Category: Drink

I think that it’s fair to say that Florida doesn’t have the best reputation.

Take, for example, the “Florida Man” game. If you’ve never tried this, your eyebrows are about to rise higher than you ever suspected was possible. Open an internet search engine, and enter the term “Florida man” and a date — your birthday is a good choice.

Feb. 9, for instance, when, according to the Florida Times-Union, a Florida man “was arrested … and charged with assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill after Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation officials say he threw a 3.5-foot alligator through a Palm Beach County Wendy’s drive-thru window.”

But it wasn’t always like this. There was a time in the 1940s and ’50s when Florida was seen as a chic and even elegant place. Miami Beach was where the most beautiful and wealthy people went to be seen, to dance in the moonlight and to drink cocktails. Powerful, cigar-chomping men in good suits flashed their brightest smiles — and wads of cash — in an effort to catch the attention of beautiful women in floral dresses. White-jacketed waiters delivered drinks to wide-eyed tourists. Dance bands played, and everywhere there were flowers.

I feel like we need more of that — more white suits and fancy drinks, and fewer fast-food alligator attacks.

Miami Dancehall

• 2 ounces dry gin – I like Wiggly Bridge
• ½ ounce elderflower liqueur
• ½ ounce crème de violette – a violet-flavored liqueur
• 5 or 6 drops rose water – There is a razor’s edge between being floral and delicious, and tasting like your grandmother’s fancy soap. Err on the side of caution until you find the level of rosiness you like.
• ½ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
• ¼ ounce simple syrup

Combine all ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker. Use a medicine dropper to measure out the rose water.

In the classic 1934 movie The Thin Man William Powell gives a master class on cocktail shaking to a group of bartenders and waiters. According to Nick Charles, Powell’s character, a well-made cocktail is all about timing: “Now, a Manhattan, you shake to a foxtrot. A Bronx, to a two-step time. But a dry martini, you always shake to waltz time.” He places his properly shaken martini on a waiting tray, held by one of the waiters, who serves it back to him. He takes the cocktail and drinks it gratefully, implying that making well-mixed drinks is thirsty work. In a similar vein, tell your digital assistant to play Miami Beach Rhumba by Xavier Cugat. Shake your cocktail to the rhythm. Given the time of year, and our climate, feel free to keep shaking until the outside of your shaker is wet with condensation.

Strain the cocktail into the fanciest cocktail glass you own.

Drink it as you dance around the kitchen.

Gin and lemon lead in this particular rhumba, followed by hints of violets and roses. This is one of those drinks that leave you searching for more of the floral finish, which leads to another sip, and then another, until you realize that you need (a) more excuses in your life to rhumba, and (b) another cocktail.

More rhumbas, fewer alligators.

Featured photo: Dancehall cocktail. Photo by John Fladd.

Days like this call for something cold, boozy and tropical, something with a lot of crushed ice.

Mango Rum

• Unsweetened dry mango
• White or silver rum

With a heavy knife, chop the dried mango into a small dice — very small pieces. Add the chopped mango to a large, wide-mouthed jar, one with a lid. It’s best to look around and find a lid to fit the jar you are using before you get up to your elbows in mangoes.

Add white rum to the same jar — three times (by weight) as much as the mango you just chopped. Could you use vodka, or even blanco tequila, instead of rum? You could, but you would be heading off on a different adventure than the one we are on today.

Seal the jar with a tight-fitting lid, shake it well, then store it someplace cool and dark — maybe in that cabinet above the refrigerator that you always forget about — and shake it once or twice per day, for a week.

Strain with a fine-mesh strainer. Bottle and label it. You will be surprised at how much rum has been absorbed by the dried fruit, but also how much color and flavor the rum has taken on. This rum should keep indefinitely.

Guava Syrup

• Fresh guava (Available in international markets, and at Walmart, guava is one of those fruits that you are probably pretty sure you’ve never had before, but you probably have. It’s one of the perfumy background flavors in “tropical” juice mixes.)
• White sugar
• Juice of half a lemon

Chop fresh guavas into medium-sized pieces, then freeze them for several hours. This is to let the ice crystals poke holes in all the fruit’s cell walls and make it oozier when it’s time to cook with it.

Cook the frozen guava over medium heat in a small saucepan, with an equal amount — by weight — of white sugar. Stir occasionally. As it thaws, the frozen guava will give off a surprising amount of liquid. If you wanted to help it along its way, you could encourage it with a potato masher.

Bring the mixture to a boil. Swirl it around the saucepan to make sure that all the sugar has been dissolved into the syrup.

Remove the mixture from heat, stir in the lemon juice, then strain the syrup with the same fine-mesh strainer that you used for the mango rum (see above). This syrup will keep for several weeks in your refrigerator.

