More Infused Liquor: Chocolate-Mint Vodka & Jalapeno Tequila

On Sunday I had some free time in the afternoon while Sonny D and Husband Jeff went to the park to play with our neighbors, so I decided to make some recipes I've had on my list for a while, chocolate-mint vodka and jalapeño tequila. This will go along with the spearmint vodka and cherry bounce I made earlier this year.  We're going to break them out at Thanksgiving with our friends, that's probably going to be a drunkfest.  :)

Chocolate-Mint Vodka

I finally went out to our garden to pick the chocolate mint for this recipe.  It's a hearty plant, still going strong despite growing without maintenance.

I picked all of the leaves off a few stems and ripped them a couple times to help release the oils, then put them in the jar.  I had no idea how much mint to use, so I just did it until I ran out of leaves and then covered it with vodka.  I used up the last of a bottle of vodka we had in our pantry and cracked open a new one I had purposely bought to make this recipe.  I wanted to use all of the vodka up so we didn't have any leftovers, but I ended up with a tiny bit that wouldn't fit in the jar.  Maybe I'll infuse it with another flavor.

Don't you love the classy homemade masking tape label!?

This will sit in our fridge to infuse for a week and then I'll strain off the mint.  I'm still not sure how we'll use this or the spearmint vodka I made, but I'm sure we'll figure something out.  Mint, lime, and rum go together to make a mojito, so maybe we'll make a variation on that with something like pineapple juice or coconut.  Or spiked hot chocolate.  Drizzled over vanilla or chocolate ice cream would be good too.  Mixed into hot tea.  Martinis. 

Jalapeño Tequila

I did a bunch of research to learn about tequila to come up with a list of possible brands/types to buy.  I ended up buying El Jimador tequila because it was highly ranked, available at the store I was in, and it's the type our friends Jim & Isabelle drink.  I tasted it straight before I added the jalapeno slices and found out that good tequila is nice!  There's a great smoky quality and it was actually enjoyable, not something you'd need to learn to appreciate like whisky.

I sliced up three jalapeños from our garden and put them in the jar and dumped the tequila on top.  It will infuse for about three-four days and then I will strain out the jalapeños.  I wonder if there's something I can do with those now-boozy jalapeños? 

El Jimador, gettin' spicy. 

I saved the bottle for this one so I can use a funnel and fill it back up.  I figured it will be easier to pour out of a bottle than a canning jar. 

This one seems like it will be easy to use, either straight shots of tequila or made into some sort of margarita.  Yum!  

Great-Aunt Pooch's Cherry Bounce

I sat down last night with a quart of cherries and made them into something tasty... but I have to wait for three months before they're really ready to eat!  I made cherry bounce, an old-fashioned Wisconsin tradition that I'm finding not many people know about.  And I'm aiming to change that, at least in our group of friends.  Gotta start small!   

Cherry bounce is sour cherries soaked in booze, typically whiskey, bourbon, or brandy.  I went full-on "Sconnie" on this and used Korbel brandy, the number one brandy in the state.  (Read about brandy being super-popular in Wisconsin but nobody seems to know why.)  I used brandy so we could use it to make brandy old-fashioneds, plus I don't like whiskey or bourbon. 

Even though cherry bounce is a simple recipe — cherries, booze, and sugar, it requires a lot of patience to wait until they're fully marinated.  It's definitely a gamble. I have no idea what I'm doing since I've never made anything like this before and only tried it at the Tip Top Tavern this weekend (they had a homemade cherry brandy old-fashioned as their drink special, yespleasethankyou!). I hope this works out.  Oh, and you don't refrigerate it, you just throw the cherries in a jar with a bunch of booze and sugar, which are both preservatives, so it ends up that I'm making pickled cherries! Who knew!

Inspiration

Island of Consumption Door County Cherry Bounce 

The great-aunt Pooch in the title isn't my great-aunt, nobody in my family made anything as cool as this.  The recipe I followed described great-aunt Pooch, so I borrowed it because I thought it gave the aura of a time-tested recipe passed down through generations. 

I picked up the sour cherries at our Northside farmers' market on Sunday, the cherries come from Sturgeon Bay (way up north).  I was a little hesitant about the unknown sour cherries and really wanted to use the yummy sweet cherries we always get, but the guy at the stand reminded me that cherry bounce is typically made with sour cherries, so I conceded and went the traditional route.  I had never had a sour cherry, they're not particularly sour, just not as sweet as the big dark Bings.  The sour ones are definitely smaller though.

