Blood and Sand

So I have decided I am going to try and make this a far more educational blog.

Tonight's mocktail is Blood and Sand. Traditional this drink is a combination of scotch, cherry heering (a brandy), sweet vermouth and blood-orange juice but our is going to be orange juice, pineapple juice and grenadine.

The real cocktail was inspired by a movie by the same name. It was released in the early 1900's and then re-released in technicolor in 1941. It is a story of a boy who rises as a matador and then plumets when he falls in love with the drink and becomes entangled with the wrong kind of women and eventually dies by the horn of the bull.

Apparently the drink has fallen a bit out of fashion since its popular rise in cocktail guides of the '30s and '40s. Obviously it is recommended that fresh orange juice is used but don't worry, I won't be squeezing any oranges today and I'm sure that it will taste just fine.

There are some pictures of a Blood and Sand in a cocktail glass (which I'm sure is fun) but my book suggest it be served in a highball glass and so thats what we will be doing.

Highball glasses were constructed to originally hold a family of drinks referred to as highball (I kinda like that name, it reminds me of top-drawer). The glass is essentially a water glass with straight walls and it's larger size (8-12 oz) allows there to be ice in addition to the larger proportions of juices or alcohols. The most common high ball was Scotch whiskey and you've probably heard of Sex on the Beach. It is rumored that the first highball was mixed in Adams House in Boston (there are other rumored places but they are of little importance).

Oh yummy, yummy, yummy. This mixture of orange and pineapple juices and a dash of grenadine is that perfect mixture of sweetnesses without getting too sweet. I think the more tart grenadine cancels some of the sweetness out and giving it the blood-ish color making you just wish you could drink more and more (but for diabetes sake probably not a good idea). Since the original cocktail was frequently made with blood-oranges I'm slightly curious and think that maybe I'll try it like that.

Definitely a bottoms up!

Harlem Cocktail

I was excited for this one because I've never had an excuse to use a real cocktail glass before. I mean as children at Thanksgiving we always filled up the family champagne flutes or wine goblets with orange soda (we were only allowed soda during the holidays, ironic seeing as now I reach my daily sugar limit with one drink). I've always had this strange fascination with the glasses that seem to adorn every china cabinet regardless of the amount of alcohol consumed and so I'm thinking that this is probably a good time to go into the actually science of the cocktail glass. The cocktail glass is that fancy glass that Bond drinks his martinis, Carey Bradshaw drinks her Cosmos, and many other TV characters sip drinks like the appletini, stinger, and the sidecar. In other words you know the one I am talking about that has a long stem and a cone-shaped top designed to hold large volumes of liquor (or around 4.5 fl oz.). It's long stem was created so that the drinker wouldn't change the temperature of the drink while holding it and the large bowl was created so that the aromas would tickle your nostrils and guarantee the cocktail to make your tongue happy.

This classy cocktail seemed to go perfectly with my classy day. After working out and showering and all that jazz (how else is it humanly possible to drink 100% sugary on a daily basis?) my mom and I chose to spend lunch at the Wayside Inn. New England is famous for two kinds of people. Revolutionaries and dead guys who wrote, particularly about places here. I mean who could blame them? I spend eight months out of the year yearning to be here. The Wayside Inn was one of those inns during the Revolutionary period that housed people like George Washington and the famous poet Longfellow who wrote Tales of a Wayside Inn with those infamous words "listen my children and you shall hear, of the midnight ride of Paul Revere." It seemed like there were a million weddings going on which made us nervous because we didn't actually have a reservation, but fortunately we made it just in time for a table of two to vacate and after filling up on two fillets of sole stuffed with crab and shrimp and drizzled with a lobster sauce (Oh my gosh I loooove being back home) we went down the road to see a play Hedda Gabler.

So as an honors student at BYU I'm supposed to go see plays and so we went to the matinee showing of Hedda Gabler and I would not be kidding you if I was saying I was the youngest person there. For a bit I questioned why I thought it would be fun to see.

"Mom, I'm the only person here who lacks a gray hair on my head." I whispered and with all the hearing aids around I didn't have to be too careful to keep people from hearing.

"Look there's a daughter," she pointed to a thirty-something-year-old which made me feel oh-so-comforted.

While they were all adorable in their well pressed polo shirts and khaki pants there was only some many times I could take their hard of hearing.

Actor: "It is done!" (or something along those lines)

Lady 1: It is what!?

Lady 2: Done!

I almost wish I was kidding at the cliché, but clichés are probably the most real thing on the market.

And so after picking up a cocktail shaker (yay!), ice and some pineapple we were definitely ready for our sweet pick-me-up.

As you may have guessed today's mocktail is the Harlem Cocktail. The original Cocktail is

made with Gin, pineapple juice and maraschino liqeur and reported by someone on youtube to

make-able in 12 seconds (I believe it). For some reason it's really difficult to find the history of

this really old drink. It came about some time during the Harlem Renaissance

which began in the 1920s and brought about huge cultural explosions in art and music. This

time also featured speakeasies such as the Cotton Club of New York famous for operating

during Prohibition and including jazz music. It hosted dozens of famous entertainers including

Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Irving Berlin, George Gershwin.

