Watermelon Sake

This is almost like Japanese sangria and is just perfect for sitting around the backyard, maybe grilling some yakitori. Picking out a bottle of sake can be pretty intimidating, what with all the Japanese terms and names that, lets be honest, no one has any clue what they mean.  Now I'm no expert on sake but I'm working on that; the only advice I can really give is since you're adding flavors, don't waste really expensive, good quality sake on this recipe.  It seems like a basic rule is the longer the name of a category, the better the quality (junmai ginjo-shu is better than junmai-shu, junmai daiginjo-shu is better than junmai ginjo-shu); I'm sure there are a lot of exceptions to this rule though.  Anyhoo, try using one that's labeled Junmai-shu (which uses rice that has been polished to at least 70%) or Honjozo-Shu (which is junmai-shu which has had distilled alcohol added).

750 ml Sake
the zest of 2 limes
2 sprigs of mint
1 pint watermelon chunks
2 tbsp sugar

wedges of lime to serve

1. mix together all the ingredients and let the sake infuse in the fridge for 6-12 hours. strain and served chilled with a twist of lime.

Burger, Fries, and a Shake

Beef and ice cream don't seem like they go together but grind up that beef, put it on a bun and blend that ice cream into a milkshake and suddenly its a classic combination.  And what's burgers without fries so here comes a post with 3 recipes (we were too lazy to take 3 separate pictures).  I'm pretty proud of these burgers.  Since you're suppose to use beef thats about 20% fat for burgers, instead we are using about 3 parts of beef thats almost entirely learn and 1 part ground up bacon which is mostly fat.

For Burgers
12 oz of top round roast or other very lean beef, cut into 1 inch cubes
4 oz raw bacon, cut into 1-1 1/2 inch stripes
1 tbsp coarse mustard
1 tsp worcestershire sauce
1 egg yolk
pepper
hefty pinch of salt

1. Run the beef and the bacon through a meat grinder.  You can use a food processor but it wont be as evenly ground.  Mix in the mustard, worcestershire sauce, egg yolk, pepper and salt.
2. Form patties, about 6 oz per patty.  Grill at high heat for about 2 minutes per side or until the center is 130-135 degrees.  Serve how ever you like it, we put them on brioche buns with lettuce, sliced shallot, ketchup, and mayo.

For French Fries
4 russet potatoes
1 gallon peanut or other neutral oil
salt (finer/ non-kosher salt is better for this)

1. Using a v-slicer attachment for cutting fries, use it for what it's intended for.  It's up to you whether you want to leave the skins on or peel them.  Place the cut potatoes in cold water.
2. Blanch the potatoes in 2-3 minutes in boiling water working in batches.  move to a baking tray lined with paper towels in a 300 degree oven to dry off the fries.  Once they are dry, fry in 375 degree oil 2-3 minutes or until golden brown and crispy,  drain on inverted cooling racks over paper towels.

For Bailey's Strawberry Milkshake:
4 cups haagen-dazs strawberry ice cream
8 full frozen/fresh strawberries
2 tsp honey
1/4 cup baileys

1. I've said it once, I'll say it again, put all the ingredients into a blender, and you know, make a milkshake.

Singapore Sweetheart

This was the cocktail I made for Valentine's day.  I wanted to name it for my boyfriend but unfortunately my pet name for him is singapore sling and that name is already taken by another cocktail, but I digress. I've never had a problem with consuming raw egg whites so it's probably safe to risk it if you want (except for pregnant women and young children and since this is a cocktail, they shouldn't be drinking it anyway).  Still I prefer the pasteurized egg whites that come in a carton because they are easier to measure and tend to be more liquid-y so they mix into the drink easier.

1/4 oz Chambord
2 oz Litchi (lychee) juice
1/2 oz Lemon Juice
1 oz Vodka
1 oz Egg Whites

1. combine all the ingredients in a shaker and dry shake (that is shake without ice) for 45 seconds, add in ice and continue to shake until the outside of the shaker is ice cold.  Strain into a chilled glass.

Butterbeer

What Harry Potter fan doesn't wanna sit around sipping on some butter beer. Out of all the food stuff J.K. Rowling came up with, not much has captured our interest more than butter beer.  The problem is that I don't like any of the recipes for it I found online (and I've tried just about all of them).  For one thing they tend to be too sweet and they are all assembled drinks (I feel like butter beer should be something you can pour straight out of the bottle and into a nice mug). And the one from Harry Potter would is gross.  So I've started on my mission to develop the perfect butter beer recipe; it's been my white whale and I think I've finally harpooned it.  Since wizards seem to prefer doing things the old fashion way (writing with quills, lighting rooms with candles, riding horse drawn carriages up to Hogwarts (albeit winged dragon-like horses you can only see if you've seen death), I decided to make the soda the old fashion way; soda actually started out as really weak beer brewed to circumvent alcohol taxes. I based this recipe around a milk stout, using lactose to give it a creamy texture. Now I'm not saying this is an quick recipe, and you probably will need to go to some specially stores to get some of the ingredients, but it's worth it.  It's very important to keep everything you're using very clean to prevent wild yeast from infecting your brew and give it off flavors.  You might want to even go as far as rinsing out whatever bowls and utensils you use with boiling water.