Difference between a sour Montmorency cherry (left) and a sweet Bing cherry. 

I used a toothpick to poke a couple holes in each cherry and then drop it into one of two freshly-washed big quart jars. It took 20 minutes to work through all of those cherries, but it was meditative. I had to be careful though, I was afraid I'd poke my fingers by mistake since the cherries were so small. As I did it I was kind of questioning why I was putting holes in them, but I realized that there needed to be a symbiotic flavor exchange while they marinated for three months, the brandy needs to get into the cherry and the cherry flavor needs to get out into the brandy.

Oh yeah, and the cherries aren't pitted, the recipe specifically said "unpitted cherries", so they're going to be a bit dangerous to eat.  There are dishes made with unpitted cherries because the pits supposedly add extra flavor, so I went along with it based on that concept.

Armed with a toothpick to poke holes. 

I added 1/3 cup sugar to each jar since I read that brandy is likely sweeter than whiskey.  It might not be enough sugar, but we can always add more later. 

Adding sugar with my canning funnel.
Thanks for the funnel, Mom!

Then I topped off both jars with most of a bottle of Korbel brandy and added a broken cinnamon stick to one jar for some flavor variety. I gently shook them a few times to mix in the sugar, but it was slow to dissolve.  I'll probably  I finished off by making my standard fancy-scmancy kitchen labels with masking tape and a marker. Classy! 

A jar of regular and a jar of cinnamon.

Then I put both jars up out of the way on the top shelf of the pantry to rest. Sleep my babies, I'll see you in three months!

Made In The Pressure Cooker: Ginger-Vanilla Syrup

I saw this recipe mentioned in a pressure cooker newsletter a couple weeks ago and was immediately smitten with the idea.  I felt it was urgent to get some ginger immediately to I sent Husband Jeff a quick text message in case he went to the grocery store that day (he didn't).  It was right around Memorial Day weekend and I knew we were too busy to even deal with making this recipe, so I didn't push to go to the grocery store that night.  I ended up buying ginger a few days later and made it on Monday night. I was particularly inspired to make this recipe as soon as I could to show my friend Jessica since she bought her husband a SodaStream carbonated beverage machine but they've only used it a few times to make sparkling water but that's about it.  I'm guessing they don't know what to do with it other than using the pre-made flavorings that you can buy that go with the machine, so here's an idea.

This recipe originally called for 4 cups of water, but that version cooks for an hour to reduce down the liquid.  My version is made in the pressure cooker, where the water doesn't evaporate away much, so I started with the end amount of water. My pressure cooker needs only a minimum of 1/2 cup of water to reach pressure, so I had no problem reducing the water down to half the original recipe. 

The recipe didn't include vanilla, but this was the perfect reason to use up my remaining vanilla bean, it was a bit shriveled up and dried out.  I was saving it for making a special jelly, but I don't think I'm going to make any jelly this year, so I might as well use it here.

You can make this recipe without a pressure cooker, just cook it in an uncovered pot for 45 minutes to 1 hour, as described in the original recipe.  

Inspiration

• David Lebovitz fresh ginger syrup for the original recipe
• Hip Pressure Cooking "fresh ginger syrup" forum post for the pressure cooker conversion

Ingredients

• 8oz ginger
• 2 cups water
• 2 cups sugar
• pinch of salt
• 1 vanilla bean, split (optional)

Directions

Wash and rinse the ginger. Slice the ginger into rounds and then chop some more into rough pieces. 

Add the ginger, water, sugar, salt, and optional vanilla bean to the pressure cooker.  Go ahead and turn the burner on now while you're stirring it all up.  Might as well save time if you can! 

Sugar, water, salt, and ginger all in the pot. 

Added a vanilla bean and stirred.

Lock the pressure cooker and set it to high pressure if you have that option.  Since it was such a small amount of water, it got hot pretty quickly for me.  Cook at high pressure for 22 minutes and adjust the temperature to keep it at high pressure.  In the first five minutes of cooking the awesome pungent smell of ginger filled our kitchen, but as it continued to cook it wasn't as fragrant. 

Pressure cooking. 

After 22 minutes, take the pressure cooker off the burner and do a natural pressure release, which is easy since you let it sit and don't do anything.  I let mine sit for a while to cool since I was off doing other things in the house. Remove the lid and take a look at the chopped bits of ginger.  Huh, not much different than when you put it in, just a little darker because you left the skin on. 

After cooking, this is what it looked like.

I poured the syrup through a strainer and funnel combo (strainer put in a funnel) to get it into Sonny D's little glass pitcher. 