Unfortunately the place closed down for good in the 1940s and so any chance of getting some

tonic at the original joint are far out of reach. For tonight just enjoy the virgin version at home.

The Harlem Cocktail is made out of the same ingredients as the Blarney Stone (pineapple juice and grenadine) only this time the proportions are different. This one is definitely more sweet because it is more pineapple juice than grenadine and has a cherry and pineapple garnish. Plus you feel oh-so-cool joining the ranks of those fictional greats (mentioned above) who have personally gripped a cocktail glass. Maybe it's a bit pathetic to be in love with an excuse to own a cocktail glass but I think that might be something that makes it something to consider for any mocktail party.

Bottoms up!

Blarney Stone

So let's say you don't drink and suddenly you have to get a series of glasses and a list of ingredients that you've never really heard of.

My mom and I started at The Christmas Tree Shop which is the equivalent of-- well I'm not sure, but it has things wicked cheap and so we thought that this would be the best place to buy a couple glasses and maybe a cocktail shaker for little more than pennies. Well, we found the glasses. Did you know there were so many? And even if they were only made out of glass and no fancy crystal I still wanted ALL of them. So we settled for two of the following (one for me and one for the buddy I decided to share with) cocktail, margarita, highball and lowball. No cocktail shaker, but that's okay.

On our way home we stopped at our local grocery store looking at the list of ingredients for tonights mocktail and began scratching our heads. I believe our interaction went something like this.

"Mom, we need orange juice," and I headed towards the refrigerated section well aware that this is the only ingredient I really knew where it was, but she continued in the other direction. I followed her into the isle with the little packages of fruit that I remember packing in my lunches as an elementary school-er. You know the ones because you did it too and tried to trade them away for something more tasty and less healthy like Dorritos. I also always found this isle so weird because it not only has these little things but other random things like peanut butter and sparkling white grape juice. Mom kneeled towards the bottom shelf and revealed little cans of pineapple juice, a main ingredient in many mocktails and so if you are considering on filling up your own mocktail bar akin to the Gilmores' fancy homes then have plenty of these little babies on hand.

"Kay now the grenadine," my mom continued down the isle.

"What is grenadine?" I said. I've never even had a Shirley Temple.

"I don't really know."

"Well, what's it taste like?"

"Bitter?"

Concluding neither of us had any inkling of an idea what this stuff was I was almost resigned to give up. Would Pineapple Juice really taste that bad alone? But magically my mom had done it. Somewhere between the popcorn and the ice cream there was this little tiny section devoted to cocktails and on the top shelf there was the sticker for the grenadine and an empty space. My mom is two inches taller than me and standing on her tip-toes saw that there was one bottle left and this was probably only because there was practically no humanly possible way to get this bottle. Well, impossible if you aren't related to an engineer. My mom grabbed the alcohol-free wine (grape juice??) that was sitting next to it and knocked the bottle over. I'm assuming (since I'm not tall enough to have seen it) that she used the bottle to shimmy it close enough to her to grab it and put it in our cart. So we successfully left the grocery store with orange juice, pineapple juice, grenadine and something called bitters which I'm sure I'll be using later and is found next to the grenadine (no worries I won't leave you lost in the store).

Tonight's mocktail was a Blarney Stone and I've got to be honest, the title makes me think of Ireland which immediately makes me wonder why this is called the Blarney Stone because this irish girl is having difficulty finding the irish stuff in it. This is a combination of pineapple juice and grenadine with a maraschino cherry garnish served in a lowball glass. I mixed it up and threw in my cherry and stupidly thought it would float. Looking back, logically, that makes little to know sense and so it disappeared in the red colored drink. It was mostly sweet with that grenadine taste which even after tasting it is still hard to describe. I love the idea of garnishes because they are just a little bit of something more after you've already finished something yummy.

"Kiss the Blarney Stone and you'll be endowed with the gift of gab.

But the Blarney Castle resides all the way over in Ireland. So in case you can't make it, we've prepared our best legendary surrogate: the Blarney Stone Cocktail." (http://www.themed-party-ideas.com/irish-drink-recipes.html#blarney-stone-cocktail)

The original cocktail contained Irish Whiskey (there's the Irish!), curacao and maraschino and was apparently meant to do what the Blarney Stone could not do for you. It can be garnished with an orange peel and a green olive and represent the Irish flag.

Bottoms up!

Black Russian

I'm turning twenty-one in December. Generally this time would be more of an excuse to drink than any other previously used by the typical college student, but I am not a typical college student. No, I am a student at Brigham Young University and so yes, I'm mormon and no, I don't drink. I am going to plan a mocktail party and am determined to find some of the yummiest mocktails for me and my friends. After all why do you have to drink in order to have easy access to a sugary drink other than sugar?

The journey started when my mom bought me The Mocktail Bar Guide. I opened to the beginning and started with the Black Russian.

Obviously it was delicious. I mean let's face it, cream and chocolate would make anyone happy. I'm not usually a fan of chocolate milk because it just lacks that richness that this mocktail definately is not lacking. Something I would make again.

Bottoms up!