Finnginn's Favourite Festive Drinks: Number 4 - Dishwasher Vodka

If you are stuck for a last minute gift idea for a sweet-toothed friend, remember: you can convert their favourite candy into an alcoholic beverage using your dishwasher.

What is it?

Definitely not bathtub gin.

Combining sweets and vodka is all about applying enough heat to melt the sweets without boiling off the alcohol. You can’t just chuck all the ingredients in a saucepan and hope for the best. Ideally, it will be done in the bottle in a temperature controlled water bath. Now where can I lay my hands on one of those…?

The dishwasher is not the first kitchen appliance you turn to for cooking. But it is basically a giant steamer with fairly accurate temperature controls. 

(I once read that you could wrap a side of salmon in tin foil and poach it in the dishwasher, but unfortunately I never owned a dishwasher before I was married and my wife is allergic to salmon so still no dice. Do let me know how you get on if you try it! - I reckon a quick shine at 60℃ should do the trick.)

Lidl's delicious Putinoff brand vodka makes a good base. Don't confuse it with Putinka vodka or profits from your purchase will go to allies of the Russian premier. Any old cheap vodka can be used as a base.

Dishwasher Vodka Method

Remove a few ml of vodka from the bottle, replace the missing liquid with sweeties, screw the cap on tightly, pop it in the dishwasher on its intensive 70℃ cycle (ethanol you will recall from high school chemistry boils at around 78℃). When it has finished its run, let the glass bottle cool down slowly (transferring to fridge straight away may lead to a shattered bottle) , shake gently to combine and then either gift wrap or chill ready for serving.

Pro tip: As the dishwasher’s running anyway, you might as well get all the unusual glasses - the sherry schooners, brandy snifters, martini glasses and champagne coups - out of the cupboard and treat them to a detergent-free hotwash ready for the season they’ll be in most demand.

Teetotal Alternative

Hot chocolate bombs. You’ll need some basic chocolaterie skills here and a silicone mould will help. But the principle is basically the same as making easter eggs. Hide marshmallows and a spoonful of instant cocoa in a chocolate sphere and then melt the whole thing in a small pan of milk.

What sweets would you like to see combined with vodka? Let me know in the comments or on the social media.

Photo credit: author's own

Finnginn’s Favourite Festive Drinks: Number 5 - Wine

 I know we’re not supposed to admit it, but getting drunk occasionally is quite good fun. And the best kind of drunk in this drinker’s opinion is wine drunk. That’s why wine forms the backbone to my Christmas day drinking. 

There’s the indulgent morning glass of fizz that we have already examined and we may yet come to the best sweet and heady fortified number with which to wash down the final crumb of stilton. But for today let’s look at the still and unfortified wines that I’ll be sampling whilst marking an X in the base of the sprouts and glazing the Xmas ham.

What is it?

Wine is fermented grape juice.

I’m going to keep this brief, as it’s hard to write about wine without sounding like a pompous prick: I don’t want to know that “The vintners of the Côtes de Gascogne region are working miracles with lesser known varieties such as gros manseng…” I want to know if I can get it in Aldi for less than a fiver.

White

I like my white wine to taste of citrus and slate - like licking lemon juice from a defelted snooker table. So naturally, my first choice for wine is always a bone dry Sauvignon Blanc. 

Rosé

Rosé is not just for summer! We’ll definitely have a chilled box of La Vielle Ferme in the refrigerator over Xmas for any rosé fans that pop by. 

Red

As far as crowdpleasers go, you can’t go far wrong with a South American Malbec. Personally, I’ll be tucking into a Romanian Pinot Noir with my Xmas dinner. Yum!

If it’s not too late to add it to your Christmas list, there’s a great dialogue by Plato called The Symposium - the version I have is translated by Percy Bysshe Shelley. I love how it opens with a discussion of how drunk the assembled Athenians of note should get (they are all hungover from the public celebrations the previous night):

“Whereupon it was unanimously agreed that this would not be a drunken party and that the wine was to be served merely by way of refreshment.”

I think that sums up the spirit of my approach to drinking wine on Xmas day! Everything in moderation! And don’t be the Alcibiades at the party! (The Athenian statesman and general turns up to the symposium late, pissed, and insistent on singing love songs).

Teetotal Alternative

Being very much a supportive husband, I willingly sipped a bunch of non-alcoholic wines when my wife was pregnant and, with the exception of some of the “No”secco style fizzes, they were all awful. Just go with grape juice or Appletiser.

Have you got any wine recommendations? Share them in the comments or on social media.

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

Finnginn's Favourite Festive Drinks Number 6 - Smoking Bishop

Towards the end of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens gives the central character Scrooge - newly converted to the merriment of Christmas following a busy night the details of which you’ll probably recall from the book/play/film/puppet show/muppet show/episode of Blackadder etc and don’t concern us here - this short speech. The reformed miser says to his clerk (to whom he had formerly refused a day off for Xmas day):

“A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given you for many a year. I’ll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob. Make up the fires, and buy another coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit.”

The “...Christmas bowl of smoking bishop...” intrigued me, so I looked it up and there’s a whole family of mulled wine recipes that were so popular in Victorian times that a reference like Scrooge’s above could be dropped without further explanation.