Verdict

I mixed up a La Croix sparkling lime water with two tablespoons of the syrup so I could try it out before I went to bed.  I love it!  It's definitely got some ginger bite.  The next day I had another version with coconut sparkling water and it was great, too.   The vanilla bean flecks sink to the bottom of the syrup so you might want to stir it before pouring, but that's no big deal. 

Sparkling water + ginger-vanilla syrup = tasty drink!

I don't drink alcoholic beverages much, but I'm trying to come up with a recipe that would use this.  I would love a riff on the Dark & Stormy (ginger beer and rum).  I need to check out what alcohols we've got in the pantry to see what I can whip up.  
 
I've got some chocolate mint growing in the garden and no plans on what to do with it yet, so I think I'll probably end up making a chocolate mint syrup. That version won't need as much cooking, the recipes I'm finding say only 3-5 minutes of cooking on the stovetop.  You can also make fruit versions, which I'll probably try out this summer too.

A Tale of Two Teas

Recently I bought two herbal teas, one at Target because it was on sale and sounded interesting, the other at Trader Joe's because well, I love pretty much everything Trader Joe's sells. Here is a review of both teas.

Good Earth Sweet & Spicy Tea

Good Earth Sweet & Spicy tea. 
I've got to be more patient when I
take photos so they're not blurry!

The first tea I bought is Good Earth Sweet & Spicy tea, it was on sale for $2.51 at my local Target.  It was a brand I hadn't seen offered there before.  I figured it wasn't much of a gamble to spring a couple bucks for this tea.  The "sweet and spicy" description won me over.

This tea is definitely sweet, but without any sugar at all and no artificial sweeteners either.  According to the Good Earth website, the ingredients are rooibos, chicory root, natural flavor, rosehip, cinnamon, lemongrass, peppermint, chamomile, ginger root, anise seed, orange oil, orange peel.  I guess the sweetness comes from the orange oil and orange peel, or maybe it's the mysterious "natural flavor".  There must be a lot of cinnamon in it because it's also incredibly spicy. 

And this tea is super strong!  You don't want to let it steep for more than the minimum time of 3 minutes.  This is one tea where you can definitely use the tea bag at least two times without suffering through a disappointing mug of weak dishwater tea.  Yes, I'm a tightwad who uses a tea bag more than once, but usually only when it's a good strong tea. 

If you want this same tea, definitely pay attention to the packaging, there's a version with a black tea base that has caffeine.  As far as I can tell, almost all of this company's other tea blends all have actual tea, so they all have caffeine.  The only other one that is caffeine-free is the Citrus Kiss with a base of decaffeinated green tea.  Disappointing that they don't have more caffeine-free teas though because I really like the sound of their Cocoa Tango, it has black tea with cocoa and spicy chile peppers. 

I also saw this tea offered at my local grocery store, it was not on sale and the regular price was something like $4-5.  Although this tea is definitely that good and would be worth that price, don't pay that much if you can get it for almost half the price at Target.  

Trader Joe's Well Rested Tea

Trader Joe's Well Rested tea

I bought the second tea when I had the day off and was leisurely shopping my way through Trader Joe's, picking up all sorts of things even though our cupboards were already way too full.  Since I had already drank most of my way through the sweet & spicy tea, I was open to picking up a new interesting tea. This Trader Joe's Well Rested herbal tea cost $1.99.  The nighttime tea description sounded nice since that means there's no caffeine.  I also thought the blend of mild chamomile plus spearmint and peppermint would taste good.

Even though I don't like artificial mint found in most candies and gum, I like mint tea a lot.  I guess this must be mostly chamomile because this tea barely has any flavor, not really much mint in there at all.  It's quite mild and pretty boring.  I get  that it's meant for bedtime, but I expected it to at least have some interesting flavor even if it wasn't too perky.

I haven't had it at bedtime to know if it's good for getting you to sleep easier, but I know chamomile is meant to do that.  I should try a mug before bed some night to give it a shot.  

Verdict

I highly recommend the Good Earth Sweet & Spicy tea for a very exciting tea to give your day some sparkle and interest without caffeine.  I'm already getting down to the last few tea bags and need to buy more. I love it! 

The Trader Joe's tea is ok, but I don't think I would recommend it.  It's not terrible, but to me it doesn't have many redeeming qualities. It's not so bad that I won't drink the rest, but it's not going to the be the first tea I reach for and I certainly won't buy more unless it's really helpful for encouraging sleep.

Question

Do you have a caffeine-free tea you would recommend? I want something interesting! Let me hear it!