When the weather gets warm, my cocktail cravings turn to summery flavors like mint, cucumber, gin, rum and tequila. One of my favorite ways to use cucumber in a drink is a simple Hendrick’s martini with a thin wheel for garnish – it really brings out the cucumber flavor of the gin. When you want to get a little fancier, though, I highly recommend the Chin Up. Stupid name, but great drink, and using Cynar gives it a lovely color. I also love the hint of salt.

This is an excellent drink for a warm afternoon spent in the kitchen while cooking curry. The layers of bitterness and cool cucumber keep it both interesting and refreshing. It would also be good on the rocks, I’ll bet. I’ll have to try that.

Chin Up

• 1/2 inch cucumber wheel
• 2 oz gin
• 1/2 oz cynar
• 1/2 oz dry vermouth
• small pinch salt
• one paper thin wheel of cucumber for garnish

Muddle the cucumber in a mixing glass. Add the gin, cynar, vermouth and salt, fill with ice, and stir. Strain into a cocktail glass and garnish with a slice of cucumber.

On the day of our taco expedition, Jon did a little experimentation with tequila drinks, and the High Plains Drifter was the clear winner (the Mexican Firing Squad, despite its ridiculous name, was also very good). It has the familiar flavor combination of tequila and lime juice, but adds in bitters, campari and honey syrup to balance the drink out and make it a bit more elegant. I recommend it.

We generally make honey syrup as needed, simply by mixing equal parts honey and warm water. You can microwave it briefly if, like ours, your honey is old and crystallized and needs a little help dissolving, but you don’t want it too hot when you add it to the shaker, so let it cool a bit first.

High Plains Drifter #1

• 2 oz tequila
• ¾ oz lime juice (lemon juice works, too)
• ¾ oz honey syrup
• 1 dash Angostura bitters
• 1 splash Campari

Rinse a cocktail glass with Campari. Shake the tequila, lime juice, honey syrup and bitters with ice and strain into the glass. Garnish with a lime twist.

Spring has officially sprung! We’ve had some frost on the ground this past week (a rarity this winter), but the days have been mostly sunny and the breezes blow eddies of cherry petals around the streets. Daffodils are in full bloom and the tulips are already beginning to blaze away in pots, borders and farm fields. My garden is beginning to come to life, which makes my fingers itch to get out and weed and plant and take pictures.

When spring is beginning to get into your bones, what better cocktail to enjoy than the Spring Feeling? Pale green, tart and very refreshing, this is one of my favorite pick-me-ups. If you have a warm sunny spot in your house, preferably with a view of the garden, this is the drink to take with you. Before or after you get that weeding done.

Spring Feeling

• 1 Tbsp lemon juice
• ½ oz green Chartreuse
• 1 oz gin

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Needs no garnish, but a lemon or lime twist is nice.

Mixology Monday is here again, hosted this month by Sonja at Thinking of Drinking, and this month’s theme is a favorite of ours: absinthe!

Anise liqueurs have been a staple in our home bar for years, ever since we walked into a bar in Provence and ordered pastis without having a clear idea of what we’d be getting. When our order turned out to include two small glasses partially filled with clear green liquid, a metal jug of ice water, beaded with condensation, and a plate of bread and tapenade, served at a little table on a sunny patio on a hot afternoon, we fell instantly in love. From then on, the flavor of pastis – or any anise-flavored alcohol – takes us back to that trip and those lovely long evenings.

For a long time we only kept a bottle of Pernod on hand, so we could drink pastis on hot summer days (of which we get relatively few here in Western Washington). We tried arak on our last trip to Paris (at the World Arab Institute restaurant), and while we couldn’t find any to buy at home, we did spring for a bottle of ouzo. We also have a bottle of Pastis 51 which we picked up at the Paris airport – it has a distinctly different flavor than Pernod. And when real absinthe became available again in the US, we bought a small bottle to try, and started using it in mixed drinks.

Probably our favorite anise-flavored cocktail is the Corpse Reviver #2, the drink that really got us on the road to our current cocktail obsession. The classic Sazerac is wonderful, too, with its Herbsaint rinse. We spent some time experimenting, though, and found this rather elegant concoction of gin, amaro and absinthe with the slightly annoying name Gin & Sip. The absinthe is just a rinse, but it adds a subtle level of flavor. We’ve also tried upping the amount of absinthe to as much as ½ ounce, and that’s pretty tasty as well, giving the drink a strong anise edge.

Amaro is a broad category. Jon recently fell in love with Cynar, an artichoke-flavored liqueur, and that’s what we’ve been using for this drink. It makes for a nicely bitter drink with some earthy overtones. It might be fun to try it with Fernet Branca, just for the extra depth, but a lighter amaro makes for a better balance.

Gin & Sip

• 2 ½ oz Gin
• ½ oz Cynar
• Absinthe

Rinse out a rocks glass with a splash of absinthe. Stir the gin and Cynar together with ice, strain into the glass and add more ice to taste. Garnish with a lemon or orange twist.

