DIY Kitchen Project: Infused Vodka

Hey everyone! Since Paul's outta town, let's all raid his liquor cabinet and have ourselves a party!

Just because times may be tough doesn't mean you need to skimp out on fancy hooch and late summer cocktails, especially with an upcoming season of "Mad Men" on the way. So in the 'sprit' of leaving kitchen renovations to the pros, I present to you a DIY kitchen project you surely won't screw up on!

What you will need:

* Vodka (the cheap stuff from the bottom shelf)

* Cucumber (english)

* Lychees (fresh or canned)

* Glass jar with lid

* White cranberry juice (but red will do)

* Cocktail shaker

* Martini glasses

So if you didn't already know, I am from Hawaii, a.k.a. "the Aloha State", home to beautiful beachfront hotels serving cocktails such as the Mai Tai, Tropical Itch & the famous Blue Hawaii (the latter of which no self-respecting Kama'aina would ever be caught drinking) However, if you venture out of Waikiki and visit a non-tourist restaurant or bar, you will find that one of the more popular cocktails is the Lychee Martini -- and today I am going to show you my personal take on this favored local drink.

drink these in secret, if you must ...

So I was thinking earlier about how I would describe the taste of a Lychee to someone who has never tried one before ... I would have to say is that it is a subtly flavored lightly sweetened fruit, with a very delicate texture, perfume, and taste. Other than that I really cannot describe it, nor can I compare it to any other fruit. The best I can come up with is that it tastes like a very pale lavender; not the herb, but the color. (If you are reading this and can describe the taste of a lychee better than that, then please by all means hit up the comment section below and let the rest of the world know!)

Unpeeled lychees

Lychee trees can be found locally here in Hawaii, and I have seen them growing in California. Native to China, the fruits are protected by a thick, red, leathery shell which must be peeled, and are in season from May to early October. If you are unable to find fresh lychee where you live, visit a specialty or Asian grocery store, and you are sure to find them year-round in the canned fruit section. Or, if like me, you don't enjoy peeling lychees, then canned is definitely the way to go!

The infused cucumber will add a slightly earthy, exotic, fresh kick to the lychee vodka that I think nicely balances the resulting cocktail, and makes it a little more masculine -- however if you choose to leave it out and only use lychee, that's fine too!

Ok, now to begin: start by slicing the cucumber in even slices, about enough to fill up half your jar. Then peel the lychees (if fresh) and remove the seed in the middle of the white fleshly center. Make sure all of the peel is removed as well as the stem before placing the fruit into the jar.

If using the canned lychees, remove all but a few of them from the syrup (reserve the syrup), and add them into your jar, leaving a little bit of room near the top of the jar.

Now comes the hard part: open the bottle of cheap vodka and pour on top of fruit. Close the lid and stick in the freezer. That's it. :)

You want to keep the jar in the freezer, taking it out every day to give it a good shake and check on it's progress, usually for about a week. There is no exact science involved, and I usually declare it's ready when it smells good to me (i.e. a strong fragrance of lychee and cucumber, upon opening). Then strain the liquid into a bowl, dump the lychee and cucumber, rinse the jar and pour the liquid back in, and store your infused vodka in the freezer.

You may be thinking, "What?!? I have to wait a whole week? After peeling all those damn lychees?!?" Remember the lychees & syrup I told you to set aside? Instant gratification! Take your cocktail shaker and add in your remaining lychees & about two spoonfuls of the reserved syrup, to taste (if using the fresh, add a spoonful of sugar). Muddle the lychees with a spoon, then add a lot of ice and about 4 oz. of cranberry juice and 2 oz. of vodka (or more) and shake vigorously for at least 30 seconds. You want the ice to continue to crush the fruit to release the lychee flavor.

Strain the now milky white cocktail into two martini glasses, serve and garnish with either a slice of cucumber on the rim, a lychee, or for added sweetness drop a maraschino cherry on the bottom of the glass.

ahhh ... the sun has set, what a nice time for a cocktail ...

A variation could be substituting lemon rind for the cucumber, or eliminate the lychee altogether and go for a lemon-cucumber infusion instead ... and after reading the Jamaica Hibiscus Tea post from yesterday, I am thinking a lychee-hibiscus infusion is in the near future!

Remember to drink responsibly and please, please, please, don't drink & drive :)

Aloha, and feel free to stop by our blog sometime!

