Hello there happy campers!
I had a mini epiphany a couple of nights ago. We were drinking a (donated!) bottle of very nice red wine which was really very lovely, especially being the first red wine I've had since before getting knocked up (I'm an extremely cheap date now). However, it was slightly... how could you explain it... hits the back of the throat somewhat?.. rather astringent?.. Drier than a fifty year old prune tumbled dried and left to watch an Open University documentary on physics? In essence, it tasted like fresh sloes ie. very dry indeed. But the funny thing is that it was genuinely a very nice wine despite making you do funny faces when you drank any. You could tell it was a super lovely wine just trying to get out. So after a little animated discussion with husband (I am a very cheap date) where we agreed that it was like a sloe gin in wine form, we decided this wine would be amazing mulled. After all, it's June! We hadn't had mulled wine in AGES! We MISSED mulled wine.We NEEDED mulled wine. So we made mulled wine! Yaaay!
You can tell it's good wine: just look at that cork. It's an actual cork. With writing on it. Fancy.
And you know what? It was amazing! Even the next day rewarmed and a bit more sober (soberer?) it was so nice. I think it's the great untapped summer drink, for those cooler summer evenings where you need a jumper but you have bare legs and still feel a bit chilly. It's all warm and spicy and orangey and yummy. I think that you could have quite a lot of fun trying different summery flavours for mulled wine - like a grown up punch (generally punch just reminds me of uni parties and drinking neat gin which had been shown some orange juice. Blerugh. But mulled wine punch? This I can get on board with!) The mulled wine we made was fairly traditional: it had orange, lemon, spices and a cheeky slurp of homemade sloe gin, but imagine a really dry red with a little spiced rum, perhaps some pineapple or grapefruit juice... it's basically warm sangria!
All those lovely spices. I'm a big fan of spices. I put practically half a jar of spice in a single apple crumble. My other half is very spice-conservative though, he's all about subtle hints whereas I prefer the smash-on-the-head-with-a-mallet approach to flavours. Well, everything really. When I was young, about ten or so, I was making this big old fruit cake and asked my sister whether I should put mixed herbs or mixed spices in it. She said herbs (naturally! who wouldn't given an opportunity like that?!), so I duly put herbs in then accidentally grilled it (didn't really get how the oven worked). Strangely, it was actually quite nice as I'd used that weird baking spread stuff which melted out of the mixture then sort of fried it, so it ended up tasting a bit like savory pancakes. Embarrassingly, I made the same mistake with a layered lemon drizzle cake the other day that I accidentally grilled (new baby, new oven, I'm taking no responsibility) I realized about halfway through the cooking time, so I flipped it over to finish cooking (it was raw on the bottom) and quite literally drowned it in butter icing, because nothing tastes bad when it's covered in butter and sugar. Well, people ate it and no-one got food poisoning so I'm counting that as success! Yay!
Cake or death?!
So we come to the important bit: how to make the mulled wine of your dreams?
Tall billy can, open flame, lots of wine: what could possibly go wrong?
Here is our recipe: I would encourage you to make your own swapping bits out and having a little experiment. If you do, report back and I'll see if I can combine results to make the Best Summer Mulled Wine Ever Made Ever. It's a tough job, but you know, I'll make that sacrifice.
Ingredients:
One bottle of dry red wine
An orange
A lemon
Two star anise
Six (or so) cloves
A cinnamon stick
Pinch allspice, dried ginger and nutmeg
A good slug of sloe gin
You could go all out and get some mulled wine spice bags if you're feeling keen, or substitute the spices with others if you don't have any. Think of this as a the chuck everything in casserole kind of recipe rather than an accurate baking type affair. Best kind of recipies in my opinion.
Anyway, back to the recipe. Cut the lemon into quarters and push the cloves into the skin. Slice the orange into thickish slices. Now pour the wine into a big saucepan (billycan not necessary, not quite sure what that was all about tbh) and add all the ingredients together. Put onto a low heat and warm slowly, making sure it doesn't boil otherwise you'll burn off all the alcohol (although if you were trying to cut down on alcohol, making mulled wine with 10 minutes of rolling boil would make a treaty drink without the bad bits! Genius!) Once it's all nicely warmed through, strain out the orange, cinnamon stick et cetera and you're all ready to go outside in the last of the sunlight with your nice warm mulled wine and some olives and chat about holidays. Sigh.
Thank you wine.
No comments:
Post a Comment