Almost as well known as my love for holiday celebrations is my distaste for crowds - especially crowds of strangers. And that discomfort leads me to avoid two of the most popular fun holidays - Fourth of July and New Years’ Eve. I usually spend my New Year’s Eve in bed reading one of the books that I received as a Christmas gift. But this year was different, for a few reasons. First, I only asked for one book for Christmas, which I finished reading before New Year’s Eve. Second, my favorite bar downtown was hosting a New Year’s Eve party, beginning at 8pm. The specialty drink menu looked fantastic, and it was definitely some place that I felt comfortable in. So I gave some serious thought to going out and joining the party. I have no issues with going out on my own, but the thought of four or five hours out in a roomful of strangers was quite challenging for me.
I remained torn until a text from one of my good friends in Texas inspired me; basically, she planned to stay home, drink a lot of bubbly, and watch a few sappy movies. I thought that if I did the same thing, then neither of us would be drinking alone! I was already prepared with a small bottle of prosecco on my credenza and two baby bottles of the same in my refrigerator. All together, the three bottles were about the equivalent of one regular 750ml bottle of prosecco. And then I remembered that, around New Year’s Eve two years ago, I conducted some fun experiments with cava cocktails. Only two of the five cocktails were winners, but the process of researching, concocting, and tasting the cocktails was quite enjoyable. Just like that, I ditched any thought of going out to the party at my local bar, and started planning which sparkling cocktails I would experiment with this time.
The Research
My previous set of experiments was derived from a fantastic low alcohol cocktail book and a challenging restaurant cookbook, both of which I was reading courtesy of NetGalley. I had deemed both the Pimms Royale from the first book and the Sex and Violets from the second book good enough to repeat, so I started my roster of new experiments with those.
The French Lavender, which is a lavender twist on the French 75, was another obvious addition to the list. Shortly after publishing the results of the experiments with the first three sample bottles of exotic liqueurs from the local distillery, I tried a few recipes with the fourth sample bottle, which was a lavender liqueur. The French Lavender was such a clear winner that, when I purchased a specially marked bottle of lavender, I made a Mason jar of it to share with my sister at Christmas. She loved it, even though she initially feared that the addition of the lavender might make it taste like soap.
Since those three cocktails would only use up one baby bottle of prosecco, I continued to search for inspiration. Naturally, I turned to my Eat Your Books account and searched my recipes for “sparkling wine.” This generated 193 results, but was narrowed down to 137 results when filtered by alcoholic drinks. The first recipe that interested me was a sparkling bourbon pear cocktail from Serious Eats. Unfortunately, that was a batch recipe that made 12 servings; therefore, while it would be something to keep in mind for my next big dinner party, it wasn’t appropriate for my New Year’s Eve sparkling cocktail experiment. Serious Eats also had a recipe for a sparkling jungle bird, which looked intriguing because I seemed to remember that the original jungle bird was a tiki drink using Galliano. So I was curious as to how they would sparkle that up. Although the recipe looked awesome, the roasted pineapple and lime infused rum that formed the base of the drink required a three day head start, which I didn’t have.
Just as I was about to start scrolling through the remaining 135 results, I received a random email from Food & Wine featuring a slideshow of sixteen recipes for festive champagne cocktails. Surely, two or three of those would be winners! The first recipe was for the French 75, a variant of which was already on my list, so I moved onto the second recipe, which featured rhubarb bitters. That looked like a good option because it actually seemed to be a twist on the Aperol Spritz, as it was sherry, Aperol, prosecco, and rhubarb bitters. Another recipe seemed to twist the traditional champagne cocktail with bourbon and Peychaud’s bitters, so I added that to the list as a possibility; however, since I wasn’t a fan of the traditional champagne cocktail when I had previously tried it, I didn’t even look at that recipe. There was a really enticing recipe for a mango based cocktail, but I wasn’t certain that I had triple sec in the liquor cabinet or reasonably fresh mango nectar in the refrigerator. I didn’t have the ingredients on hand for the remaining nine recipes, so I didn’t seriously consider any of those, nor did I give much thought to the two other variations on the French 75.
After finding the Food and Wine slideshow, I felt like I had enough options without having to go back to the Eat Your Books recipe list, which I had left open in my browser just in case. By the end of it all, the list of possibilities included:
* Pimms Royale
* Sex and Violets
* French Lavender
* Hat Trick
* Americana
* Sudden Headache
Although I probably had enough prosecco to make all six drinks, I had absolutely no intention of doing so. I wasn’t one hundred percent certain that the blueberry lavender syrup in my refrigerator was still fresh enough to use for the Sex and Violets cocktail, so that one might be out. Also, I still wasn’t sure whether the mango nectar in my refrigerator was good, so the last cocktail might be out as well.
Dinner Plans
Because I had been home for only about 36 hours in the past week, I had not been grocery shopping in about ten days. Therefore, come New Year’s Eve, I ran out of milk for my coffee, ran out of pasta in my horde cabinet, and was otherwise in desperate need of a trip to the grocery store. Before running out, I took the opportunity to make a good shopping list, which included a plan for an excellent dinner that would complement my plans for experimenting with sparkling wine cocktails.
The plan for dinner included a caprese salad, shrimp cocktail, couscous, and baked salmon. Remarkably, that plan survived contact with the grocery store. I bought vine ripened tomatoes, fresh mozzarella cheese, horseradish, a bag of large frozen shrimp, and fresh salmon fillets. The big change was that a bag of brightly colored sweet mini peppers caught my eye in the produce section. I knew that I had about four cans of crabmeat in my horde cabinet, so I could make some really good stuffed peppers if I added some blue cheese and cream cheese to my list. Also, on my way out of the produce section, I spotted small bottles of clementine juice in the fresh juice display. I picked up one of those for another variation of the French 75, which I had deliberately passed over in my research because I had thought fresh clementine juice was unobtainable.