Mango Daiquiri

• 3 ounces mango rum
• ½ ounce guava syrup
• 1 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice, which isn’t discussed above but you can probably figure out
• Lots of crushed ice

Wrap several handfuls of ice cubes in a kitchen towel, and beat viciously with a rolling pin or some sort of martial arts weapon that you find lying around, until well-crushed. I like to leave a mixture of different sizes of ice. Fill a large rocks glass with the crushed ice.

Add the mango rum, guava syrup and lime juice to a cocktail shaker, and shake it over ice, until it is very cold. Feel free to shake it longer than you normally would; this is a strong, sweet drink that will benefit from the cold and the melted ice.

Strain the shaken daiquiri over the crushed ice. Call up footage of a beach view of Bora Bora on your laptop. Watch it through half-closed eyes as you drink this daiquiri. If small children try to disturb you while you do this, tell them that you are listening for secret messages that you have to be very, very quiet to hear.

It’s no secret that rum plays well with sweet fruit, which in turn plays well with acidic citrus like lime juice. The first sip of this daiquiri will be sweet, then a little sour, which will make your mouth water, which prepares you perfectly for another sip.

Featured photo: Mango daiquiri. Photo by John Fladd.

We had just come home from a long trip, and I’ll admit that I was a little out of it. Jet lag and a week of over-indulgence had definitely taken a toll on me. And yet I made a surprisingly good decision — there was still time to go to my usual exercise class at the gym and try to clear some of the fog from my brain.

A less good decision was eating two bowls of coleslaw before I left the house.

An hour later found me tripping over my feet and frustrating one of my workout friends.“You are really out of it tonight,” he said, not unkindly. “What’s the problem?”

“Six time zones and a bellyful of coleslaw,” I told him, which stopped us both in our tracks, because that is probably the best title for a blues album ever: Six Time Zones and a Belly Full of Coleslaw

Our theme this week is the blues.

Blueberry Syrup

• 1¾ cups (250 grams) frozen wild blueberries, the kind you have in your freezer to use for smoothies.
• 1¾ cups (250 grams) sugar
• Juice of half a lemon

In a small saucepan, heat the blueberries and sugar over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the mixture comes to a boil. Let it boil for a few seconds, to make sure that the sugar has thoroughly dissolved. Because the blueberries started out frozen — Well, they didn’t start out that way. They were young once, and had hope and joy in their hearts, napping in the dappled sunshine, listening to birdsong. — At any rate, because the wild blueberries started today frozen, their cell walls have been pierced by large ice crystals, and they will give up a surprising amount of juice. During this syrup-making process, if you wanted to help things along with a potato masher, who could blame you?

Remove the blueberry pot from the heat, and place a fine-meshed strainer on top of it. Squeeze half a lemon into the mixture. You could use a hand-held, nut-cracker-looking juicer, or one of those reamers that look like a primitive medical device, or even the ends of some kitchen tongs to get all the juice out of the lemon. Because you remembered to put a strainer on top of the pot, you don’t have to worry about getting seeds or pulp into your blueberry mixture. Stir the lemon juice into the blueberry sauce.

Use your strainer to separate the cooked berries from the syrup. Squash the pile of berries with the back of a spoon — a little, a lot — it’s up to you. (Don’t throw them out, though. You have just made very nice blueberry compote to have on toast or stirred into yogurt.) After 15 minutes or so, transfer the syrup to a bottle. It will keep in your refrigerator for several weeks.

Blueberry Margarita

• 2 ounces blanco tequila – I’ve become very fond of Siete Miserios, lately.
• 1 ounce blueberry syrup – see above
• ¾ ounce fresh squeezed lime juice

Combine all three ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker, then shake until very cold. At this time of year, it will be ready when a thin layer of frost forms on the shaker.

Strain into a cocktail or margarita glass. If you wanted even more ice, the Margarita Police would not stop you.

Sip, sitting in your garden or on your deck (or surreptitiously on a bench in the park), listening to Carlos Santana, who, unlike Life, never disappoints.

Unless you’re a purist, this is everything you want in a margarita at this time of year. It is sweet and sour and slightly smoky and utterly refreshing. Blueberries play extremely well with sour citrus fruit. We tend to pair them with lemons, but they are more than happy to dance with limes. Tequila too, has an affinity for citrus. Even the concept of this drink is refreshing.

Salud.

Featured photo: Blueberry Margarita. Photo by John Fladd.

Ingredients:

• 3 ounces cold-brew coffee concentrate – Trader Joe’s makes a very good one.
• 6 ounces half & half
• 1 ounce simple syrup
• frozen coffee (see below)
• dark chocolate, frozen (optional)

Coffee Ice

The secret to truly excellent ice coffee is coffee ice.

