Just after posting my pinklog, I made something else pink by accident.
“Tangy angelica liqueur,” Gregg called it, and indeed, he guessed correctly because the base of this cocktail is a spicy angelica liqueur we made in the fall. I’ve been drinking it by itself, chilled over ice, and liking it—but not quite loving it, not like I loved the elderberry flower liqueur of this past summer, or the berry liqueurs before that.
Still, wild angelica (Angelica sp.) is a good friend of mine, one I made after much trepidation on account of how it resembles poison hemlock. This particular batch we gathered from approximately 11,000 feet in Colorado in the days just after Gregg proposed to make an honest woman of me.
Tonight, as I cleaned dishes piled in the kitchen from two days ago, I came to a saucepan of dry, abandoned sumac “berries” (Rhus glabra) from which I had extracted tea to use in a tangy butter sauce for fish, and my need for clean dishes inspired the cocktail. So I simmered the sumac leftovers down in a small amount of water to make as tangy a tea as possible, then let it cool and poured it over ice with the vodka-based angelica liqueur. Yum city.
Gregg tasted it and played the guessing game and got the sumac on his third try; not bad. He called it a summer cocktail—perfect for a girl who’s been in the kitchen too long when for some reason (probably having to do with a sedentary fiance nursing a new ACL) it’s like 1,000 degrees in the house.
I’ll just keep channeling these pink wild edible concoctions while I’m playing girly nursemaid I guess.
I’m so glad I’m not the only person who sees stuff in the dirty dish pile and decides it’s still food!
I tried to make a liqueur with domesticated angelica + cardamom + a handful of other spices a couple of years ago, and it wound up tasting more like church incense than anything else. Weird to drink. I’ve used almost all of it a couple tablespoons at a time in pie crusts.
Hmm, maybe I can use the Artemesia liqueur in pie crusts…but probably not. Tee hee.