I think I've mentioned before that I really prefer cocktails to wine. I knew that one of the guests at my dinner party liked wine and was bringing it, so I put wine glasses out for everyone. I don't get to do that very often since I never really serve wine, but I sometimes fall in love with vintage wine glasses the same way I do other vintage glass pieces, so I buy them and was glad to be able to use them. I think, I'll have to use them as water glasses from now on...
Back to the cocktails... What goes into creating a Passover dinner party cocktail is more complicated than other dinner parties because Jews are not really drinkers so the ingredients I need to make them aren't always easy to find and sometimes aren't available at all. I can get the base spirits kosher for Passover but I can't always get the secondary ones-like campari or vermouth... But I can get fruit juices and sodas easily enough. Vodka is easy enough but I had to do alot of research to find a gin that is kosher for P-there are only 3 brands that are and one of them is so new it was only available on the Dean & Deluca wesbite-or so I thought...It turns out that one of them, Dean or Deluca created it specifically for Passover in his vineyeards. Gin is made from ingredients that aren't kosher for P so he distilled it from sugarcane. But it wasn't overly sweet, it got a good review in the NY Times and my friends all liked it a lot. It was quite smooth, I must say.
I want my cocktails to be fashionable and delcious and for an April holiday-springy, something other people will like as well... And something I can make ahead in a pitcher. Cocktail recipes are so often given in 1 drink measurement and making one drink at a time for 11 people is ridiculous, plus it would be a real hardship for my glam BF, my cocktail host (by the time guest 11 gets a drink guest 1 is ready for another, my friend would spend his whole night in the kitchen mixing drinks. And the kitchen gets so sticky, plus with cooking for 11 people there's no room on the counter for cocktailing). What I've done in years previous is to puree strawberries with lemon juice, mix in a little simple syrup then shake that with vodka and strain it into vintage glasses. It's delicious but I was bored of it and this year's weather didn't really suggest spring. So I decided on Tom Collins and because most people prefer vodka to gin I planned on vodka collins too.
My glam BF came to dinner on Thursday evening so we could have our weekly evening together (I can't go to restaurants on Passover because of the kosher issues but I can cook like in a restaurant for us, appetizer was slmon 3 ways (smoked, sushi, tinned in olive oil with lemon curl garnish followed by baby lamb chops in rosemary olive oil garnished with a green olive and orange tapendae). But also because I wanted him to perfect the cocktails with me. We had much fun with them! We got our measurements settled. The next day I took said measurements over to my Mother's house and she, the 5th and 8th grade math teacher, along with my brother, the CPA figured out how to increase the one drink measures into a pitcher.
The drinks went over really really well and we had to make 3 rounds of pitchers that evening!!! I beleive that classics develop into classics for a reason.
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