Forgotten drinks

Kim has a new hobby: inspired by a book found on an occasional prowl through the delightfully vast cooking section of the Bibiliothèque Nationale du Québec, she came across an interesting little book. Elixir et boissons retrouvés is a charming tome that has a wonderful combination of old-fashioned aperitifs, liqueurs, infusions and syrups, interspersed with charming old labels. If, like us, you have ever wanted to make your own Absinthe, Pastis or Crème de Cassis (and you can read French), this is the book for you. Our house has turned into a depository/laboratory/herbarium, with strange ingredients such as Artemisia, Winter Savoury, Gentian root, Angelica and dried artichoke leaves turning up in surprising corners of the house, or hanging on rustic-looking ropes, drying above the heater. You could easily mistake this for a witch’s lair...

Yes, we have always liked drinking strange things, as long as they are tasty. Cynar, the Italian artichoke aperitif, is one of our favourite drinks, so it was only natural for us to develop and invest in this new hobby. Making drinks at home is an unfortunately forgotten art, although it was once common in many places. We have friends in France who said that in their village people used to bring their surplus fruit to be distilled by the local distiller. We tasted some of their plum eau-de-vie and it certainly was good! Now, even France has been known to put a stop to this age-old tradition by requiring people to have licences for distilling. It is really too bad that such a beautiful centuries-old tradition can be so easily lost. Most of the drinks in this book, however, do not require anything as exciting, dangerous, blindness-inducing or - at least in Canada, blatantly illegal. All it requires are some simple ingredients found in most homes (or gardens/specialty shops), like red or white wines, eau de vie (or vodka if you don't have it), and whatever flavours with which you wish to infuse them.

The aperitif that we would like to share with you was inspired by (but doesn't actually come from) this book. It is for a rosemary red-wine based aperitif and it is, in our humble opinion, rather delicious. Actually we have a new blog policy that if we get more than two requests for a recipe we will blog about it, and we received several requests for this one. At the beginning, we were rather skeptical, and worried about wasting a perfectly good bottle of wine. But this concoction, when served to family and friends is sure to bring much praise and admiration. So, without any further ado- the recipe!


Rosemary Aperitif

75 grams rosemary
750 ml (1 bottle) of red wine
75 grams of sugar
one small glass of rum (approximately 1/3-1/2 cup)

1. Macerate (soak) the rosemary in the red wine for four days.
2. Strain, mix in the sugar and rum.
3. Put in a bottle.



Obviously, the recipe is simplicity itself. A few tips:
-It is best to get wine with a screw top, then you can use the bottle to store the aperitif.
-Do not macerate the rosemary in the wine bottle, otherwise it will be hard to get all the bits out. The best is to put it in a glass pitcher with a cover, as it may be hard to get the taste out of plastic.
-While putting it back in the bottle (using a funnel or something with a spout for pouring) don't forget that because you added the rum you now have more liquid than will fit in the bottle!
-The drink mellows out as it matures, the first few days it is quite strong, and after a week it has toned down a bit.


And if you were wondering who helped with the styling of "randomly scattered" rosemary in the  the photo above, here is a hint:

A new home in Montréal

We are really embarrassed: the last time we posted on Lime Soda was in December last year! But as most of you know already, we had an almost-good excuse for this as we spent the last 8 months or so planning and executing a trans-Atlantic move, and then recovering from it. Finally we are settled in our new home in Montréal and only have about ten small boxes left to unpack. This will hopefully be fixed with (yet another) "quick" trip to IKEA this week. That is, if we can decide what we want, and if they have it in stock, the two of which never seem to coincide.
After what seemed like a lengthy apartment search (but was in fact only about ten days) and after having seen some pretty scary basements, we happened to walk by our dream apartment. What made it our dream apartment was the kitchen. Eight or so years ago, this apartment was a pizzeria, and when they converted it into an apartment, they kept most of the original restaurant kitchen equipment. This translates into: a six burner professional gas stove, a huge oven, a wooden counter top big enough to sleep on, red walls and a griddle. The funniest thing was that the guy showing us the apartment, who lived here with his girlfriend, said "Everyone always gets so excited about the kitchen, but we never use it because we are vegetarians...". Can you imagine? We just had to have the place, even if it meant sleeping on the floor (or the counter top). We took it. It's called NANA PIZZA, and it sits 42 as the sign on the door still attests.


We know you don't really want to hear about the rest of the house, but we'll give you the quick tour just in case. There are only two other rooms, so it will really be quick. The place is the corner house on the ground floor and reminds us a bit of our place in The Hague -it's right on the street, in the middle of the action. Although, mind you, it is not as noisy as our Jaffa place. The apartment was described as a "loft-style" accommodation, which is a funny name for something on the ground floor, but basically means that we don't have that many rooms. Actually there is only a "living" room and a "working" room... After installing our good old high bed (lower than in Jaffa, but still higher than The Hague), closet and the yet-to-come IKEA bookshelf, this space is starting to look attractive. There is lots of light (and no privacy), atmosphere (smells from the open kitchen) and room for a crowd (sits 42, as we said). On the other side of the apartment, separated by a corridor and quasi-closing door is Boaz's workshop, painted sky blue and sh*&^%ty brown (not our choice). It's roomy enough for all of the nice big machines, and even has a little side room for wood storage and a small library.



We decided to inaugurate the kitchen after being inspired by the season's bounty from the Marché Jean-Talon, our local market. Every September, they start giving food away; tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, swiss chard, basil, huge bushels of crisp, sour apples, all are being offered for mere pennies. This is also the season to buy baskets of Blueberries - Quebec's pride, blood-red raspberries, and ground cherries that look like they were designed by a Japanese artist. What could one possibly do when faced with so many delights? Everyone knows that the season in Canada is VERY short, and in less than a month, all the local bounty will disappear and be replaced by sad, pesticide-ridden, imported fruit from Chile. So one must PRESERVE!!! This is a true market festival, with Italian old ladies and their SUV-ed daughters-in-law buying commercial quantities of beautiful Roma tomatoes to take home and, with the help of at least ten additional family members, turn into sauce for the whole year.

As you can imagine, we were unable to resist and rented a car to get our 20kg of tomatoes, 10kg of eggplants, 4kg of jalapeño peppers, 10kg of onions and many other negligible quantities of other things that just had to come home with us. After a long weekend in our new kitchen we turned it all into: Home made ketchup (4 litres), tomato sauce (8l), sweet tomato jam (2l), a huge jar of pickled eggplant, Jalapenos en escabeche and several cakes to last us while we are cooking it all.
After all this work, we sat down for a beautiful meal with friends, celebrating Rosh Hashana - Jewish new year. And thus, with an apartment that is almost livable, fully-stocked pantry and lots of good friends we embark on a new year in this new city. We wish you all a wonderful year, full of joy and good food, and sweetened by our Tomato jam (recipe below...)


Artusi's Sweet Tomato Jam
This is a great recipe, taken from one of our favourite cookbooks, Pelegrino Artusi's 1891 La Sienza in Cucina e l'Arte di Mangiar Bene. It is the granddaddy of all Italian cookbooks, one of those books we'd take with us if we got standed on an island somewhere.

You will need:

- 1kg ripe tomatoes
- 350gr (a cup and a half) of sugar
- juice of one lemon+its zest
- 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract.

Blench the tomatoes in boiling water for a couple of minutes, peel and seed them. Disolve the sugar in a pot with abour 1/4 cup of water to make a light sirop. Add the tomatoes, lemon juice and lemon peel. Simmer, uncovered until the jam thickens up and jells nicely on a cold plate. Add vanilla and can while still warm, but not too hot.