Grow Your Own: The Farmer’s Market Vodka Garden
The clever people at Log House Plants have put together a collection of plants that blend oh-so-well with vodka-based cocktails. They’re a wholesale nursery, so they’re growing the plants for sale at retail garden centers and gourmet grocery stores on the West Coast. Look for them in your local indie garden center/grocery store, or order them online from the Territorial Seed Company, who has joined in this effort and put together a great collection of cocktail-friendly plants and seeds. We called this first collection The Farmers Market Vodka Garden, because vodka can be made...
Read MoreMamani Gin & Tonic
1.5 oz gin 2-3 fresh jalapeño slices (or, if you prefer, a milder pepper), seeds removed 2-3 sprigs cilantro or basil 2-3 chunks cucumber 1 chunk celery stalk 4 oz high-quality tonic water (Fever Tree or Q Tonic) 1-2 cherry tomatoes, along with a basil or cilantro leaf, on a pick for garnish Ice Fill a mason jar, Collins glass, or short tumbler with ice. In between the ice cubes, layer in a slice or two of pepper, a sprig of cilantro or basil, and a cherry tomato. In a cocktail shaker, combine the first five ingredients. Use a muddler or wooden spoon to gently crush the vegetables...
Read MoreThe Farmers Market
1.5 oz vodka (Try Glacier Potato Vodka from Idaho) Gin or tequila would also be lovely in this drink. 2-3 ‘Mexican Sour Gherkin’ cucumbers or regular cucumbers 1-2 stalks ‘Red Venture’ celery 2-3 sprigs cilantro or basil 2-3 slices small spicy or mild peppers 6 cherry tomatoes or 1-2 slices large tomato Dash of Worcestershire sauce (try Annie’s for a vegetarian version) 3-4 oz Q or Fever Tree tonic water Reserve a celery stalk, cherry tomato, or cucumber for garnish. Combine all ingredients excep the tonic water in a cocktail shaker and gently crush the vegetables and...
Read MoreCilantro
The trick with cilantro is to keep it from blooming. Once it blooms (this is called ‘bolting’), you can forget about harvesting any leaves. So keep it watered, grow it in the shade, and look for varieties that are bred to resist bolting, like ‘Santo‘. Cut back an entire stalk to harvest it, rather than snipping off individual leaves, and pinch off the flowers if they do bloom. If you see a thick central stalk emerging, that’s the one you want to cut back. If you’re growing cilantro for the fruit, which is what botanists call those round seedpods,...
Read MoreWildcrafted…really?
Can you eat any of the plants in this picture? Really? How do you know? This post from the always excellent Rowley’s Whiskey Forge got me thinking about this. He posts a really cool recipe for a liqueur called mistela de chimajá. I couldn’t resist–I had to go look up the plant. But more about that in a minute. First, some background: So the foraging/wildcrafting movement has met the craft distilling movement and the result is that people want to go out into the wilderness, or into a vacant lot, or into the woods, and pull a plant out of the ground and drop it into...
Read MoreHerbs. Now.
Buying herbs at the grocery store is a sign of defeat. Not defeat, even, because defeat would suggest that you tried and failed. It’s more like inertia. Because really, if you can’t grow a few herbs, you have just given up on having any kind of interaction with the plant kingdom or the parcel of soil around your home. This is the year to change that, and the reason to make that change is because there are so many very nice cocktails that just require a pinch of some herb or another. A cocktail should be an impulsive decision, one that doesn’t require a trip to the grocery store. If...
Read MoreBooks by Amy Stewart
The Drunken Botanist
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