Category — Drinks

I wish the BC Blueberry Council would send me emails on how to get my blueberry bushes to produce some berries, but instead, they send me emails with cocktail recipes.  Hmm.  And they sent it to me on a holiday Monday. Oh blueberry council, how did you know I needed a little fizzy something on a hot Ontario day? (But seriously, how many years do I need to wait to get my blueberries to grow at home? I’m two years in and have zero berries.)

The photo of their blueberry mojito looked so pretty that I wanted a glass.  Immediately.  Ok husband, let’s make mojitos!  Small problem: we had very few of the ingredients needed to make them other than soda water, mint and blueberries. We threw blueberries to the wind and mixed up a blueberry mojito-ish drink that I think they would approve of.

I collected the ingredients: mint from the garden, brown sugar, some blueberries purchased earlier in the day, the last of our Prince Edward Distillery gin (HOW DID WE FINISH IT ALREADY??), soda water and my jar of gooseberry and lemon balm syrup. Voila. Cocktail hour had begun.  Now, you can call it a “fizz” or a “crush”, I call it “let’s make more”.  I give you, the Minty Blueberry McFizz.

I went a little wild at the fruit stand over the weekend at the Ottawa Farmers Market.  Well..  these days, my version of “wild” means overspending our grocery dollars on fruit.   I live on the edge.

The fruit vendor (Warner’s Farm) was stocked with cherries, sour cherries, currants, gooseberries and more.  Many of which, I’ve never cooked with before.  While my loyalties lie with strawberries, their season has almost come to an end and I need to fill the berry void in my heart.. and my fridge.  This week, I picked up gooseberries as well as red and black currants.   Let’s not mention the litres of strawberries or blueberries that also came home with me.   I will dub it, the splurge before the storm.  Later that same day a massive wind storm blew away our six foot long outdoor carpet from our porch, blew it over our house and into the Centretown netherworld (update: our neighbour found it!) AND our air conditioner died. Sigh.  (Someone’s getting a new AC for her birthday this week!  Dear husband, can you put some frosting on it and call it a cupcake?  I’d like that.)

Ok, so my freewheeling berry buying halcyon days may have come to an end, but at least I’ve got a fridge full of fruit to cook with.

I chose this lemon balm and gooseberry syrup recipe from Pickles and Preserves to begin.

I love making syrups to add to soda water.  It’s a quick and easy way to use a small amount of berries and not be a slave to jam or jelly making over a hot stove.  I stepped outside to pick some of my rogue lemon balm (I didn’t plant it!) which is THRIVING in its neglect.  I picked more than the recipe called for to keep it from taking over my rosemary zone.  (Hey, giant Italian parsley plant.  Your days are numbered too.)

Like the lavender syrup that I made a few weeks ago, this gooseberry syrup is a great addition to soda water.  Refreshing!

I know my friend Tracy can relate to this post – she is strictly anti-mayo when it comes to potato salad. We avoid it for the egg allergy factor and we can’t even use vegan mayo (because of the mustard). But it’s still summer and potato salad is a must-make dish.

I used the recipe that I found on Epicurious since it combined cilantro, mint and basil (three things I have LOTS of in the garden right now).  That makes for a lot of green in the dish – which is pretty for adults and uh.. less pleasing to others.

Noooo, I don't want it.

You can’t please everyone.  That’s what the bread is for.

This week I’ve been on a summer cleaning spree and the kitchen cupboards were enemy number one.  While cupboard purging, I found a box of “Moroccan style mint green tea“.  When or why I bought this… I don’t recall.  Aside from the bags being individually wrapped (do people need wrapped tea bags??) it was actually a great tea for iced tea.  Without much effort, I made two litres of tea to have throughout the week (or as it would turn out… two days.)

A cup and a half of syrup!

My lavender had mostly flowered during my vacation, but there were several stalks (stems?) that still had closed lavender buds that are perfect for cooking.  I whipped out my Lavender Cookbook to see what I could make and the lavender syrup recipe sounded so blissfully easy.

And it was.

Before the boy woke up this morning, I picked and washed 2 tablespoons of lavender buds.  Then, I steeped them in boiling water with sugar and lemon.  After about 20 minutes of steeping, I strained the mixture into clean jars  using a coffee filter.  Classy.