6 1/2 cups distilled water
5 oz brown sugar
2 oz lactose
1 tsp cream of tartar
1 tbsp butterscotch extract
1 tsp vanilla extract

3/4 tsp irish ale yeast (WLP004)

1 tsp light corn syrup.

You'll also need a plastic half liter soda bottle thoroughly cleaned with the label removed, preferably replaced with some cute butter beer label (there are a surprisingly large amount of good ones on google image search)

1. In a medium sauce pan add the brown sugar and 2 cups of the water.  Bring to a boil (this is important because it will kill any microbes and will break the sucrose into glucose and fructose which is easier for the yeast to eat). turn off the heat, and whisk in the cream of tartar and lactose.
2. Move the brown sugar syrup to metal bowl inside a larger bowl filled with ice to cool the syrup as quickly as possible.
3. Once cooled to about 60 to 70 degrees, add the butterscotch and vanilla extracts along with 1/2 tsp of the yeast (it'll come in a test tube, shake it up to get the yeast in suspension, and open it carefully over the sink like a soda, it'll be carbonated). Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and set in a cool (65degrees-ish), dark place for 24 hours.
4. Ladle the butter beer into bottle, careful not to disturb the sediment at the bottom. Add in the last 1/4 tsp of yeast and the corn syrup to the bottle, tightly seal and shake to combine.  Place in the same cool dark place for 2-4 more days or until carbonated to your liking then move to the fridge.  Serve chilled and enjoy (while reading quidditch through the ages, pretending that letter did come when you were 10).

Guinness Chocolate Milk Shake

I kept hearing about milkshakes like this and always wrote them off as just sounding gross but then I had an Irish Car Bomb when Keith's room mate turned 21 and suddenly it didn't seem quite so absurd.  This recipe makes a blender full so have some friends over and have a good time.

1 container of chocolate ice cream (14 oz)
1 1/3 cups guinness
1/4 cup Bailey's

1. Put all the ingredients in a blender and, you know, make a milkshake. garnish with whip cream or a sprinkle of coco powder

Chocolate Egg Cream

This recipe developed from me wanting an egg cream but not having any chocolate syrup so I macgyver-ed up some with honey and coco powder which ended up being way better than hersey's.  This way you can use better quality coco powder than they'd use in the pre-made syrup. It's important to use dutch-processed (also called sweetened) otherwise it'll be too acidic. You can use any honey but the orange blossom does go quite nicely.  If you want it to be non-acoholic, replace the kahlua with coffee and just leave the vodka out.


1 tbsp dutch-processed coco powder
1 tbsp orange blossom honey
1 tbsp kahlua
1/3 cup milk
2/3 cup seltzer
vodka to taste (I do 2 tbsp)

1. in a glass mix the coco powder and kahlua with a fork or small whisk until smooth, stirring in the honey, then milk and vodka.
2. add in ice and stir
3. in a chilled glass add in the seltzer and pour in the coco/milk mixture. serve with a orange spiral.

Lemon Buttermilk Fizz

This recipe is based off of a lemonade recipe from Miss Aimee's tea room, a place I've never been but I really like this recipe.  It seemed so weird I figured it had to be good.  It doesn't actually use buttermilk, but adding lemon to milk to make it curdle is a common substitute for buttermilk.  And the best part is that this lemony drink doesn't require you to squeeze or muddle a single lemon.

4 lemons, cut into chunks
2 cups sugar
4 cups milk (2%)
seltzer
vodka

1. roughly mix the lemon chunks and sugar in a bowl, you aren't really muddling but don't be gentle. let sit for 30 minutes, stirring again halfway through.
2. mix in the milk and let sit for an hour.
3. chances are the milk will curdle, go from opaque to simply cloudy with little white blobs floating in it, no problem; just use a colander or a slotted spoon to fish out the lemon pieces and seeds (don't use a mesh strainer, it's too fine and will remove the curds as well). transfer to a blender and blend for about 30-45 seconds or until it has re-homogenized.
4. pour seltzer over ice in a glass, pour in an equal amount of the milk mixture, and then add in vodka to taste. it's best to pour the seltzer in the glass before the milk mixture or the proteins in the milk will strengthen the bubbles formed when the seltzer is poured and you'll get a huge head on your drink.

The Weasley

This cocktail uses the pumpkin juice recipe I previously posted. The first time I made it, I used some fire whiskey I made, but it was too much. I think the name is sorta clever, since the Weasleys were all gingers and wizards, so a cocktail with ginger ale and pumpkin juice makes sense.

2 oz dark rum
2 oz pumpkin juice
2-3 oz ginger ale
2 dashes of reagan's orange bitters

1. Combine the rum, pumpkin juice, and bitters in a cocktail shaker with ice and shake.
2. Strain into a chilled glass and top with the ginger ale.

