A happy belated Yule, all, and a premature happy New Year! I never really post much around Christmastime because, aside from the frantic rush that is work-shopping-cooking-wrapping, my holiday drinking consists primarily of brandy and soynog, followed by mimosas. While both are quite tasty, neither cries out to be posted here. However, after the big holiday rush is over, I find that there are plenty of cocktails that ease the transition from holiday bustle to holy Moses, it’s 2009 already?!?!

As though it isn’t bad enough that it’s already a new year, the end of this year means that I had to compile my list of favorite albums from 2008. I listened to plenty of music this year—a ton, in fact—but many of the albums were not recent releases. That made my list-making a bit of a chore, but it’s done and I can’t take it back now. So, in case you’re curious, here are the best round shiny objects of the year in the World According to Marleigh:

1. m83 – Saturdays = Youth
2. The Mountain Goats – Heretic Pride
3. The Hold Steady – Stay Positive
4. Horse Feathers – House with No Home
5. Grouper – Dragging a Dead Dear Up a Hill
6. Sigur Rós – Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust
7. Sun Kil Moon – April
8. Have a Nice Life – Deathconsciousness
9. Why? – Alopecia
10. Fucked Up – Chemistry of Common Life

With that done, we relaxed over the long weekend and enjoyed some “quality” time with our new Wii games—Animal Crossing: City Folk and Cooking Mama Cookoff. The occasion seemed the perfect time to further test our copy of The Essential Bartender’s Guide…that is, until the recipe I decided to make was a Trader Vic special. I attribute the inspiration to make this (with lime juice) to Robert Hess, but the recipe is all Victor Bergeron. Continue →

If left to my own devices, I would make nothing but exceptionally complicated, difficult drinks to show on this blog. The really gorgeous kind that require two special tinctures, crushed ice, particular glassware, a very specific hard-to-find spirit and shisho leaves. I’d make those, that is, if it weren’t for the fact that I have a full-time job, clothes that require washing at least every few weeks, a home that needs to be cleaned from time-to-time, a cat who gets cranky if he goes unfed for more than a day—the ceaseless responsibilities of this hellish merry-go-round we call adulthood. Whine, whine, whine.

Since I unfortunately do not have the free time to make all of the cocktails that I would like to, I try to mix up my repertoire of classics with some more complicated tipples. That way my garnish skills and palette don’t get rusty and you don’t get bored with reading recipes that end in “shake and strain into a cocktail glass.” Hence, one afternoon while I was paging through The Craft of the Cocktail in search of a drink idea, I saw the Horse’s Neck and decided that my channel knife-skills needed some honing. It isn’t a horribly complicated garnish, but it requires patience, dexterity and concentration to execute successfully. Continue →

About a month ago, I received an email from a fellow cocktail blogger asking if I’d be interested in going to San Francisco to tour the Hangar One/St. George Spirits distillery. Some of the guys at the Mixoloseum had been in touch with St. George and had an opportunity to do a tour…but none of them lived anywhere near Alameda. Being kind and generous souls, they offered the spots up to all the Californians in the group. Not having had many (read: any) chances to visit St. George, I jumped at the chance and took a day off work. San Francisco is, after all, only five hours away by car on some of the most boring freeways in the country. What’s not to be excited about?

The original itinerary was a tour of St. George, but a compatriot managed to get us a tour at Domaine Charbay in St. Helena, a mere one-and-a-half hours from the City. Not a problem—who wouldn’t say yes to two distilleries in one day? At various points we had five or six other writers/bloggers/drinkers involved in the plan but in the end we turned out to be a foursome—Camper, Matt, myself and a poor, dear friend I shanghaied into driving with me and spending the day in a car with two strange men. We planned to pick up the aforementioned strange men at the Oakland Airport at nine to reach St. Helena around ten-thirty. If you do the math, that does indeed mean that we Los Angeles at four, when even the crickets were asleep. Heavily caffeinated with the stereo cranked up, we reached Oakland just in time for morning rush hour (I am an excellent trip planner) and scooped up our partners in crime for the drive out to Napa. Continue →

Once upon a time, long long ago, I was a graduate student with no more sense about drinking than I had when I was attending college frat parties. Intimidated by the bold flavors of liquors like gin and whisk(e)y I, like so many others, took refuge in vodka. Being nearly flavorless, vodka is a perfect gateway alcohol—you can drink without having to think about what will or won’t make the vodka taste good, because it isn’t going to affect things much at all. Which is why, I suppose, I found vodka martinis lacking (well, that and the crappy vermouth), and turned my attention to a vodka martini that actually tasted like something: the Dirty Martini. I don’t care to remember just how many Dirty Martinis I consumed in my nascent cocktailian stage, but there were a lot of them. Embarrassing but true.

Moving forward a few years, I’ve had nary a thought about vodka martinis of any stripe for quite a while; it’s gin or nothing at my house. I don’t drink much vodka at all anymore, and mostly keep it around to preserve homemade syrups and for mixing Bloody Marys (though Chuck did enlighten us about the magical properties of Beefeater in the Red Snapper). Enter, then, two convergent sample products that appeared on my doorstep: Sobieski Vodka and Dirty Sue Olive Juice. Continue →

I have, in reserve, the perfect recipe for November’s Mixology Monday. Doug from the Pegu Blog is hosting this month, and the theme is “Made from Scratch,” a time-honored home ec tradition that I take very seriously. I mean, really. I bake my own bread. I cook my beans from a bag, rather than taking them from a can. I make a fresh batch of vegetable stock every week. This one is easy!

Or at least it was easy because I had the perfect recipe. A recipe that involved making a liqueur into candy, a flavored salt and a consommé. A contest-winning recipe. But then my weekend got really busy and we had to put in a new chimney pipe and I wound up stuck in traffic forever on Saturday and my football games went—sigh—terribly yesterday and it was too cold to hang my laundry out and my cinnamon rolls wouldn’t rise and, well, you get the point. I got behind, and so did my (lengthy) preparations for the cocktail I was going to prepare from scratch. Fortunately, being the nutter that I am, I had a few things in reserve that will work for this month’s challenge. Namely, olives. Continue →