Friday, March 26, 2010

barely know her

Grapefruit bitters

Grapefruit Bitters - the simplest bitters to make at home because you can get everything except one optional ingredient at the supermarket.

1 empty 750ml bottle
1 large grapefruit
black tea
cinnamon chunks or 1 cinnamon stick
whole allspice
gentian (optional)

Juice the grapefruit. Drink the juice. Cut the juiced grapefruit - rind, pith, bits of pulp, and all, though feel free to get rid of any seeds - into small pieces and stuff them into the 750ml bottle.

Add loose black tea (about enough for two cups of tea, I'd say) to the bottle, along with a stick's worth of cinnamon and a pinch of whole allspice. If you have gentian, add a pinch of it to help round out the bitterness.

Add vodka until everything is covered. 100 proof vodka is better than 80.

Let it sit for a couple weeks, maybe a month, shaking the bottle from time to time. Because everything will expand in the bottle, you'll lose some vodka, but the bottle is also practically self-straining -- just pour it from the big bottle into something smaller, and almost all the solids will remain in the bottle.

A drink to make with your grapefruit bitters:

1 oz grapefruit bitters
1 oz St Germain elderflower liqueur
1 oz Ugli fruit juice (sub orange or grapefruit juice)
3/4 oz lemon juice
1/2 oz rye

(I would love to know why, with the new version of Opera, I'm suddenly unable to click "publish post" in blogger. I can type, I can save, but to post, I have to open blogger in Firefox instead, and because blogger and Google are linked, that means logging out of my normal Google account and logging back in as okaycheckitout, just to go to the dashboard, open the draft, and click freaking publish. Actually, I don't want to know why. I just want it to stop being true.)

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