Another pitfall of having had a such a busy week - which was just the capstone to an incredibly eventful year - was that I was extremely behind on my annual minimum mandatory professional education requirements. Therefore, immediately after unpacking the groceries, I started running my professional education audio lectures in hopes that I would finish them all before the clock struck midnight.
Clementine 75
Around 4pm, I moved my laptop into the kitchen so that I could continue to listen to my audio lectures while starting to prepare the syrup for the clementine juice variation of the French 75. Since I bought the clementine juice on an impulse, I hadn’t examined the recipe closely enough to determine whether I had all the ingredients. The syrup for the recipe required white sugar, fresh ginger, juniper berries, dried cranberries, and cinnamon sticks; I had everything except the fresh ginger. However, I had a jar of crystallized ginger in my spice rack, so I decided to proceed using about an eighth of a cup of that as a substitute. In under ten minutes, the syrup had boiled long enough for the sugar to dissolve. I premixed the gin and clementine juice in a Mason jar and let that chill in the refrigerator until the syrup had completely cooled and infused.
An hour later, my small strainer had been found and the syrup was ready to be used. I strained the syrup directly into the Mason jar because I did not want to have another vessel to clean. It was a bit challenging because there was so much solid matter - juniper berries, cranberries, ginger - left in the pan. The directions required pressing on the solids to get as much syrup as possible, but I didn’t do that because I didn’t want to get my fingers sticky. I did taste the syrup, and I didn’t taste as much juniper as I thought I would with one-quarter cup of juniper berries in the mix.
Overall, the drink was very good. I tasted the leftover straight clementine juice; since it tasted very much like straight plain orange juice, I’m thinking that the drink could be made with cheap orange juice instead of clementine juice in the future. I’m happy that I have almost a full Mason jar of the base because I think I mixed too little prosecco into the base because I was following some markings on the glass.
As I was drinking the Clementine 75, I mixed the cocktail sauce for the cooked shrimp that were defrosting in the sink. I make cocktail sauce a little differently than my father does: we both start with a lot of ketchup and mix in a lot of white horseradish. And we get our horseradish in the refrigerator section (by the eggs). Unlike my father, I also mixed in some Cholula to give it a little extra spice. I was a little surprised by how much horseradish I needed to use to make it taste like something other than ketchup. But I kept tasting and adding until I liked it.
I started preparing the salmon while I was enjoying my drink and my shrimp cocktail. That went very quickly, as all I had to do was oil the pan, put in the salmon, coat it with some leftover homemade pastrami spice mix, and pop it into the preheated oven for about 30 minutes. When there was roughly fifteen minutes left, I started the couscous so that everything would finish at about the same time.
French Lavender
I decided that the French Lavender, which is another riff on the French 75, would be the next cocktail to be mixed because it was a very simple recipe that could be done while continuing to listen to the audio lectures. And gin after gin is never a bad thing.
Not surprisingly, the French 75 was a lovely cocktail that didn’t taste like my grandmother’s soap. Rather, it tasted strongly of lemon even though the recipe was equal parts lavender liqueur and lemon juice. And it was quite complimentary to the pastrami salmon filet and couscous that I was having for dinner.
Sex and Violets
The continuing education lectures encountered some very frustrating technical hiccups after dinner. I had reached the end of the audio recording, without knowing that the audio recording was missing the last two hours of the lecture. And then the video lecture took about fifteen minutes to properly load to the spot where the audio lecture ended. After all that, I decided to mix a third sparkling wine cocktail.
I hadn’t mixed the Sex and Violets cocktails since my last foray into cava cocktails, so I wasn’t entirely sure what it required or how it would turn out. I knew it required the bottle of blueberry lavender syrup in the refrigerator, but I wasn’t sure how good it was. I also knew that I had two eight ounce jars of it in the freezer, just in case the bottle was no good. What I didn’t remember is that the recipe required a small amount of elderflower liqueur, which is one of my favorites. And then it was mostly sparkling wine on top of that.
In addition to being easy to mix, the cocktail was really good. A bit on the sweeter side because of the blueberry lavender syrup and the elderflower liqueur, but I didn’t mind that. Because it was so easy to drink, I was tempted to mix a second one. However, I refrained in order to try something different.
Pimms Royale
I had a difficult time choosing what to mix for my fourth cocktail. I had three new recipes on my list, but those required liquors that I wasn’t sure would mix with the gin that I had already been drinking. I knew I liked the gin-based Pimms Royale; however, I had used the recipe in three different posts since December 2016, so I thought it might be time to experiment with something different.
I decided that the deal would be made or broken on whether I had the bottle of Pimms No. 1 in my fabulous liquor cabinet. Because there is no Pimms Royale without the Pimms! And sure enough, I found a fairly full bottle midway to the back of the cabinet. So I pulled out the recipe, gathered up the other ingredients, picked out a clean coupe glass, and started measuring.
For some reason, the first sip of the Pimms Royale was extremely bitter. I thought it might be the fancy dry curaçao, or the substitution of the sparkling wine for the ginger ale, or the skimpy regulation measurement of the sparkling wine. But the second sip was better, and so on with the third sip, and the fourth sip, until I didn’t notice that there was an issue with bitterness.
The Verdict
While I did stick to the “safe” gin based sparkling wine cocktails, I enjoyed each of them. And now I have the research done for when I feel like using up the rest of the prosecco in my refrigerator. Fortunately, I won’t be conducting those experiments while listening to continuing education lectures!
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