-- Adrienne

You say Jah-May-Kah, I say Huh-Mike-Uh: Jamaica Tea

Recently I learned how to make a kind of hibiscus tea. The drink goes by several names - roselle, karkady, bissap, sorrel etc. - depending on where in the world you are drinking it. I was introduced to it as an agua fresca, which is a light refreshing not-too-sweet drink consumed in Mexico and Caribbean to reduce the effects of heat, both outside and from spicy food. The woman who served me my first glass told me it was "huh-mike-uh" tea, spelled like Jamaica but pronounced in a less Anglicized fashion. There are many kinds of aguas frescas and you can quickly find many recipes by doing a little googling, I mean searching, on the Web. After my first glass, I was hooked and immediately set about gathering the ingredients and recipes to make my own batch. The result was delicious, and I later learned, healthy.

bandwidth killing picture of the dried Jamaica flowers

I purchased dried hibiscus (Hibiscus sabdariffa) at a local grocery in their bulk herbs section. Mexican groceries or Latin markets may also carry these dried flowers. I used demerara sugar, also from the grocery, because it has marvelous caramel undertones. The unrefined cane flavor adds to the tropical taste of the tea. Evaporated cane sugar or cane syrup could also be used, or maybe even brown sugar if you are really in the sticks.





1 quart water

1 oz dried hibiscus flowers

1/2 cup demerara sugar

Add the water and sugar to a saucepan. Bring the water to a boil. Turn off heat. Put the hibiscus flowers in a large tea ball. Place the ball in the water. Cover and let steep for at least an hour or overnight.
Remove the tea ball and chill the infusion.









The resulting tea concentrate is slightly sweet and quite tart, I prefer mine watered down and on ice. The flavor is more like cranberry juice than a flowery brew like chamomile. When making the tea, you can skip the tea ball and just pour the flowers directly in the hot water. Just pass the resulting infusion through a fine strainer once its finished steeping. Be very careful with this tea! It will stain you, the counter, your clothes, the cat, anything that it touches. Thankfully, it does not stain teeth.

Many recipes for Jamaica tea call for boiling the flowers, which I don't do. There is even a Food Network video here that demonstrates this method. I have cold extracted the flowers by adding the tea ball into a glass pitcher of water and letting it sit in the sun all day. The tea was lighter and less flavorful, and also less acidic. I have also increased the sugar, and the amount of water sometimes, to produce the tea that suited my needs for the day. I encourage anyone to play with the amounts to find their optimum infusion.

While searching for recipes, I also found that fellow scientists are busy trying to prove that Jamaica tea is good for you, as well as refreshing to drink. There is published research about the benefits of drinking hibiscus tea in fighting high cholesterol (1) and blood pressure (2 or 3). Hibiscus infusions have been used in many cultures folk medicine traditions around the world. The tea is loaded with Vitamin C and obviously antioxidants, given its deep red color.

Commercially, Celestial Seasonings offers Red Zinger tea that contains hibiscus flowers, in case you just can't get it together to make Jamaica from scratch. Hopefully, you will give this delicious drink a chance and please let me know what you think or if you have a preparation or serving suggestion. According to online sources, ginger is a common additive and I believe that my next batch of Jamaica tea will feature fresh ginger slices also. Enjoy and have a good week!

References:

1. Hibiscus sabdariffa extract reduces serum cholesterol in men and women
Nutrition Research, Volume 27, Issue 3, Pages 140-145
T. Lin, H. Lin, C. Chen, M. Lin, M. Chou, C. Wang

2. Abstract 3278: Hibiscus sabdariffa L. Tea (Tisane) Lowers Blood Pressure in Prehypertensive and Mildly Hypertensive adults. DL McKay et al. Tufts Univ/HNRCA, Boston, MA.

3. The effects of sour tea (Hibiscus sabdariffa) on hypertension in patients with type II diabetes
Journal of Human Hypertension (2009) 23, 48-54; dooi:10.1038/jhh.2008.100; published online 7 August 2008

Noodle Head to Rubber Feet: Tile Mosaic by Feral Willcox

Hello fellow Kitchen and Residential Design followers! My name is David Nolan, and I will be understudy for today. It is quite a privilege to be writing for Paul's blog, and a somewhat daunting task as this is my first post on any blog and I am the first of a series of more experienced guest authors. I hope for your sake they are all less nervous and more entertaining than me.

Today I decided to do an artist profile on my good friend and neighbor, Feral Willcox. Unfortunately, we are only exploring her tile mosaic work because I can't possibly cover all of the creative outlets Feral pours her energy into - ceramics, sculpture, mandalas, music, gardening - in one post.

Feral and I have enjoyed a friendship for years, and now I enjoy her creative side more as I regularly visit her studio/living space, which is conveniently located on the other side of our shared house. Our unique living situation with our landlady next door reminds me of Paul's symbiotic friendships with his former neighbor-down-the-hall Brandon (Where the Sweet Olive Grows) and his former next door neighbor Kevin (The Restless Sybarite).
Good friends are wonderful to have, especially close by.