We’ve all been there, really, truly enjoying a cup of iced coffee on a bone-deep level. Not guzzling it — we’ve been around the block a few times, and we know that an ice cream headache is a real danger in situations like this, but we’ve also learned the hard way that we don’t make great decisions after ingesting an injudiciously large caffeine bolus.

So we nurse our iced coffee.

The first sip is transcendent.

The second one, 10 minutes later, is still pretty good.

After half an hour, we ask ourselves if it was really that good to begin with. Right now, it’s only so-so.

It eventually sinks in that the enemy here is the ice, gradually, subtly diluting the iced coffee, like an unwanted watery chaperone.

The secret is to make your ice out of coffee. Pieces of coffee ice will melt, but when they do, do you know what they add to your iced coffee? More coffee!

Use leftover coffee to make ice cubes, or make some with cold-brew concentrate.

But it isn’t the 1970s. What if you don’t have an ice cube tray?

Do you have a cake pan? Or a large zip-lock bag? Use one of those to make a block of ice, then chop it up with an ice pick.

But this isn’t a suspense movie; what if you don’t have an ice pick?

Wrap the ice in a tea towel, and swing it over your head, smashing it into the kitchen counter. Do this three or four times and you will have your choice of smashed ice — from coffee snow, to jagged coffee-sicles, to chunks of frozen coffee that will take up half your glass. Use what you want, then put the rest in a Tupperware container in the freezer for your next, inevitable iced coffee.

The actual iced coffee

The question here is how much restraint do you want to show with your iced coffee? The amounts here will make a very respectable 16-ounce serving. Maybe you only need a little pick-me-up. Maybe you have guests. Maybe you have in-laws staying with you. There are any number of reasons why you might want to drink a reasonable, temperate amount of iced coffee.

But maybe you are alone, or Having. A. Day. Maybe the kids or your boss are making extremely unreasonable demands. Maybe you need to drink enough iced coffee to stun a water buffalo. I’m not here to judge you.

The important thing to keep in mind here is the proportions. A one-quart glass jar would work just as well as a juice glass for this.

Pick a glass, then fill it halfway with coffee ice.

Add the half & half and cold-brew concentrate in a 2:1 ratio.

Add enough simple syrup to sweeten to taste.

Stir.

Using a microplane grater, or the tiniest holes on your box grater, grate frozen dark chocolate on top of your coffee, as garnish.

If you think you don’t like iced coffee, you might want to try this. It is creamy and slightly sweet. It isn’t a takeout milkshake pretending to be iced coffee. It’s the real thing. It’s delicately sweet, without much of the bitterness that mass-produced ice coffee tends to have. It starts out pretty innocent, whistling and looking up at the ceiling, but over the course of an hour it becomes more and more grown-up coffee.

Featured photo: Iced Coffee. Photo by John Fladd.

You know how you can be in a large crowd, almost overwhelmed by the dozens of conversations going on around you, but if someone 30 feet away says your name, it grabs your attention immediately? I have the same reaction if someone is discussing pizza or tells a knock-knock joke.

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

From.

From who?

From “WHOM”! Jeesh, I can’t take you anywhere.

Have you ever wondered why that never happens when you’re watching a crowd scene in a movie? It’s because the background extras have been instructed to say a particular word to each other, over and over — one that is unlikely to grab anyone’s attention. If they just said, “blah, blah,” it wouldn’t sound right, but if they said actual sentences, it would run the risk of distracting from the lead actors’ lines.

The industry term for this is rhubarbing, because the mantra-like word they are instructed to say is often “rhubarb.”

So now you know that.

Strawberry rhubarb collins

• 2 ounces vodka – I’ve been using Tito’s lately, and I’ve been pretty pleased with it.
• 2 frozen strawberries (about 1 ounce)
• ½ ounce orange curaçao
• ¾ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
• ¾ ounce rhubarb syrup (see below)
• 4 to 5 ounces tonic water

Blend the frozen strawberries and vodka thoroughly. If you have a miniature blender for making smoothies, this is an ideal use for it. Otherwise, mash the berries up with the vodka in the bottom of a glass with a pestle or a wooden spoon.

Strain the berry vodka through a fine-meshed strainer, into the bottom of an ice-filled Collins glass. Add the curaçao, lemon juice, and rhubarb syrup. Stir thoroughly.

Top with tonic water, then stir again. Add a straw, and drink somewhere relaxing.

Obviously, strawberries and rhubarb are a natural combination; the sweetness of the berries plays off the tartness of the rhubarb. Once in a while you will find a strawberry pie in the wild, or possibly a rhubarb pie, but strawberry-rhubarb is a reliable standby. They work well in this drink but get a little more backbone from the citrusy curaçao. The lemon juice keeps everything from getting too sweet, and the slight bitterness of the tonic levels everything out while bringing fizziness to the table.