This month’s Mixology Monday challenge is hosted by Cocktail Virgin, and the theme is tea. Black or herbal, brewed or infused, anything goes as long as it’s tea-based.

When thinking the challenge through, it seemed like we had three basic options: add brewed tea to the cocktail, infuse spirits with tea, or make a tea-flavored sugar syrup. We actually had rather good results mixing brewed oolong tea with aperol and lemon juice, but the drink we became fondest of used the sugar syrup.

The really tough decision was which tea to use. We thought of Lapsang first, with its deep smokiness, but thought that might be too strong. We have some madrona bark tea from Shaw Island which we haven’t yet tasted, but it brews for a long time and we kept forgetting to get it started. One of my very favorite teas, though, is Golden Yunnan, and it seemed like a perfect candidate. Rich and malty in flavor, it seemed like it would go great with booze.

Having decided on a tea, making the syrup was a snap.  Combine equal parts sugar and water in a saucepan and heat until the sugar dissolves, then add 1 tsp of loose tea (this was for a small amount of syrup – just about 1/2 cup total) and steep for 5 minutes or so.  Strain into a clean jar and refrigerate.

With the syrup made (and really tasty on its own) we experimented with a few different combinations. We’ve recently become fond of Crown Royal, with its smooth sweetness, and thought it might work well with the Yunnan. We tried using it to make a Whiskey Sour with the tea syrup in place of the usual sugar. This was very tasty, but the lemon juice overwhelmed the tea flavor – not bad, but not enough tea. For our next try we used Aperol instead of the lemon, both to provide a citrus element and a bitter edge to offset the sweetness. This worked really well, and was gorgeous besides. We call it the Royal Yunnan.

Royal Yunnan

• 1 ½ oz Crown Royal
• ¾ oz Golden Yunnan syrup
• ¾ oz Aperol

Stir all the ingredients together with ice, then strain into a rocks glass. Serve on ice with a strip of orange zest and a piece of fresh ginger.

Ed. 1/27/10: The roundup of everyone’s tea cocktails is up! Check it out at Cocktail Virgin Slut.

Note: This Mixology Monday post is brought to you by our house mixologist, my husband Jon. He makes the cocktails, I just drink ‘em and take their pictures, so I had him write this post himself - Jessamyn.

Another note: December MxMo roundup is up on Beers in the Shower!

When Jessamyn informed me of this month’s MxMo assignment, ideas did not immediately spring to mind.  Money drinks?  What the heck is a money drink?  Two different definitions were provided, but neither gave a clear direction.  The first definition, a normal drink made with super-high-end ingredients, quickly got ruled out.  We just don’t have enough super-high-end ingredients in our liquor cabinet.  The other definition provided seemed a little better: a drink that you could give to anyone and they would like it.  Still a challenge, but potentially doable.

Since there seemed to be an undercurrent of festivity, with the upcoming holidays, I headed straight for the pomegranate juice.  It doesn’t appear in very many cocktails, giving it an aura of something special, plus it has that great, brilliant red color.

For a gin-based pomegranate drink, it’s hard to beat the Diva Quaranta, which Jessamyn has already written about.  For cold winter evenings, though, we’re often more in the mood for whiskey-based drinks, so I used the Diva Quaranta as a jumping-off point and began tweaking.

Not all of my attempts were successes, but I do believe I found a winner.  Named the Runabout, after one of the better words played in a game of Scrabble the other evening, it uses rye, but would work equally well with bourbon.  I retained the Campari, since I enjoy the bitterness it imparts.  If the recipient of the drink does not like bitter (after all, this is supposed to be a drink that you could give to someone and know that they would like it), omit the Campari and double the Triple sec.

The Runabout

• 1 oz rye
• 1 oz pomegranate juice
• 1/2 oz Campari
• 1/4 oz Triple sec

Stir all ingredients with ice (shaking creates a bit of foam on the top that detracts visually).  Garnish with a lemon twist.  Give to someone you really like and then make another for yourself.

- JLN

Jon’s gotten into making honey syrup-based cocktails, something that seemed difficult until he actually tried it. Now he just whips up a little when he needs it by whisking honey and water together. Simple.

My favorite honey-based drink so far has been the Gold Rush, really just a whiskey sour with honey instead of sugar, and it was the best thing ever when I had a sore throat a few weeks ago. Jon wanted to do a bit of experimentation with other drinks, of course, and I was quite happy when he presented me with a Hummingbird Down last weekend. Bright and tart, the honey is just a lurking warmth in the drink, which is mostly a vehicle for the unusual flavor of green Chartreuse (which I happen to love). It was a hit.

Hummingbird Down

• 2 oz gin
• 3/4 oz lemon juice
• 3/4 oz honey syrup
• 1/4 oz green chartreuse

Shake with ice, strain into a cocktail glass and garnish with lemon.

While I was enjoying my drink, Jon made himself a Keegan, an impressively bright drink with Aperol and lime. It was a replacement for his first drink, which (alas!) got poured down the sink. It was a cocktail called a Heavenly Dram, and sounded like a good idea at the time.

