Lime Cordial and Lime-oncello

Those tiny yellow limes you grew are so intense, Mom -- they're wonderful, but more acidic than regular limes. Today I used some of them in booze-related experiments.

Lime-oncello
First I zested 14 of them and started a batch of limoncello using limes instead of lemons.

I read a few recipes and enjoyed this overly detailed recipe the most. I more or less followed it but didn't filter the vodka -- it seems silly to filter something that's distilled. We had a bunch of Skyy vodka and since we don't drink vodka very often this seemed like a good use for it -- no grain alcohol in my version.

Two hours in, the vodka is already starting to yellow (it's in the jar on the right). After a few months it should be very pretty. Either that, or it'll look like urine. We'll see.

Lime Cordial
So then I had a bunch of dermis-free limes -- way too many for margaritas or mojitos. I thought about juicing them and freezing the juice, but again, they're so acidic, if they were to lose any delicate lime flavors through freezing they wouldn't be very useful -- all tartness, no flavor.

I poked around online for a while and decided to make lime cordial. Rose's Lime Juice is lime cordial, but Rose's seems pretty gross lately. Maybe it's the high fructose corn syrup. I made a gimlet with it over the summer and it wasn't very enjoyable.

Recipes for lime cordial online mostly contain lime juice, simple syrup, citric acid and tartaric acid. I have neither of the latter two ingredients. I decided the limes' acidity was intense enough to make up for the missing citric acid. For the tartaric acid I used cream of tartar. I'm no chemist, but cream of tartar retains the acidic flavor of tartaric acid, which I think is the goal of the acid, and is also a potassium salt...and I figured salt is a positive thing from a preservative standpoint.

I think I can taste the potassium from the cream of tartar a little. There's a slight bitter aftertaste similar to potassium chloride -- the taste of those "salt substitutes," or of Marmite, or of banana bread with too much baking powder. But Lawson says he can't taste it, so it's probably not a big deal.

After some adjustments, here roughly what I ended up with:

2 cups sugar
1 cup water
1 cup freshly squeezed lime juice
1 scant teaspoon cream of tartar

Boil the water and sugar until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat; stir in lime juice and cream of tartar. Strain into bottles and refrigerate.

I'll make gimlets tonight. And I'll let you know how long the lime cordial keeps.

Lemon-Basil Daiquiris

Our beach trip a few weeks ago was somewhat marred by cold weather, but was otherwise beautiful. You can see in this picture I am holding a daiquiri in my long pants and wool jacket.

Sharon had heard about this drink somewhere, so she and Annie set about trying to re-create it. Here is the recipe for a blenderful, as perfected over several days.

• 4 ounces light rum
• 1.5 ounces lemon juice
• 1/8 cup or more sugar
• 4 basil leaves
• ice to fill

It sounds almost too minimalistic. It is very light and crisp, like a mojito. But all the ingredients come through just right, assertive but not too strong.

They experimented with using lemonade, lemon zest, and freshly squeezed lemon juice, but in the end settled on high quality bottled lemon juice. I would probably juice a lemon just because that's what we usually have around.

I think you should make one with your homegrown Meyer lemons and garden basil, Mom.

February Thaw

Mom, we're geniuses. I just made that cocktail we invented in conversation last week, and it's great: a Campari and soda, but with an ounce of gin to cut the sweetness and make it stiffer.

The best part is that the gin and Campari flavors both come through well, with their two different varieties of bitterness. It's modeled on a negroni, of course, which is equal parts gin, sweet vermouth, and Campari, but is far less bizarre than a negroni, which is a drink I can probably have only once every few years, so sweet, strong, and unsettling is it.

This is 1 ounce of gin, 3 ounces of Campari, and maybe 5-6 ounces of soda -- enough soda to fill an ice-filled glass the rest of the way. Very good.

There's an actual sunset occurring here in Columbia at this very moment.

Last night, to capitalize on the warm weather, I grilled hot dogs. I also made a salad of mixed lettuces, sugar snap peas, and strawberries; the dressing was lemon juice, tahini, olive oil, honey, salt, pepper, and fresh mint. Very summery.

As much as I loved cooking and eating with you and Dad, it's good to be back in my own kitchen again, you know?

Classic Mojito Recipe

The point of this post is to record my mojito recipe. I had it down last year, but I managed to completely forget my recipe over the winter and have had to spend the past month re-perfecting it.

Easy way to remember it: the Rules of Twos.

