Eggnog Milkshake

Desolate winter snowscapes: the cause of adding booze to
things for roughly 1000 years.

Eggnog, it's commonly believed, was derived from a British drink popular in the middle ages called Posset. It is a classic British recipe consisting of taking stuff that doesn't have alcohol in it, and throwing some alcohol in it because it was Britain and the middle ages, and life wasn't especially worth living unless you were drunk enough to forget those things. Some people have theorized that alcohol was added in to preserve the drink and prevent people from getting sick. This is technically possible, but seems to be crediting a fair amount of scientific and medical knowledge to a group of people who literally used to bore holes in to each other's skulls to try and cure migraines. A more likely scenario is that alcohol was added to proto-eggnog in order to give people something to look forward to during the year so that they could better cope with the constant ridiculous insanity of their daily lives. It's used for pretty much the same purpose today. Adding ice cream and making it into a milkshake helps too.

Ingredients:

1 Cup Eggnog

1 Cup Vanilla Ice Cream (You want to get a decent vanilla ice cream here. The sort of vanilla that makes you think "delicious" instead of "boring.")

1/2 Cup Heavy Cream

1.5 TBSP Sugar

1/4 tsp Allspice

Cinnamon

Nutmeg

Whiskey!

So the first thing you're gonna need to do is find some eggnog. You can make it yourself, steal it, or buy it from a store. Homemade stuff will probably have a somewhat richer flavor and consistency, but we're mixing this with spices and ice cream, so it doesn't make that much of a difference. Though I've heard that eggnog won is twice as sweet as eggnog earned, so if you see any contests with an eggnog prize they might be worth entering. In any case, take your eggnog and toss in your allspice and cinnamon. If you want the best cinnamon flavor you can get, take some cinnamon sticks and throw them in a saucepan with your nog while heating it (Gently heating it. It's got dairy and eggs in it, neither of which you want curdling) for 20-30 minutes, and then let the mixture cool completely. If you have better things to do than spend upwards of an hour teasing out the the best flavor from your cinnamon, just add in half a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and call it a day. Sure, it won't taste quite as deliciously cinnamon-y, but again: we're mixing this with ice cream and whiskey. Take your spiced nog and throw it in your fridge while you whip up your cream. 

Alcohol, ice cream, and eggnog. That'll hold you over until
it's warm outside again.

Take your cream, sugar, and a small sprinkling of nutmeg, and whip that nonsense together until it forms a thick and delicious cream. This should take about 5 minutes, or roughly until your arm has wanted to fall of for a minute and a half. Now it's time to talk about whiskey. Traditionally (at least in the USA), bourbon is added to eggnog. Personally, I think that Irish Whiskey has a much better flavor for a drink like this, but feel free to experiment. There are no wrong answers with whiskey (there are so many wrong answers with whiskey. Evan Williams happens to be one.) As for how much of it to use, you can really add in as much or as little as you'd like. It's just about personal taste and your specific level of alcoholism and depression. Personally, I like it when the whiskey is one flavor that melds with the other flavors in the eggnog to make something new and awesome. That's about 2 TBSP of whiskey in this recipe. But if you drink eggnog more to forget the pains of all the times that Santa wronged you than to drink delicious drinks, feel free to up that to 2 liters, or whatever amount of whiskey soothes the violent raging storm in your soul. Then add your whipped cream on top and maybe some sprinkles because sprinkles are fun, especially when alcohol is involved, and maybe I've already had a few. Enjoy! 

Spiced Hot Chocolate

There's nothing like a pyramid for some good old-fashioned
religious ceremony, sacrifice, and chocolate

Chocolate is pretty ubiquitous. You pretty much can't go to any store without finding enough of the stuff to choke an oompa-loompa to death. This wasn't always the case. The Aztecs used to use cocoa beans as a currency, and would drink a bitter hot chocolate mixed with chiles, spices, and vanilla for religious events which, since they were Aztecs, meant weddings and human sacrifices. Fun times. Then the Spanish came "liberated" Mesoamerica from its owners and "civilized" the inhabitants by introducing modern inventions like steel and gunpowder, often at very rapid rates. They brought chocolate back with them to Spain where it slowly gained popularity despite tasting like hot garbage because nobody had thought to add milk or sugar to it yet. The Spanish did make some changes to the recipe though. They added whale vomit. Seriously, they totally did. Sure, the Aztecs had just lost an empire, but watching the Spanish choke that down had to have brought some smiles to their faces.