It looked very much like Guinness Stout poured into a cocktail glass, and it tasted strangely like Guinness as well. If that sounds like a good idea to you, feel free to give it a try (but consider yourself warned):

Heavenly Dram

• 2 oz single malt
• 1/2 oz pedro ximenez
• 3/4 oz lemon juice
• 1/4 oz honey syrup

Shake and strain into a glass. Garnish with a lemon twist. And if you don’t like it, hopefully you didn’t use the good single malt.

So last week I told you about the Deep Blue Sea, which is a drink that I really like but my husband doesn’t really care for. It only seems fair that this week I should tell you about a drink that he loves, the Jack Rose. Popular during Prohibition, its fame has dwindled but it remains a classic.

What I find kind of funny is that he first saw this drink in Danny Meyer’s book Mix Shake Stir, which I brought home from the library, and he got a bee in his bonnet that he wanted to make it. He actually went out and bought a bottle of Laird’s Applejack just so he could make this (well, and a few other recipes that called for it. He’d never actually tasted it, though.) Once he had rounded up the ingredients and tried it, it was an instant hit. The sweet-tart of the grenadine and lime (sometimes lemon), combined with the applejack, produces the effect of a ripe tart apple, something Jon is very fond of when it’s just at the right point.

The paper-thin apple slice on top of the drink was inspired by a photo in the Meyer book. It’s showy, but makes the cocktail awfully hard to drink. I might recommend a thin wedge stuck on the edge of a glass, unless you’re trying to impress people.

Jack Rose Cocktail

• 1 ½ oz Laird’s applejack or apple brandy
• ½ oz lime juice
• 1 tsp grenadine

Shake with ice, strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with an apple slice.

Jon has taken to reading cocktail recipe books like novels lately, and making lists of everything he wants to try. Inevitably, there’s some ingredient we just don’t have and can’t get locally. Our area liquor stores have some interesting stuff, but when I asked for Creme de Violette at the Burlington store I got an extremely blank look. We had to make a special trip to the Capitol Hill liquor store (where the clerk accused us of buying stuff off of the “fancy-pants” shelf) to get a bottle.

The drink I really wanted to try with the Violette was an Aviation Cocktail, but it wasn’t until we made it by the Crown Hill liquor store that we managed to score some Maraschino liqueur and I was able to try one. I thought it was disgusting – apparently I don’t have a taste for Maraschino as yet. Fortunately, in the meantime Jon had found a recipe for another drink that I ended up loving, called the Deep Blue Sea.

Now, I just did a Google search and discovered a lot of really icky-sounding drinks with the same name, involving blue curacao and pineapple juice and such. This is not that drink. Apparently found only in our copy of Mr. Boston, this one is gin, Creme de Violette and a lemon twist, and it tastes to me like a very refined, adult Chiclet (have you ever had violet Chiclets? I had them in Mexico in 1982 and have never forgotten). Like a gin and lemon with candied violets. Slightly sweet, slightly tart. Lovely.

This is not really a drink to go with food. It wants to stand on its own. Shortbread or plain bread and butter might be all right, but otherwise – just the drink, please.

Deep Blue Sea

from (as usual) Mr. Boston: Official Bartender’s Guide

• 2 oz gin
• 3/4 oz Lillet Blanc
• 1/4 oz Creme de Violette
• dash orange bitters

Stir with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

I can’t explain the way cocktails have eased their way into our lives this year. Not that long ago, I was still prefacing every mixed drink comment I made with “I don’t usually like cocktails, but…” and now suddenly we have a full cabinet of liqueurs and a Boston shaker. Hm.

We first met the Sazerac (the Official Cocktail of New Orleans) about a year ago, at Star Bar. Phyllis, our favorite bartender, had taken it upon herself that month to get as many customers as possible to order Sazeracs, just so she could have the fun of making them. Jon had been wanting to try one, so we were in luck. When she set the drink down in front of him (I believe she served it up, in a cocktail glass) we each tried it. We weren’t sure if we loved it, but we were definitely intrigued.

Later, when we finally managed to find some Peychaud’s bitters (had to order them online), we started experimenting with Sazeracs at home. One day, out of the blue, I discovered I love them. My preferred presentation is in a rocks glass (built in the glass), with just a couple of ice cubes, and a sizable lemon twist. It makes me happy. Who knew?

The following recipe is based on the Mr. Boston’s version, and I like it very much. We have a very different version by Dale DeGroff that uses both rye and Cognac, which we don’t currently possess. We’ll get around to it one of these days.

The Sazerac Cocktail
adapted from Mr. Boston: Official Bartender’s Guide

• 1/2 tsp Pernod or Absinthe
• 1 dash Peychaud’s Bitters
• 1/2 tsp simple syrup or 1 sugar cube
• 2 oz rye whiskey

Rinse an old-fashioned glass with the Pernod. Add the bitters and sugar and muddle together. Add the whiskey and stir. Add two ice cubes and a lemon twist and serve.