Rhymes with Orange

I've been looking for Seville or Sour Oranges for years - I'd heard rumors of them being available locally, but usually just after the nick of time.

This year I hit the mother lode while browsing around Barbur World Foods out across from the Park & Ride Station on Barbur at Taylor's Ferry Road.  I picked up several pounds of the them while I had the opportunity. I knew I wanted to try my hand at making some marmalade and some orange liqueur.

These babies were really aromatic sitting there in the fruit bowl. They perfumed the whole house - it was a treat to walk through the front door and smell the oranges.

I had a couple of recipes for marmalade that I'd saved the links for. One of the recipes was on David Liebovitz's Blog, the other was Rose Prince's recipe on the Telegraph - a British newspaper. I don't have a clue who Rose Prince is - she may be the Martha Stewart of the United Kingdom for all I know. David Liebovitz on the other hand is a former pastry chef from Berkeley's famed Chez Panisse and a prolific writer on all things sweet.

I basically followed Ms. Prince's recipe and the only issue I have with the results is that the marmalade is a bit on the runny side. Next time I'd add some pectin. The jam firms up when it's refrigerated. It's tasty on toast or pancakes. I'm not a big jam or marmalade eater so most of this will go as gifts or get used in deserts that call for jam or jelly.

I'm much more pleased with the liqueur. It's a very aromatic and substitutes well for Cointreau or Curacao in cocktails. I've got a near lifetime supply at this point having made nearly a gallon of the stuff. It makes a mean margarita, but I thought that since in my mind the marmalade is such a British thing I needed to make a cocktail that at least sounded like it had British origins, so I whipped up a "Churchill" - probably need a bulldog and cigar to really enjoy this one!

Churchill Cocktail
1 1/2 oz Blended Scotch - I used Famous Grouse
1/2 oz Housemade Orange Liqueur or Cointreau
1/2 oz Sweet Vermouth
1/4 to 1/3 oz fresh lime juice - this is the juice of half a small lime

Shake or stir in a cocktail shaker and strain into a chilled cocktail glass

Housemade Orange Liqueur

Peels of  three Seville oranges - use a vegetable peeler and just take the orange part
750 ml of 100 proof vodka
10 oz evaporated cane sugar or 1 1/4 cups
5 oz water

Soak the orange peels in the vodka for two weeks - strain the extract through a coffee filter

While the extract is filtering make simple syrup from the sugar and water - mix them in a pan and bring to a boil. When it's cooled down add it to the extract and bottle it up in some 375 ml bottles - you'll get about 2 1/2 bottles out of the deal.

Life is the Pits!

It was one of those weeks where Friday couldn't come soon enough. Wednesday morning I went out to head for work and discovered that my car had been broken into. The driver's door window was broken out and shattered glass was all over the interior of the car. Apparently they thought they needed the things in my car more than I did. I've seen enough of the PPB talks on car prowls that I didn't have anything of value in view and very little of value in the car. The value of the items taken was less than $25 - the window was $155 to replace.

Late last summer I ate apricots at a furious pace and managed to collect an ounce of apricot pits to make apricot kernel liqueur. An ounce of apricot kernels is about a 1/3 of a cup. Doesn't sound like much but it represents a lot of damn apricots!

The inspiration for this came from Matthew Rowley's Whiskey Forge Blog

Please Note! Apricot kernels contain cyanide in trace amounts! The minimum lethal dose is about 3-4 ounces of raw apricot pits. In other words you'd have to drink in excess of three 750 bottles of this liqueur to approach this. I think most of us would pass out or throw up before we reached that level and if we didn't we'd probably wish we were dead when we woke up later.

Amaretto is considered to be an Almond Flavored Liqueur, but in fact it can be made with apricot kernels or almonds or both.

Housemade Apricot Kernel Liqueur

Ingredients:
16 oz 100 proof vodka plus a bit more
1 oz shelled apricot kernels - you can buy them by the pound on Amazon or eBay
12 oz agave Syrup
12 oz water

Method:

Put the apricot kernels and vodka in an air tight glass jar and stash away in a cool dark place for several months.

Strain the resulting extract through a coffee filter and add additional vodka to bring the total back to 16 ounces.

Add the 16 ounces of filtered extract to the water and agave syrup and mix thoroughly. Pour it into bottles and seal tightly - store it in a cool dark place.

Godfather

1 oz Blended Scotch
1 oz Housemade Apricot Kernel Liqueur

Mix in an old fashioned class filled with ice cubes

There are more drinks and links Here