Blood Orange Gin Sparkler

In an effort to broaden my culinary/mixology horizons, and to follow through with actually doing some of the ideas I get from the Internet, I may occasionally post a recipe that I've made here. I would say "recipe or project," but since I'm not the crafty type, I doubt I'll be getting any "project" ideas from sites like Pinterest. Common sources of recipe ideas for me are many of the blogs listed to the right (both the "regular reads" list and the "food porn" list), Cooking Light magazine (I've been a faithful subscriber since 2003), and Pinterest. I happened to find this recipe via Pinterest, and it's of the "adult beverage" type.

There are a couple of things about this recipe that caught my eye. First, it's a gin-based drink, which is one of my favorite (i.e. most tolerable - I'm not a big hard liquor drinker) hard liquors. There is nothing quite like an icy, limey gin and tonic on a hot summer night. As you may have noticed, though, it's not exactly hot and summery right now. This recipe puts a nice twist on the classic gin and tonic by including rosemary and blood oranges, two decidedly wintry flavors. M. and I made round one last night, and liked it so much that we are currently sipping on round two as I type.



Adapted rom 101cookbooks.com:

Blood Orange Gin Sparkler

Simple syrup:
2 cups water
1 cup sugar
4 tablespoons (~2 sprigs-worth) fresh rosemary leaves
1 bay leaf (optional)

Drink:
blood oranges
gin
ice cubes
tonic water (or sparkling water) - I used diet tonic water

To make the simple syrup, combine the water, sugar, rosemary, and bay leaf (I left this out) in a small saucepan over medium heat. Heat until sugar dissolves and liquid comes to a simmer, about 5 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from the heat and let infuse for 10 minutes. Strain into a jar to cool completely. Simple syrup should be kept in the refrigerator, and will keep for a couple of weeks. Even so, I found that this makes quite a lot of simple syrup, with only a small amount needed for the cocktail. You could probably halve the simple syrup recipe and still have more than enough.

While syrup is steeping, juice and strain your oranges. The recipe recommends 3 tablespoons / 1.5 ounces of juice for each drink. To give you an idea of how many oranges you will need, the first night, we juiced three blood oranges and got 6 tablespoons of juice, just enough for two drinks. Tonight I again juiced three oranges and got 8 tablespoons of juice, so I just increased the amounts of the other ingredients to make a slightly larger drink. So plan on juicing at least three blood oranges, as they are on the small side, or more if you want a larger drink/more than one drink. We used a simple lemon squeezer to juice the oranges. Note that this would probably be very nice with grapefruit or regular oranges, too.

For each drink, combine equal parts gin, juice, and tonic water with a bit of syrup and ice. So, its 3 tablespoons / 1.5 oz gin, 3 tablespoons / 1.5 oz freshly squeezed blood orange juice, and 1-2 teaspoons of the rosemary syrup in each glass. Stir to combine, fill each glass 2/3 full with ice and top off with 3 tablespoons / 1.5 oz tonic water.

This doesn't make a huge drink, as you can see from the picture below that I took the first night we made this (we used a woefully innapropriately sized glass the first night), but it makes a damn good drink. I have a feeling I'm going to be buying a lot of blood oranges over the next few weeks!