A delicious, festive cocktail that makes excellent use of leftover cranberry sauce. A shot of bourbon adds spicy depth, along with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice and a splash of ginger beer.
We all know that one of the very best parts of Thanksgiving is the leftovers. In fact, after cooking for days, cleaning the house for guests and finding a place for sixteen people to sit in our tiny living room, I’m usually so tired that I barely eat on Thursday night (except for dessert because I’d have to be fully dead to refuse a slice of Maple Cheesecake).
Luckily we always have enough of most everything for a repeat Friday night, made even more special by the fact that we can stay in our pajamas and be as messy as we please. But even after leftover night and multiple sandwiches, we often still have at least one tupperware filled with homemade cranberry sauce left.
What to do? As is the answer to so many of life’s questions: drink it.
This modern update on the classic Old Fashioned combines the warmth of vanilla bean with fresh orange peel and citrus bitters. The result is a little sweet, very smooth and dangerously drinkable.
Light and airy pumpkin mousse, with a good splash of bourbon, in a rich chocolate cookie shell topped with whipped cream swirls and crunchy candied pecans. Yeah, you need to make this.
The rosemary cocktail doesn’t come any more Hallowe’eny than this: “Rosemary, Baby!” – a little sweet, a little bitter, with just enough herbal and citrus flavor to balance it out. Oh, and it’s blood red. Good for individual cocktails or a party punch!
It should come as a shock to absolutely no one (who either knows me or has glanced at this blog) that I like cocktails. Whenever I go to a new restaurant, the first thing I check out is the cocktail list. And whenever we throw a party, we try to have at least one cool cocktail on offer as an option to beer and wine. Fun, right? But you know what’s not fun? Spending your entire party behind a bar, mixing individual cocktails for 30 people.
That, my lovelies, is why God invented the punch bowl.
Nerd Alert: Here is a short, mostly-accurate history of the term “punch”. Punches date back to the 1600s, when British sailors required something to drink that wouldn’t spoil in the tropical heat of India and Indonesia. (Unlike us modern dummies, British sailors were entitled to ten pints of beer a day. Yes, entitled). A true punch will always be a balance of five flavors (some kind of citrus, a sweetener, a base spirit, a weak portion like juice or wine and a seasoning portion, like herbs or spices). It’s meant to be less potent than a standard cocktail, allowing party-goers to gather around the bowl and socialize. Here endeth the lesson.
Rosemary, Baby!
Since neither Matt nor I planned to dress as a bartender for Halloween, we decided to go the punch route. After many, many minutes of research, we settled on this recipe from Prime Meats. Now I know what you’re thinking and, no, we didn’t choose it just because we love that restaurant and used to go there all the time when we lived two blocks away. And we didn’t chose it simply due to its perfect Hallowe’en name, Rosemary, Baby!, an homage to one of my favorite horror films. We chose it because it sounded delicious. And it was. Delicious, that is.