Pumpkin Juice

I Love Harry Potter, I can't stress that enough.  I mean I have a golden snitch tattoo for god's sakes. That's my elder wand in the picture.  I''ll spare you my rant about how Harry should have ended up with Draco, not Ginny.  Anyhoo, obviously I was gonna try to recreate the food from the book.  This is my take on pumpkin juice.  Most of the recipes out there are not so much pumpkin juice but apple juice flavored with pumpkin.  My other problem with recipes out there is that they use canned pumpkin; I'm not a huge fan of juices from anything cooked, it tends to dull the flavors.  I use fresh pumpkin; eating pumpkins are sorta hard to find, so if you can't find any, just use butternut squash it tastes exactly the same.

makes about 2 1/2-3 cups of juice

700 gm peeled, seeded, chopped pumpkin*
1/2 cup demerara sugar
1 1/2 inch ginger, sliced and smashed
1 stick of cinnamon, snapped into several pieces
juice of 2 lemons
juice of 2 oranges
small pinch of salt

also you'll need some cheese cloth

*how finely you chop it depends on how good a blender you have.  I use my mom's vitamix and got away with 1 1/4 inch cubes. The worse the blender, the smaller the cubes.

1. combine the sugar, ginger, cinnamon, and 1 cup of water into a small saucepan. bring to a boil over medium/ medium low heat. Take off of the heat, cover and let steep for at least 1 hour
2. remove the ginger and cinnamon, discard. Move the syrup to a blender along with the pumpkin, lemon and orange juices and a small pinch of salt. blend until fairly smooth
3. strain threw a fine mesh strainer lined with a double layer of cheese cloth. You'll need to use the cheese cloth to wring out the juice from the pulp. Serve chilled.

Rose Toad

In Singapore they make a drink flavored with rose syrup and calamansi, a citrus fruit I've never heard of before.  In place of calamansi, I used a lemon/ lime combo.  They're garnished with holy basil seeds that, when soaked in water, look like tadpole eggs.  Since the alcohol makes this an adult drink, I decided to garnish it with an adult frog (actually it's because I got a frog-shaped candy mold for christmas and wanted to make frog shaped ice cubes).  You by no means need the frog ice to make this drink delicious but it certainly makes it cuter.

1 tbsp rose syrup

1/4 cup water

1/4 lime

1/4 lemon

1/2 clementine/mandarin orange*

1/4 cup orange juice

gin or vodka to taste

*This blew my mind but evidently clementines are simply a type of mandarin orange, weird huh? Never thought of clementines as exotic.

1. Muddle the lime, lemon, and clementine.

2. Add the orange juice, water, rose syrup, and gin/vodka.

3. Strain and serve in an old fashion glass and serve on the rocks, and on the rocks here means frog shaped rocks.

I know it's cheating but I couldn't think of a good trick to make the ice cubes green so I use food coloring.

Vodka Martini

There is nothing I like more than simply sitting around sipping cocktails and what cocktail is more classic and classy than the martini? Unfortunately I could never drink them because I'm not a huge fan of olives until I found out that some people drink them with a twist of lemon, people like James Bond no less.  I was drinking such a martini at this black tie thing I went to with my dad when this photographer compared me to James Bond, very proud of that.  But I digress... Anyhoo, with a cocktail this simple it's the little details that matter, like using good vodka.  Now you can fix not-so-good vodka by running it through a brits pitcher a few times but just go out and buy some tito's, it's worth it.  The bitters aren't very standard (but nowadays neither is the vermouth, most bars where I order a vodka martini end up serving me a cold glass of vodka), but apparently in the 1800's bitters were a standard part of a martini and I like to really drive the lemon part home.

3 oz tito's vodka

1 oz dry vermouth

1 dash fee brothers lemon bitters (optional)

lemon zest twist to garnish plus more

1. place a martini/cocktail glass in the freezer to chill the glass. this isn't necessary if you're serving it on the rocks, but half the fun of drinking a martini is it looking like a martini which means serving it straight up

2. fill a cocktail shaker with ice and the vermouth, shake to coat the ice and then dump out the excess vermouth. I don't like my martinis too dry so I don't try too hard to get all the vermouth out.

3. add in the vodka and the bitters if using, shake for 15-30 seconds and pour into the chilled glass. now if you wanted to make a standard martini, you would just switch the vodka out for gin. I'd stir the gin one instead of shake it though; shaking makes a drink much colder than stirring, and gin shouldn't be served that cold.

4. to form the garnish, harvest the zest from a lemon with a vegetable peeler, you're looking to get it about 2 1/2 inches long. try not to get too much of the white pith (if you do get some you can scrap it off with a knife or just leave it, it's not a big deal). use a pair of kitchen shear or a knife to cut it into a strip let's say 3/16 of an inch wide or so.  then wrap the strip around a chopstick or narrow handle of a wooden spoon to make it a spiral.

5. the final touch, take the scraps of lemon zest and either bruise them by twisting them to get the essential oils flowing or if you are doing this in front of your friends and wanna get fancy, hold the lemon peel up to a lighter for a few seconds, and rub the oils around the inside of the rim of the glass so when you take a sip you get hit with the lovely aroma of lemon.