Ingredients:

2 cups Whole Milk

1.25 cups Heavy Cream

1/2 cup Sugar

6 oz. Dark Chocolate (I used chocolate chips, but bars or whatever are fine. Just break them up into small chunks before using them)

5 Cardamom Pods

2 Star Anise Pods

2 Cinnamon Sticks

1 Serrano Pepper

1/4 tsp Allspice

1/4 tsp Vanilla Extract

1/8 tsp Ground Ginger

Nutmeg

Salt

So this is kind of a blending of some modern hot chocolate sensibilities combined with some flavors reminiscent of the original, more human-sacrificy version. Spices and flavor galore, but also creaminess and some sweetness, and probably no whale vomit. So get started by slicing your serrano pepper in half and removing the seeds. Then throw it in a pot along with your milk and 1/4 cup of your cream. Add in your cardamom, anise, vanilla, cinnamon, half your allspice, and half of your sugar and crank that sucker up to medium. Now it's times to deal with the nutmeg. Nutmeg is one of those things that tastes awesome as long as you don't use enough of it for anybody to be able to tell that it's in there. Otherwise it just kind of tries to overpower everything else and ruins the whole party, kind of like you when you're drunk. So add a tiny little sprinkling of nutmeg to your milk. Just enough that you can see it floating there before you stir it together. Once your sugar is dissolved, turn the heat off and let that sucker sit for about 20 minutes or so. We in the "sitting around and doing nothing for 20 minutes" game call this "steeping." While you're steeping, feel free to start making your whipped cream. Take a bowl and toss in your remaining cream, sugar, and allspice, along with your ginger. Then take a whisk and stir it around until if forms whipped cream and your arm hurts bad enough that you wish you could just take it out on somebody by sacrificing them to the gods. Careful though. If you whip your cream too much it will turn in to butter, which totally sounds like a punishment from the gods for insufficient sacrifices to me. 

Sure, you don't have to put in so much whipped cream that
it starts to drip down the side. Joy isn't mandatory.

Once your whipped cream is made and you're good and steeped, turn your heat back up to medium and add your chocolate in to the milk and spice mixture along with an oompa-loompa sized pinch of salt. Stir that sucker pretty continuously until your chocolate melts and the whole thing looks and smells incredible. Turn off the heat and strain out the various peppers and pods from the liquid. Or don't bother with any straining, and just be careful when you drink it. Either way. Just don't blame me if a small liquorice-flavored starfish gets lodged in your esophagus. Anyhow, put your chocolatey goodness into a cup, top it off with your whipped cream, and enjoy! It's sweet, but not too sweet, and just kind of awesome in every way. You're welcome. This recipe should make two good sized cups of hot chocolate, which is perfect because it's totally a drink that you should share with a friend or loved one. And if you don't have a friend or loved one, now you have an extra cup of hot chocolate to drown your lonely lonely sorrows in. Happy Holidays!

Mulled Wine

Any work of fiction that has castles and horses
counts as medieval Europe. That's the law.

Well, it's official. There's snow on the ground in Chicago. I know that's not much of a shocker. It's kind of like saying that water is wet, or that a Oscar winning movie is disappointing, but it's still pretty momentous for me. I spent six years living in LA, where they think that snow is a myth believed only by credulous savages who haven't even done a juice cleanse this month. Seeing snowfall again has been calming, good for my soul, and cold. Like, really cold. Literally freezing. So now it's time to come up with ways to warm myself up and pretend like I'm somewhere else, anywhere else, where I don't have to shovel anything and my face doesn't hurt from being outside. Medieval Europe sounds about right. Nothing says "comfort and tranquility" like a drink popularized when people regularly died from getting run over by a horse.

Ingredients:

1 bottle Red Wine (I used a cabernet sauvignon that has a fair amount of sweetness in it, but follow your alcoholic heart and/or liver! If you're using something aggressively dry though, add in a tablespoon of honey to the rest of the ingredients)
12 Cloves
6 Cardamom Pods
4 Cinnamon Sticks
1/2 an Orange
Ginger

So mulled wine, as far as I can tell, was developed by the Romans back when they were conquering all the parts of the world that they were aware of. They liked wine, and brought it with them to the north because what sober person is going to go to war in the snow while wearing sandals? It seems like every European country has their own fiercely exclusive version of mulled wine, most of which are almost exactly the same. This is an amalgamation of what seemed best from all of those versions. So the first thing to do is open your bottle of wine and carelessly dump it in a pot. Then peel some ginger and slice off 2 1/2 inch thick wedges. If you like things more or less gingery I won't stop you from messing with this amount, just remember that this is about a balance of flavors, and that you've ruined it all and made an inferior version for yourself. Next slice the peel off of your orange half. Try to get as little of the white pith in with your peel as possible, because it (the pith) is bitter, and who needs that in their life? Toss your peel into the wine along with your ginger. Now for the rest of your ingredients you've got some options. You can just throw them in, but then you'll have to deal with the annoyance of straining them out later. Another way to go is to toss them in a spice bag or some cheesecloth, tie it off, and then just toss the resulting spice sack in your wine. Either way, crank your heat all the way up to a gentleman's...low.

