Soviet Bubbly who knew?

I’m just emoting that’s all.

  
THIS IS A REASON TO BUY MOSCATO WHAAAAAT!? yes.

I adore this cocktail gleaned from the wisdom and stories of The CCCP Cook Book. Which rocks.

Thank you Emily Hilligoss for the suggestion.

Oh, and yes I know it only really is champagne if it comes from the region in France but let us just refer to it as champagne because it is like “ya know what I mean when I say champagne”. Unless I state otherwise, I mean sparkling wine.

I made this cocktail not because it sounded like something I’d want to drink. I made it as an excuse to get my hands on some Benedictine. Which I am now having fun employing in a new batch of cocktail experimentation. Even if I weren’t doing that I’d say it was worth the buy because I have now made this cocktail quite a few times. It’s a repeater, y’all!

By the way, I bought Fetzer moscato. At Rite Aid. That is my life. I am buying wine at Rite Aid.

How can I describe this…it is balanced. The sweet, the herbaceous nature of Benedictine, the bubbles of the sparkling wine smoothed by the dry white. My goodness.

Incidentally, the cookbook calls for Soviet champagne. If you have a bottle of champagne leftover from those ripping good days of the Soviet Union, crack er’ open. Otherwise some other such thing will work. It needn’t be fancy. The original recipe is for a lot of people but remember so was the Soviet Union. In theory. There are many theories that don’t work out so well though.

This cocktail is not one of them. It is totally working out for me. The cookbook gives proportions for six drinks. The best way I could reduce it for my measuring purposes was to make 1/5 of a drink so that is what I am giving you. Whee.

There is some fun history in the book about the Soviet team that invented the way to make champagne cheaply in tanks because the government mandated that there needed to be a way to make quick n’ cheap bubbly for the people. So they did okay on that, seeing as Moët & Chandon got the method licensed to them in 1975.

I made do with what I had on hand. I repeat: no need to get fancy. After all the subtitle to this recipe was “working class champagne”. As opposed to royalty champagne? Je ne sais pas.

Soviet Champagne Cocktail adapted from The CCCP Cook Book
60 ml Soviet Champagne (sparkling wine, y’all, in the spirit of thriftiness I say use whatever brand floats your budget boat)
60 ml dry white wine (I tried this with a couple different types and all were fine, use what ya got)
30 ml white muscat wine (I used Fetzer moscato)
15 ml Benedictine
15 ml cognac
15 ml tinned fruit (in the notes they suggest cherries–I didn’t have these canned but had some in the freezer)
30 ml ice
Mix all and add ice and fruit. Yea.

Keep the love

Got two recipes for y’all but you have to go over to the lovely Jessica’s site to see my guest post there. Click here: The Hostess Handbook
You get a recipe for a loving long-distance friendship, and the recipe for Campari Champagne Cocktails, i.e. the Woman’s Girly drink. Girly color, manly bitter taste. Good stuff!

Love it. Do.

<img src="https://scrumptiousgruel.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/20121104-012807.jpg" alt="20121104-012807.jpg" class

I love eggs. In all forms. Then I saw this recipe that involved eggs, peppers, crumbs, and my favorite herb(thyme) and it went to the top of my to-make list. Then Thanksgiving came along and it got side-lined.
Hosting 9 people, even if you are not making a turkey, is time intensive.
Those champagne cocktails took blood, sweat and tears, man. Not to mention the fact that I feared my dessert would be piedenfroid.
So that is why it took me until December to cook from the November issue of Bon Appetit. That I received in October.
I’m a working woman, peeps. Lay off.
And my apologies for saying peeps.

I must make this again. I LOVED it. I am craving this as we speak. The real magic in this dish happened when my fork broke the yolk. The gooey-in-a-good-way yolk seeped into the peppers and crumbs so each bite had this creamy, crunchy….je ne sais quoi. Wow, autocorrect does not like it when I try to type French.

How do you like your eggs?

I left out the meat one this, and did not fry in quite the depth of oil of the original recipe. I also reduced the portions to serve just myself-I halved the amount of peppers since I like lots of veggies, and made one egg instead of four. Silly me. I ate the one and realized I wanted at least three.
Here’s my take:
Crumbed Egg on Peppers(adapted from the November 2011 Bon Appetit)
1 egg
1 tbsp. vinegar
Bring a couple of inches of water to a boil. Reduce to a simmer. Add vinegar. Crack egg into a small dish, half-immerge in water then slide your eggy-wegg in and allow to cook til the white looks pretty solid. Use a slotted spoon or spatula to scoop egg out and put it into a bath of iced water. Allow to cool. You can make this part in advance. I’d never poached an egg before this way, having always been a lazy microwave poacher, but I think it was worth the extra effort. And now to the veggies:
1 tsp. chopped garlic(I use jarred)
olive oil spray
1/4 cup jarred roasted red peppers cut into 1/2 inch wide strips
1/4 cup dry sherry
1/2 tsp. dried marjaram
salt
freshly ground pepper
baby spinach
Spray skillet and heat over medium. Saute garlic a little bit then add peppers, sherry and marjaroam. Simmer til almost all liquid evaporates. Add some salt and pepper then place on a bed of baby spinach. Back to eggs!
1/4 cup panko
1/8 tsp. dried thyme
1/4 tsp. salt
1 egg white
Mix the panko, thyme and salt.
Whisk egg white in another bowl.
Take your egg out of it’s bath and pat dry on a kitchen towel. Coat in egg white then bread crumbs.
Spray skillet with olive oil and heat to medium high. Saute your egg until the crumbs are getting goldenish then place on peppers. now the magic: take your folk and cut into the yolk. Dish the hell in. You deserve it. Love it. Do.

I have huge melons, and I’m bitter.

Actually it’s more like I had one huge melon and some Angostura bitters. My own melons are extra petite and I like em’ just that way.

I discovered the love of bitters last summer via the classic champagne cocktail. I’ll do a post about that later. In the meantime, I was excited to see a non-alcoholic, in fact not a beverage at all, recipe using angostura bitters.
I dearly love old, housewive-y cookbooks and as such own a reprint of the Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook from 1953.
This little do came from the Appetizers section in a list of Melon-Ball Cocktails. Twas delightful. Subtle. Amazing what little embelishments can do to a simple melon.

Love this recipe. Love this book. Though it is hard to entirely trust when it calls for. For instance, say, a package of pudding mix. I am betting the ones they sell these days are completely different in size and make-up than the ones in the 50’s.
This recipe did not call for pudding, but it did call for preserved ginger. The only type of preserved ginger I am aware of at my local supermarket is the dried and sugared type, and the pickled type. I went with the latter since it is prettier. And rinsed it to taper down on the pickle-y taste.
This recipe did not list amounts. Here is what I concocted:
Old-school Housewife Melon
1 cup of cubed cantaloupe
1 slice of pickled ginger, rinsed and chopped
1 dash of angostura bitters
1 teaspoon freshly squeezed lime juice, mixed with a pinch of sugar
Mix it, eat it.
This was so simple and pretty much unbelievably tasty. In the future I will add even more ginger. Actually, I also just tried wrapping a melon wedge in a piece of the ginger. It was like a vegan version of those melon-prociutto things people seem to love. Yup, yup. Seems like these super-simple recipes are always the winners.