbonated and produced by lactic fermentation. It’s probably like nothing you’ve ever tasted before, and mixed with a bit of juice or in a cocktail, it’s a tasty treat. We’d suggest trying out both the water and the soda versions, as they come in small bottles or cans, and add different things to a drink.

For your first foray into Calpico, try the Milky Pink, an adaptation from the cocktail menu at local favourite Guu.

Milky Pink

Ingredients:
2oz vodka
3oz Calpico water (buy the premixed stuff, it already has sugar in it)
3oz pink grapefruit juice

In a Collins glass with ice, mix vodka, Calpico and juice. Stir to combine and garnish with a cocktail umbrella. If you’d like a fizzy drink, substitute Calpico soda for the Calpico water.

Guu has a great selection of Calpico cocktails they mostly call “milky drinks” with Calpico, vodka and fruit juice. We recommend experimenting at home with the spirit and fruit juice of your choice.

Make sure to check out the Calpico site for a number of great cocktail recipes, as well as non-alcoholic drinks and desserts.

This weekend marks the annual Eat Vancouver festival. Billed as the “Everything Food & Cooking Festival” this year also includes a beverage stage highlighting beer, wine, sake, coffee and more. While the Food Network celebrity stage will definitely be a big draw for many people, for those of you already sick of “Vancouver’s Own Iron Chef Rob Feenie” (and if I have to see him on one more White Spot commercial, I definitely will be), then check out the tasting areas.

The drinks stage promises you will:

Enjoy some of the best wines, beers and spirits from British Columbia and around the world, offered for tasting by the vintners and producers themselves. Sample, compare and ask questions directly from those who know.

The Grapes & Hops Presentation Stage, located right inside the Tasting Pavilion and hosted by Vancouver’s own Wine Diva, Daenna Van Mulligan, will feature an impressive lineup of seminars, food pairings and wine tasting’s with celebrities drawn from the world of wine and beer plus culinary and mixology experts.. The Presentation Stage is located right in the Tasting Pavilion and provides comfortable seating. Master of Ceremonies Daenna will host writers, chefs, vintners, wine experts and a host of other presenters from across the country.

We’ll be checking out the Wine, Beer and Spirits tasting pavillion on Saturday and promise to report back on our best bets.