Seriously, if I didn't have work I'd just sit home and sip
this all day. I considered calling in sick.

So here's the thing about alcohol. It evaporates pretty easily, which is exactly what it's going to do if you heat up your mulled wine too much. But you need the heat to extract flavor our of your spices and whatnot. It's a fine balancing act that's kind of a pain for a couple minutes, but totally worth it in the end. Let your wine stew for about 20 minutes, being careful not to let it boil. If you've got to take it off of the fire for a couple minutes here and there to achieve that, then so be it. Sure, you probably have other things you could be doing, but let's be honest: you weren't going to use that time productively anyway, and it's totally worth 20 minutes of your time to make a warm, delicious, alcoholic drink that kind of effervesces on your tongue with a crazy and awesome balance of spices. After that it's pretty simple. Pour it in to a cup, with optional garnishes like a cinnamon stick or a twist of orange peel, and then sip it slowly while brooding in your castle and contemplating the state of your fiefdom. Enjoy, and tune in next week when we continue Drinkcember with even more beverage goodness!

Cinnamon Schnapps

Trained actor depicted. Don't actually buy
store-bought schnapps

Well, it's official. The weather is finally starting to get colder. As of today that is, because it was 60 stupid degrees in Chicago yesterday. In December. And don't get me wrong, 60 degrees feels nice. But one of the main reasons I left LA, aside from getting away from the unnecessary levels of cilantro on everything and the overpowering stench of palm trees, was to maybe see snow again at some point in my life. You know, in person and not just added into a movie with CGI. So far that plan hasn't really worked out. Last year's winter in Chicago was pretty tame, and the only real snowfall came when I was out of town (because apparently I wronged the god of irony), but I've got high hopes for this year. Of course I've also been enduring an endless stream of possibly well-meaning acquaintances and doom-sayers taunting me about how this will be my first real winter in years, and how I'm obviously going to freeze to death because I'm no longer acclimated to the cold. Fortunately some delicious cinnamon schnapps really helps me make it through the long nights of dealing with those idiots.

Ingredients:

1 bottle Vodka

at least 10 Cinnamon Sticks

Water

Sugar

The first thing you're gonna need to do is buy some vodka. Now some of you may have discerned my personal feelings on things like vodka in general, but we're flavoring this sucker. I wasn't about to waste some good whisky on this, and anyway we need alcohol without any strong flavor of its own. So now we need to actually choose which vodka to buy, and there are a dauntingly high number of vodka brands at astonishingly different price points. From what I've been able to gather, Vodka is the main export of pretty much every eastern european nation, which explains a lot really. Again, we're flavoring this, so don't go crazy expensive with it. Just avoid any obvious garbage brands with names like "Alex's Upscale and Legitimate Vodka Product." You should be paying roughly 12-18 dollars for a bottle, so let that be your guide. Once you've picked out your vodka, pour out a shot of it and either consume it or throw it down the drain to try and get your drain-goblins good and drunk. Either way, fill up that empty space in your bottle with about 7 cinnamon sticks. Close the bottle back up and let it sit for a week, shaking it up every day or two. 

Seriously, which of these would you rather drink? I rest my
case. Regular vodka is for suckers. 

Now you've got cinnamon vodka, which is already better than regular vodka in pretty much every perceivable way, but we're not quite done yet. Take equal amounts of sugar and water and bring them to a boil along with some cinnamon sticks. About 3 sticks should do it for every cup of sugar you've got going. Let that sucker boil for about 5 minutes, and then let it cool completely. Now it's time to emulate our favorite mad scientists, and just mix together the various liquids we have lying around the house. Mix together a solution of about 2/3 cinnamon vodka and 1/3 cinnamon sugar syrup. The result is going to be super cinnamon-y, a little sweet, and a whole lot of deliciously awesome. Bring it to parties, drink it with friends on cold nights, or use it as a libation during your saturnalia celebration. Or all of the above. Happy alcoholism!