Now, some people leave the buds in their syrup, but trust me, it is PLENTY potent without keeping them.

Steeping the lavender and lemon zest

Now comes the tricky part… deciding how to best use the syrup.  Martinis?  Iced tea? Lemonade?

Prince Edward Distillery - vodka, gin, rum, rye and soon... whiskey!

Ever since I sampled some PEI potato vodka at a PEI tourism event a year ago drizzled over oysters, I knew I wanted to visit the Prince Edward Distillery the next time I was on PEI.  Unlike an earlier misadventure to a new winery,  I made sure to call ahead to see if they were open because even in mid-June, you just never know.

Getting to the Prince Edward Distillery was on my ‘must do’ list for this trip to PEI.  The distillery is located in the eastern tip of the island in Hermanville (about an hour from Charlottetown).

For $10 you get a tour of the distillery and you get to sample 3 products.  Our tour began with the potato bins!

How the potatoes arrive - potato bin!

Local potatoes arrive then are diced and cooked.  It takes about five hours for the potatoes to break down into an oatmeal consistency.  (Most vodkas nowadays are made with grain which only takes a few hours to cook down.)  Using potatoes makes for a more labour intensive product: washing, dicing and the increased cooking time compared to grain makes this a real labour of love.

This machine cooks up the potatoes - it takes 5 hours.

Our guide (and co-owner) leads us to the still.  None of us on the tour had ever seen a still before and we marveled at its Jacques Cousteau appearance.  The only things going under today were a batch of blueberries ready to be processed into blueberry vodka.

Arla explains how the still works.

This machine comes from Germany and is self cleaning.  Gotta love modern amenities!  Otherwise, that’s a lot of little portholes to clean by hand with a toothbrush.  No thank you.

The still. Possibly doubles as submarine.

A little cork sniffing to get our noses working

Next stop on the tour – a lesson in casks and a bit of cork sniffing.  These casks are made of oak and are charred inside.  The distillery only uses new casks to ensure that their product is pure.  (I had no idea that used casks were used to make whiskey.  And reused.  And then reused.)  I can totally appreciate that in the first years of business, you don’t want any funny business going on with used barrels and mystery flavours.

Bottling! Today they were bottling whiskey.

On the day I visited, they were bottling whiskey and putting labels onto the bottles.  I am smitten with their packaging and bottles – I think it’s really stylish.

Finally, the part we had been waiting for – the tasting!  We started with the blueberry vodka pulled straight from the freezer.  I was totally prepared for some sort of overwhelming berry-ness liked you’d get with a fruit wine.  Instead, this was completely subtle and understated.  It was definitely my biggest surprise of the tasting.  You get the essence of blueberry, without the sweetness.  Hmm… kind of wishing I had purchased a bottle of it now in retrospect.

Sampling chilled blueberry vodka

Since I had already tried the potato vodka (the LCBO sells it at their Walkley Road location in the Vintages section), I decided to sample the gin and rye.  The gin was my favourite and a bottle of it is coming home with me.  It tasted of salt air and juniper berries (and a combinations of angelica root, coriander, ginger, lemon grass and orange peels).  And NO NUTS!   Did you know that both Bombay Sapphire Gin and Beefeater contain nuts.  Neither did I until I started reading up on different gins tonight.   Stupid nuts turn up everywhere.  Gah.

I sampled their rum as well.  Now, I am not a rum connoisseur, but I liked this one.  This was likely due to the molasses quotient in the ingredients – as my husband knows, if there’s molasses I AM THERE.    Apparently, the Merchantman Pub in Charlottetown is the only place to sample this product outside the distillery.  So, if you can’t get to Hermanville…  head downtown instead.

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Now that we have almost no strawberries left in the garden, the little dude has decided to go bonzo for berries.  It took a long time to warm up to strawberries and raspberries.  He’d pluck them out of the garden, take a bite, chew, scrunch up his face and spit them out.  Disgusted.

I tried blending them into “banana “ice cream”.   THE HORROR.  Then he tasted a perfectly ripe raspberry and started signing ‘more’ and chirping “mo mo mo!”  I sent him to daycare each day with a handful of berries from the garden, a half dozen on a good day.  Apparently he chirped for “mo mo mo” at school.  This kid needed berries.  STAT.

