Happy New Year! Here’s to 2017! We hope this year brings you many reasons to raise a glass with friends. For our New Year’s Eve dinner, we wanted a champagne-style cocktail without resorting to cliché. The recipe we followed is based on a recipe published in Style at Home magazine December 2016; it fit the…
Author: ell
Hypnotizing Pussy
It had been a long and busy week, and we would not be the full complement for dinner. So we decided to break the usual injunction against drinking anything blue, and looked for a cocktail featuring Hpnotiq, the on-and-off darling of the club scene. Unsurprisingly, there are numerous cocktails that feature Hpnotiq, a fifteen-year-old creation…
Peach Smash
Misshapen peaches were on sale at the grocery store. Y’know, the “ugly” fruit that conventional shoppers apparently don’t want to buy. But these peaches were deliciously ripe and sweet — until, after a few days of sitting on the counter, they were on the verge of being over-ripe. Which called for emergency measures in the…
The Amateur
In the communopoly, we are fans of Japanese food in part because of the mingling of flavours that epitomizes that cuisine. Taking that idea as inspiration, I started searching for a cocktail that would be both easy to assemble (because I’m slammed with being back to school) and pleasantly mellow at the end of a…
Rosemary’s Baby
We were in search of something delicious, so we spent a few hours with Cocktail Culture by Shawn Soole and Nate Caudle, published by Touchwood Editions, 2013. It’s a fascinating volume about the resurgence of hand-crafted cocktails in the Victoria, BC, region, and we’ll certainly revisit this book for inspiration. The Rosemary’s Baby involves rosemary…
The Miss L
One of us has a name that begins with L, so in our little communopoly we avoid making the shape of an L on our foreheads. Instead, we make an O, as in “oozer,” which is how you might feel if you consume too many of this cocktail. We discovered a version of this cocktail…
The Old-Fashioned
After binge-watching Mad Men this spring, I was taken with the mostly suave Don Draper and his ubiquitous Old-Fashioned. Hence this week’s cocktail selection. The Old-Fashioned is a traditional cocktail, originally developed in Kentucky in the late nineteenth century — and therein lies one controversy. Should we make it with Kentucky whiskey or with another liquor?…