The Lee Bros. Simple Fresh Southern_ Knockout Dishes With Down-Home Flavor - Matt Lee [7]
3 Fill each highball or pint glass two-thirds of the way to the rim with ice, and pour the ginger lemonade over it. Garnish with a slice of the steeped ginger.
NOTE If, after making Ginger Lemonade, you’d like to sweeten the lemonade further without adding more honey flavor, add superfine sugar to taste.
get your drink on!
ginger lemon drop For each cocktail, pour 3 ounces Ginger Lemonade into a rocks glass filled with ice. Add an ounce of your favorite bourbon or Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey. Stir, and garnish with a slice of the steeped ginger.
lemon gingerita With a fine Microplane grater, zest one of the lemons you’ll squeeze to make the Ginger Lemonade onto a plate; from another lemon, cut as many thumbnail-size pieces of lemon peel as the number of margaritas you plan to make. Prepare the Ginger Lemonade, and when it’s ready to serve, for each margarita, take a piece of the lemon peel and rub it around the rim of the glass. Dip the rim in the grated lemon zest (it’s okay if the lemon-zest rim is patchy; lemon zest is intense), fill the glass with ice, and top with 3 ounces Ginger Lemonade and 1 ounce silver tequila. Stir, and garnish with a slice of lemon peel and a slice of the steeped ginger.
HUMMERS
serves 4 • TIME: 5 minutes
We’re the type of geeks whose thrift-store threads and sloppy grooming would never pass muster at the front gate of a country club. Lately, though, we’ve managed to bend the dress code at a few (Ted wore sneakers; Matt wore seersucker out of season), when we’ve been invited in to speak about southern cooking. Clubs, we’ve discovered, tend to have a signature cocktail, and at the Piedmont Driving Club in Atlanta, we can report that evenings in the dining room often end with a round of “hummers” in the cozy bar. Giggles ensue, not just because hummer has many meanings, but also because the drink is essentially an alcoholic chocolate milk shake—the ultimate comfort beverage. It’s as good as it sounds, and a perfect sweet finish to a meal when having dessert seems like too much and having nothing at all is out of the question.
1 pint premium chocolate ice cream
2½ ounces VSOP cognac, such as Hennessy
1 tablespoon, plus a splash, peppermint schnapps
Fresh mint sprigs, for garnish (optional)
1 A few hours before serving, freeze the ice cream and a pitcher to approximately 15°F.
2 Add the ice cream to the pitcher in a few clumps, using an ice cream scoop or a spatula. (If the ice cream container is made of paper, you can tear it off the ice cream and cut the ice cream on a board with a knife.) Add the cognac and schnapps, and blend to milk-shake consistency with an immersion blender. (Alternatively, add the ice cream and liquor to a food processor, and blend just until evenly incorporated.)
3 Serve immediately in tea cups, garnished with a small sprig of mint, or return the mix to the freezer for up to 1 hour for serving later.
CELERY JULEP
serves 6 • TIME: 15 minutes
Whenever you’ve got a mess of celery tops or a few fading celery ribs that you’re about to toss in the compost, make celery syrup with them instead. It’s an inexpensive way to add intriguing herbal flavor to all kinds of desserts and drinks, from fruit salad to this garden-tweaked bourbon cocktail.
“Sweet celery?” you’re probably thinking. Well, yes, and it’s not just us. Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray soda, a fizzy, celery-flavored beverage, has been made since 1869 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. It’s a superb mixer, too, and by far the best Cel-Ray cocktail we’ve tasted is the “Harrison Tonic” at The Harrison restaurant in New York City. Composed of Cel-Ray, bourbon, and lemon juice, it flatters the southern spirit in a manner so much more compelling than cola, more beguiling even than mint.
We’ve never found a reliable source