The cookbook Truly Mexican has, count them, eight recipes for guacamole. Eight! If that’s not enough to get your blood pumping, then I don’t know what is. Pineapple seems to be on sale everywhere, and I’m a huge fan of fresh pineapple, so I was especially excited about the pineapple and cucumber guacamole.
Happy Lunar New Year! The lunar new year may have started on Monday, but the Chinese celebrate for 15 days, so why shouldn’t you? You have plenty of time to kick off the year of the dragon with this lychee martini appropriately named Eye of the Dragon.
When a rep from Bulldog Gin sent me this recipe and offered to send a sample of their gin, I could hardly say no. I had never had (or even heard of, to be fair) Bulldog Gin, but the very morning that I got an e-mail Bulldog, a coworker mentioned that she had to find some for her sister’s cocktail party because it was her boyfriend’s favorite gin. My interest was piqued, so I was pretty excited by the time I got the package from Bulldog with my sample.
Bulldog Gin is distilled with dragon eye (also known as longan, a tropical fruit found in South and Southeast Asia) along with the traditional juniper and other botanicals and is without a doubt the smoothest gin I’ve ever tried. It can easily be drunk neat, but if this drink is any indication, it’s also delicious in mixed drinks. It’s perfect in this lychee martini, with its citrus and floral notes layered with the dragon eye and juniper.
Lychees, if you’re not familiar with them, are a popular tropical fruit in Southeast Asia with a fresh, perfumy flavor that is hard to describe. They’re larger and slightly firmer than grapes with a reddish rind and a marble-sized seed inside. I’ve never had the pleasure of having fresh lychee (I hope to change that in May when they’re in season in North America), but even canned, lychees are delicious, refreshing morsels.
I was all set to make the cranberry crunch bars from Moosewood Desserts for a potluck at work, but then I saw these cranberry turtle bars on Beantown Baker and I just couldn’t get them out of my head. I had to make them.
I was a little nervous about making caramel since I’m always terrified of burning caramel, but it’s really not hard at all and it’s even easier if you have a candy thermometer. I got all my ingredients and equipment ready and got cookin.’ And then I realized that my candy thermometer wasn’t a candy thermometer at all – it was a chocolate thermometer (for tempering chocolate) and only went up to 70 degrees F. I needed a thermometer to go up to 245 degrees F.