For each mojito:

1. Put about 2 inches of fresh mint leaves in the bottom of a tall glass. Smush them up a little with the handle of a sharpening steel, which is the perfect muddler if you're not into buying something as fancy as a muddler.
2. Mix in a measuring cup:
   • 2 ounces freshly squeezed lime juice, which is about 2 limes' worth of juice
   • roughly 2 teaspoons granulated sugar, depending on how sweet the limes are
   • 2 ounces light rum
3. Mix. If you're making several, you might as well put it all in a shaker with some ice to get it really well mixed, but for just one I wouldn't bother.
4. Add ice to glass on top of mint.
5. Pour lime-sugar-rum mixture over ice.
6. Add 2 to 5 ounces club soda, depending on desired strength, and mix well.

This is a classic mojito recipe, something surprisingly hard to find online.

Actually, decent drink recipes can be hard to find, period. For one thing, neither the public nor the alcohol industry seems to understand the concept of "parts." For example: the back of the Kahlua bottle in my liquor cabinet instructs me to mix 1 ½ parts Kahlua to 1 ½ parts vodka as the base for a White Russian. I am not kidding.

Here, take a look at the mojito recipe at the official Bacardi site: 1 part rum, 2 parts club soda, 12 mint leaves, half a lime, and half a part sugar.

Now, the whole point of giving a recipe in parts instead of measurements is that it's scalable. If you tell me to mix 1 part Canadian whisky with 2 parts motor oil, I can make one small cocktail or an entire punchbowl full.

I'm serious here: You cannot mix measurements and parts in the same recipe. Mix half a lime with half a part sugar? What if I'm making a bathtub full of mojitos? Is Bacardi suggesting that a lime is a quantity fixed in relation to a part? Cause that would make my head explode.

Moreover: there is no such thing as half a part. Rather than halving the part, you double the parts of the other substances. Instead of "half a part Sweet-n-Low to 2 parts Asti Spumante," you would need to specify "1 part Sweet-n-Low to 4 parts Asti Spumante." That's kind of the whole point.

Astute readers will chip in here to observe that my recipe requires 2 inches of mint but doesn't specify the diameter of the glass, which is equally imprecise. That's true. So here: Use 12 to 22 mint leaves per drink, depending on how much you like mint and how much mint you have.

Also: No, it's not okay to make a mojito with dried mint. That's pretty much the definition of not okay. If you don't have any fresh mint, just drink a stupid beer. Or some rum and soda with a squeeze of lime -- nothing wrong with that. Just like in cooking, you have to let the ingredients on hand dictate what you make. You don't make beef Wellington out of leftover hamburgers just because you're craving beef Wellington and don't have any tenderloin.

Sheesh.

It's strange having a one-sided conversation here these past few weeks, Mom. It seems to be leading me to lecture imaginary conversational partners. I wonder where you are today -- crossing into Canada, probably? If you get near a computer anytime soon, tell me what you're eating.

That summer I helped you, Dad, and Russell move up to Alaska, I remember eating in a lot of rural Canadian diners. I ordered a lot of Denver sandwiches. Eat one for me. Tell 'em you want 2 ½ parts egg to one lime's worth of bell pepper on six ounces of toast. See how they feel about that.

Second Annual Tapas Night and Family Gathering

We gathered in Tucson again and spent one night drinking and making tapas (here are last year's posts on Tapas Night). This time Russell and Brittany were in on it, too. I'm still in Tucson on vacation...hence the lack of posts this past week.

Dad made margaritas. He squeezes tiny Mexican limes one by one, then mixes 4 parts good tequila, 1 part lime juice, and 1 part triple sec. They are like martinis, fierce and amazing and totally unlike your average sweet frozen margarita.

For the first course, Russell made a big batch of baba ghanoush. We ate it with Ak Mak crackers. Lawson sauteed fresh coconut with salt and fresh hot chile -- a Fijian dish he learned about from a friend who once lived and worked there.

For the second round of food, Grandma made whole wheat bread with sweet butter.Mom (you? I never know how to phrase these co-posts) made a green bean and tomato salad. And I made white lima beans with garlic and fresh rosemary. Here is my recipe:

Rinse 2 cups dried white beans -- cannellini, lima, or great Northern -- and put them in a crockpot. Cover by 2 inches of water -- no more. Cook on high for 2 to 4 hours, until the beans are beginning to soften, and add several tablespoons olive oil, 3 6-inch springs of fresh rosemary, and two big smashed garlic cloves. Add water at any point to keep things slightly moist. After a few more hours, add salt to taste. During the last hour or two, add more water here and there to make a white sauce for the beans. Add black pepper before serving.


The last main course was by my mom: avocados filled with crabmeat and avocado, dressed with lime juice and maybe some other secret things.

For dessert we had date bars and fresh fruit, I think. Here is Russell finishing off the grapes.

But around that time Russell also started making bourbon sours, so I don't completely remember. Coincidentally, my pictures became quite silly around that same time. Most are too silly to post.

Here is Russell's bourbon sour recipe as written that night.

All in all, it was a successful evening.