Back in Town!

Finally back in olympia! The trip was culinarily action packed and included: butter chicken, peach champagne cocktail, french toast with rum spiced pears and whipped cream, mexican breakfast casserole , baked brie, strawberry parfait, grilled honey lime chicken sandwiches, and more. (if anyone is interested in these recpies let me know and I'll post em) We drove from the twin cities to spokane in 20 hours straight. It was intense. To save money and time, we brought our own food in a cooler. Everything was really good, but by far the prize was a grilled chicken breast salad with rotelle, grilled peppers, grape tomatoes and kalamata olives. The dressing was made with oils, mayo, white wine vinegar, tomato paste and liquid smoke. There wasn't a recipe really because it was based on one of those premaid salads I got from the grocery store. I'll write down the recipe when I make it again cause it's something that needs to experienced.

Anyway, before I left I started making the coveted vodka, so it would be ready when I returned.

There's absolutely nothing that's not amazing about pepper vodka. It's basically a tincture of chili. It works so beautifully because alcohol will dissolve capsaicin and perfectly extract the flavors of the peppers and garlic, leaving you with essence of pepper in a 40% alcohol solution. Unfortunately this also naturally makes it much less tolerant of lower quality ingredients. The first time I made it I used an older clove of garlic that had gotten really spicy and the aroma overpowered the whole thing. You have to use the best quality peppers and garlic you can get your hands on. I like the purple stripe garlic cause it's really sweet. Jalepeno's are flavorful but always a gamble, especially in a recipe as finicky as this. They have a huge range of spiciness depending on when they're picked. I've had ones that went from bell-pepper-neutral, to fiery hot. Also Top Foods sucks bals because they don't have more than 5 kinds of chilis and no serranos, which I needed for the recipe. They were selling thai chilis as serranos. Both peppers look the same but serranos have 5-15,000 scoville units and thai chilis have 50-100,000, which is hotter than most habenero hot sauces.

I like drinking it 1-1 1/2 oz at at time, straight and chilled. The pleasant spiciness of the chili replaces the burn of the alcohol. But because the capsaicin dissolves in the alcohol, most of the pepper spice is washed away and doesn't linger. Extremely nice.