Early summer brings a lot of rites of passage — weddings, graduations, anniversaries. This is a good drink to sit and think. Not to brood — this isn’t Irish whiskey — but to take a minute and think about where your life is headed. It is an optimistic drink.

Rhubarb syrup

Clean several stalks of rhubarb, then chop it into smallish pieces, about 1-inch dice.

Freeze the chopped rhubarb for several hours, maybe overnight. This will allow large ice crystals to perforate all the cells and allow a lot of weeping (on the part of the rhubarb, hopefully not yours) when you cook it.

Combine the frozen rhubarb and an equal amount of sugar (by weight) in a small saucepan.

Cook over medium heat. As the rhubarb melts, the sugar will draw out its juice. You will be surprised at how much juice there is. About halfway through the cooking process you might want to help the process along with a potato masher or the bottom of a beer bottle.

When the rhubarb juice comes to a boil, stir it for a few seconds to make sure all the sugar has dissolved. Remove from the heat, and squeeze a small amount of lemon juice into it. Let it cool, then strain it and store the syrup in a bottle. It will keep for a month or more in your refrigerator.

Save the rhubarb pulp. It looks like it has come out on the losing end of a fight, but it is actually a super-delicious compote that is excellent on toast or ice cream.

Featured photo: Photo by John Fladd.

On a good day, a cucumber is 96 percent water. That hydrocentic (a word I just made up and am very pleased with) nature of a cucumber lends itself really well to cocktails. If you can extract the water? It’s bonded with cucumber flavor. That makes for a very good syrup. If you chop a cucumber up and soak it in alcohol, the volatile enzymes that give the cucumber its flavor are happy to jump ship and bond with the alcohol instead of the water. The more finely you chop it, the more surface area you provide for this reaction to play out. Let’s do this.

Cucumber syrup

(Trust me; it’s delicious.) Wash an English cucumber — one of the long, plastic-wrapped, ridgey ones — and chop it into medium (1/2-inch) dice. You don’t have to peel it or even remove the stem.

Put the cucumber pieces into a bowl, and put the bowl in your freezer. You can use any kind of container you like, but an open-top bowl will make your freezer smell like cucumbers. Which is nice.

Inside the cells of the cucumber, ice crystals will start to form. It will probably take an hour or two for the cucumber chunks to freeze up completely.

Using a kitchen scale, weigh the cucumber pieces in a small saucepan, and add an equal amount of sugar by weight. If you don’t have a kitchen scale, a typical English cucumber will probably give you around three cups of diced up chunks. This will probably weigh around the same as 1¾ cups of white sugar.

Cook on medium heat, stirring occasionally. The first time you do this, you will be shocked at how much liquid comes out of the cucumbers. (It’s around 96 percent water, remember?)

At some point, crush the soggy cucumber pieces with a potato masher to coax even more liquid out.

Bring the mixture to a boil. Stir it for a few seconds, to make sure that all the sugar has dissolved. Remove from heat and let it sit for half an hour or so, then, using a fine-meshed strainer and a funnel, pour it into an empty bottle. In my experience, it will last about a month in your refrigerator. You will probably end up with about two cups of syrup.

Cucumber gin

(This is even more straightforward.) Wash, but don’t peel, some cucumbers.

Put the cucumbers and an equal amount of gin, by weight (see above) in your blender. Because your goal is to overwhelm the gin with cucumber flavor, you can get away with using a fairly non-fancy gin (I like Gordon’s). Blend at the lowest speed for about a minute. The goal here is to chop the cucumbers up pretty finely, to give them more surface area exposed to the alcohol. You’re not actually trying to puree it or anything.

At this point, you will have a bright green mixture that looks like hot dog relish. Pour it into a wide-mouthed jar, label it, and store it somewhere cool and dark for seven days, shaking it two or three times per day.

Strain and bottle it. If you let it set for another day or so, some of the tiny cucumber particles will sink to the bottom of the bottle, and you can strain it again with a coffee filter to make it prettier. Either way, it will be delicious.

Cucumber fizz

(Finally!)

• 2 ounces cucumber gin (see above)
• ½ ounces cucumber syrup (see above)
• 3 to 5 mint leaves
• 5 ounces plain seltzer
• lemon wedge for garnish

Muddle the mint at the bottom of a tall glass. Add ice.

Add the syrup, the gin, and then the seltzer. Squeeze the lemon wedge, then drop it into the pool. Stir.

Cucumber and mint are a classic combination. Gin loves being carbonated. The lemon gives a hint of acid that keeps the cucumber from tasting flat. This is light and fizzy and reminds you that, against all expectations, a cucumber is a fruit. It is the cocktail friend you never knew you wanted to be friends with.

I like to think that it is happy to make the sacrifice for you.

Featured photo: Cucumber Fizz. Photo by John Fladd.