Results tagged “Booze Week”

It's sad to see booze week coming to an end. Having all this alcohol in the house was a nice excuse to get drunk while I cooked all these recipes. but you know what they always say; when one door closes, another bottle opens, or something. Right? I might still be drunk you guys.

For the last recipe of the week I knew I wanted to use whiskey. I thought of making an Asian style sour noodle dish, and then I realized that sour is a friend of whiskey in many mixed drinks. I used a classic Korean noodle dish called jajangmyun as a baseline inspiration for these whisky sour noodles.

It's funny that some of the inspiration for booze week is coming from my time in Bermuda. I didn't expect this to be the case, but I guess I should have considering that was like a 3 year vacation for me. The first time I drank a caipirinha was outside of a Latin themed after work spot on the island, and at that moment with the tropical weather and palm trees blowing in the breeze, the national drink of Brazil tasted like happy juice to me. I was hooked! A traditional caipirinha is only cachaca (a sugar cane based alcohol similar to rum), lime, and sugar, but this place had many variations including mango, cucumber, and the ubiquitous mint leaf in almost every drink. I used the many varieties of caipirinhas I drank that night as inspiration for these tacos.

A highlight of living in Bermuda was when friends from the US would come to visit, we would pack up the vespa and all take a nice ride out to the tip of the island known as the dockyards. Visitors tend to bring the tourist out in someone whether you live on a tropical island or in the middle of a city! At the dockyards is the Bermuda Rum Cake Company, and they served free samples of all of their rum cake varieties. The best by far is the chocolate rum cake. It's so dense, chocolaty and moist, and it doesn't need frosting or anything. For booze week, I wanted to make my version of this cake, but I wanted to try and make it even denser, chocolatier, and moister!

IPAs are generally my first beer choice throughout most of the year. Sometimes in the winter I will go with a stout or porter, and sometimes in the summer I will choose something lighter, but India Pale Ale is my usual go-to. If you have an aversion to the bitterness commonly found in hoppy IPAs, you probably aren't going to love this sauce, but if you are like my sister and I and seek out the highest IBUs (international bitterness units) you can find, then this is the sauce for you!

For this sauce, I used the IPA from my new favorite local brewing company Clown Shoes. They have a beer called Supa Hero IPA that only uses the freshest hops they can find and because of that the recipe for it actually changes all the time.

There is actually more than a whole bottle of wine in the risotto, because the shortrib braising liquid has a cup of wine in it as well. One bottle and one cup is a great amount of wine to have in a recipe, because then you have an open bottle you need to finish! Despite having been to two wine tastings in the past three months, I am totally lost when it comes to wine knowlege. I bought a few different bottles that day and ended up using merlot because it was my favorite of the bunch. I imagine that any red wine that you like would make this dish a winner, just don't buy a crappy/cheap bottle because the flavors really concentrate and come through in the final dish.

My first original recipe, way before I had a website, way before I even knew how to cook, was dumping Busch Light in a zip lock bag with various meats and spices and grilling it on the greenspace on sunny afternoons senior year. Ever since, I have had a bit of a habit of adding some of what I am drinking to the food party. A lot of times however, when you cook with booze you don't really taste it in the final dish. Because everyone loves a nice theme week, I set out to make 5 recipes with 5 different alcohols and make them actually TASTE like the boozy ingredient. The fun starts Monday, but for now, here is a roundup of my 15 favorite recipes with booze in them.

Irish cream AND whiskey in the same recipe! Yes please.

Lets get through the sweets first here. Bacon burbon brownies speak for themselves.

Bananas Foster is awesome! So is having a banana tree in your yard...

Guiness Bread.

Guiness Onion Soup (serve with said Guiness bread).

Chili Risotto.

I used Magic Hat Howl in this tasty plantain chili.

A classic beer battered fish sandwich.

Bro Week fra diavolo has a nice hit of white wine.

More Guiness! This time we are braising a short rib with it.

This Paula Deen recipe for Jack Daniels sweet potatoes has become a holiday staple in my family.

Jerk chicken is not jerk chicken without rum. Jerk chicken lasagna.

RUM HAM! RUM HAM!

Stroganoff with some brandy.

The BBQ sauce in this recipe is LOADED with burbon.

Be back next week with more boozy goodness!