When it comes to fruit, he needs a bit of prodding to accept anything other than bananas.  I knew that  I needed to act fast on this berry eating window.

We biked to the Main Street Farmer’s market on Saturday and bought a large basket from the Rochon Farms stand.  By the end of the day, the berries were gone.  Between myself and the kid (and I think the husband even got a few), we are a household of berrryophiles.  On Sunday, we cycled down to the Lansdowne market for more berries (and corn, meat and peaches).  Again, the berries were gone before we left the parking lot.

Next year, instead of zucchini (gah, could they grow any bigger??), I’m planting berries for my downtown berry patch.  The dream!

To make the most of our freezer berry stash ( always have a freezer berry stash!) we’ve been making a lot of smoothies.  Berries + straw = TODDLER WIN.

Almost three weeks after we started our homemade ginger pop experiment – we got to sample the finished product tonight.  Lo and behold – not only did it work, but it is the epitome of summer fizzy drinks.  The kid was not at all impressed… no problem, more for us and future neighbourhood ginger pop socials.

Look at those bubbles!  It’s pop!

{Our first batch of Ginger Pop. }

In my copy of Urban Pantry there is a recipe for homemade ginger soda (or pop as we call it north of the border).

The recipe sounded so easy that we couldn’t resist giving it a try.  Aside from needing to wait about three weeks for the final product, there’s not much else you need aside from patience.  Making ginger pop is a two-part process: first, you make a natural ginger starter (much like a sourdough starter) using grated ginger, sugar and water. Every couple of days you feed the started until it gets foamy – this is the natural yeast forming. Once your ginger starter is ready and frothy (after about 6-8 days), you can move on to step two – making the pop liquid.

{Frothy ginger starter. }

Once you have mixed the starter and pop liquid, you bottle it up and store it for another 10-14 days to let it naturally carbonate.  The instructions advise to do this in a cupboard away from other food or breakables as the bottles can explode.  Ack!  We put our jars in the milk cupboard for safe keeping.  Once your pop is ready, it’s important to put it in the fridge to stop the carbonation process.

{The result: 14 jars of pop. }

We sampled the liquid as we bottled it and it was very zingy.  I think it’s going to be a stellar batch of pop.  I’ve already got the starter going for batch #2 of “Gladstone Ginger Poppe”.  This would be great to serve at a party – you could even  “go full Martha” and buy some special bottles and labels at the wine/beer supply store.

{The result: 500ml of syrup and 200ml of rhubarb mash. }

When a coworker offered me rhubarb, I couldn’t say no or wait to use it. I decided to make rhubarb syrup using this recipe from Canadian Living. It’s super basic and not overly sweet. If you’ve cooked with rhubarb before, you already know it usually takes a huge amount of sugar to make it palatable – usually a one-to-one ratio. Zing!

This recipe takes about 15 minutes from start to finish. Who doesn’t have a spare 15 minutes?

Once the syrup had been boiled, strained and poured into clean Mason jars. The liquid was still hot enough to seal the jars. I figured since I would be using the syrup in the next couple of weeks, I wouldn’t bother doing a water bath to process the jars. If I was keeping the syrup for any longer, I would definitely process the jars.

We served the leftover rhubarb mash on top of some vanilla ice cream and froze the rest – I’ll use it in muffins.  For the syrup, you can add it to any drink (adult or not) – try lemonade, fizzy water or gin and tonics!  All in a all – an easy project with no waste!

This whole “baby thing” has really turned me off my morning coffee.   I was pretty hyper about not drinking caffeine during the pregnancy ( though I indulged in the occasional cappucino, latte or tea misto.. ) and since Alden was born, coffee just hasn’t tasted as good as it used to.  Cappucinos and foo foo coffees are still fair game.  In the last year, I’ve been a de-caf tea drinker and have tried all sorts of green, de-caf and unusual teas.  One of my favourite finds was barley tea which I purchased at the local Korean market.

Roasted grain doesn’t sound very romantic and the enormous tea bags don’t exactly scream “finer things” but there is something comforting about a hot cup of this grainy tea.  While my research says that many like to drink it cold – I like it nice and hot for the winter.  It smells just like you would expect – a bit like porridge and a bit like nuts. Mmmm!