First things first, Feral on Feral:

I am a multi-disciplinary artist, and everything I do begins with the letter P: Pottery, Poetry, Piano, and Pen-and-Ink. In all of these mediums, I'm most interested in Pattern. I'm a pattern junkie. I look for it everywhere I go. In ceramic art, this has led me to work with tile mosaic, and, in three-dimensional ceramic art, to explorations in surface design and texture.



The first project I saw Feral working on was a large pool back splash for a gorgeous home here in Gainesville, Florida. I had seen pictures of the tile layout previously but when you see a monstrous installation like this up close and in person, the effect is overwhelming and disconcerting at first. Then your brain slowly grows accustomed to the myriad of shape and color, and you start to breathe again.

If you click on this picture or any below, you will see the details of the tile and pattern.

Each ceramic tile was individually rolled, cut, glazed and fired by Feral. The brightly colored glass tile in the orderly arcs are by Karen Story at Dolce Glass Tile . The combination of textured earth-toned ceramic and smooth jewel glass interact well rather than clash. I imagine that once the pool was filled, the reflective quality of the water surface would only add to the playful chaotic beauty of the mural.

The detail picture below is just the tile laid out on a white backing, without grout.

The homeowners later commissioned Feral for a second mural for an exterior wall by the outdoor showers. This privacy wall can also be viewed from the master bathroom, bringing joyful color inside the home as well.

my favorite detail picture below

This last photo was taken of a handsome tile backsplash Feral created for some friends in California. It is called "Trees Sneeze" for obvious reasons. Feral was in California teaching ceramics at a school in Los Olivos -The Dunn School - and some of the tile installation was done by her students as part of their education.

If you are interested in learning more about Feral's incredible work, she can be reached at feralann (at) yahoo (dot) com. Her ceramic sculpture and pottery are featured in a local artist cooperative gallery here in Gainesville, called The Artistan's Guild. Stop in and see her work, in addition to 50 other area artists, if you are ever in our beautiful city.

Hasta luego

OK gang, by the time you read this I'll be well on my way. I'll resume posting on 17 August but that certainly doesn't mean that nothing's going on here while I'm gone. I have eight guest bloggers lined up and they represent as many different walks of life as they do different locations. There's a kitchen designer from Honolulu, a biologist from Pennsylvania, an American expatriate from Buenos Aires, a professional writer from New York, a professional writer from Miami, another biologist (this one's from Gainesville, FL), a waiter from New Orleans and an art historian turned writer and soon-to-be architect from the Midwest. I'm grateful of course and thrilled at the idea that all of this is going to unfold over next nine days and I won't see any of it until I get back. Stay tuned, be supportive, leave comments and have fun!

Twitter really is worth something. Really.

I have been using Twitter for about two months now and despite my initial misgivings, I've really come to enjoy it. I've made some tremendous contacts through it and Twitter has introduced me to a whole host of people from around the world I'd have never met otherwise. It's worth exploring Twitter, really. Besides, it's not going anywhere because it's what the future looks like. In addition to meeting some folks who are up to some really cool stuff, it's also becoming a great source of topics for this blog. Here's a list, and by no means an exhaustive one, of some of the interesting Twitter folk I've come across.

• I met Jake Gevorgian recently. Jake's a cabinet maker and SketchUp aficionado based in LA and he makes some beautiful, beautiful things.
  
  
• Alex Brooks is another great Twitter find. Alex maintains a renovation and design blog, Renovation Planning, from Sydney, NSW. Alex is also a regular contributor to and blogger for The Sydney Morning Herald, among other publications. I love reading design blogs from parts of the world other than the one I call home.
  
  
• Vicente Wolf started following me last week. I nearly choked when I got the notice. Vicente Wolf? Following me? Vicente also writes a blog, Vicente Wolf Blog.
  
  
• Linda Merrill is another member of the pantheon of great American Designers I've met through Twitter. Linda is a friend of the great Joni Webb (who's also a Twitterer). I don't think either of those women are aware of the influence they've had over me and it's a treat to correspond with them.
  
  
• Marie Cole is a designer who's pioneering the new venture known as online design. She's designing remotely and she's doing it full time. I've done it a couple of times and it's a fascinating idea. I'm glad to see that there are people out there making a go of it.
  
  
• Pam Rodriguez is doing what I fantasize about, she designs kitchens and baths and sells nothing but her designs. She also puts together design presentations for other designers and builders. She's pretty funny too.
  
  
• Given Campbell is a Tampa-based wallpaper designer and artist. Her work's being hailed wildly and you need to look through her website if you want to see wallpaper realizing its full potential.

Of course, there many others I've met and even more I've yet to meet. Give it a try some time and when you do, you can find me as @saintpetepaul.