Here at the home of the Finnginn blog, we are always saddened to discover that a once-loved Xmas tradition has bitten the proverbial dust. Fortunately, we have a voice, and a host of readers and together we might just reinvigorate the corpse of the smoking bishop tradition.

What is it?

Smoking Bishop is a mulled wine made from port wine and roasted spiced citrus fruits. The Victorian cookbook writer Eliza Acton has a recipe in her Modern Cookery for Private Families first published in 1845.

Eliza Acton deserves to be better known. She was the first in print to refer to plum pudding - that delicious combination of flour, fruits, sugar, spices, brandy and kidney fat - as Christmas Pudding. She also introduced the English speaking world to Spaghetti and to Brussels Sprouts. Now’s not the time to open up an argument between two ladies long since departed but a certain Mrs Isabella Beeton plagiarised quite a few of her recipes. And although I’m firmly team Acton, what’s good enough for Mrs B is certainly good enough for me, so here’s that Acton recipe in full:

“Make several incisions in the rind of a lemon, stick cloves in these, and roast the lemon by a slow fire. Put small but equal quantities of cinnamon, cloves, mace, and allspice, with a race of ginger, into a saucepan with half a pint of water: let it boil until it is reduced one-half. Boil one bottle of port wine, burn a portion of the spirit out of it by applying a lighted paper to the saucepan; put the roasted lemon and spice into the wine ; stir it up well, and let it stand near the fire ten minutes. Rub a few knobs of sugar on the rind of a lemon, put the sugar into a bowl or jug, with the juice of half a lemon (not roasted), pour the wine into it, grate in some nutmeg, sweeten it to the taste, and serve it up with the lemon and spice floating in it.”

Those of us not possessed of a slow fire can simulate that step with an oven or that air fryer you bought yourself last Xmas.

Another delightful fact is that the smoking bishop is but one of a handful of mulled wine recipes in a family known collectively as the Ecclesiastics. They all follow the same pattern as above but have different names according to the wine you use as the base.

Substitute port for whichever of the following you happen to have in your wine store and change the name:

• Claret - smoking archbishop
• Champagne - smoking cardinal
• Burgundy - smoking pope

But the one that will be mulling away in the Finnginn slow cooker to greet Xmas guests returning rosy-cheeked from the Boxing Day walk will be the smoking beadle - which has added raisins and is made with that most Xmassy of wines: Stones Ginger Wine.

Teetotal Alternative

One for the ankle biters to enjoy alongside the grown-ups is hot Ribena which is made by adding boiling water to blackcurrant squash.

What are you mulling this Xmas? Can you help us revive the tradition of the smoking bishop? Let us know how you get on in the comments below and on the social media.

Photo by Hannah Pemberton on Unsplash

Finnginn’s Favourite Festive Drinks: Number 7 - Stout

All tastes are acquired, but some tastes take more acquiring than others. No child, mistaking a parent’s glass of dark bubbly stout for a cherry-cola, ever took a sip and thought: “Yes! This is the drink for me!” Liking stout takes practice, and the effort is its own reward.

A solid bottle of stout is a bit like a solid marriage. With any luck there will be sufficient notes of joyful liquorice, coffee and dark chocolate to prevent the undercurrent of bitterness from overwhelming.  

What is it?

Stout is a dark beer brewed from barley that has been toasted until burnt. For purists, stout is traditionally made with unmalted barley and it is this that distinguishes it from the maltier-tasting porter. But in practice there is a lot of overlap between the two and mixing of malted and unmalted grains to get the desired flavour in the brew.

Guinness or Murphy's?

The stout with the best international marketing campaign is undoubtedly Guinness. I’ve worked many St Patrick’s Days in an Irish-owned bar, in a typical week we’d order 2-3 barrels of Guinness. For the 17th March we’d order (and sell) an extra 10. People would tell you how much they disliked the drink as they ordered another tray of 4 pints to get their hands on another Gunness-branded tall nylon hat (known unaffectionately in the trade as a wanker hat). 

The stout with the best local marketing campaign is undoubtedly Murphy’s. I accidentally moved to County Cork briefly in the late 1990s (a story for another time). The town I lived and worked in - Youghal (pronounced like the American second person plural pronoun: “y’all”) - was the only town in Ireland where Murphy’s stout outsold the brand leader Guinness. As a reward, the brewery ran a loyalty card scheme where for every three pints you drank you got a fourth free. The stickers and cards were like a second currency in the town that summer.

When to drink stout

Back to Christmas day - veg prepped, turkey’s in the oven - you’ve got a couple of hours before the spuds need to go on. For me, this is the perfect time to pop down your local boozer for a pint or - if your luck’s in - a bottle of Guinness. Bottled Guinness (sold as Guinness Original in the UK) is a lovely bitter stout with a sharper effervescence than the nitrogen bubbles that give its draft cousin its famous creamy head. A delicious mid-winter warmer.

(Nearly*) Teetotal Alternative: Kvass

Did you ever take a bite of an Eastern European rye bread and think: “My god! If only this was available in drink form!”? Well then you need to get some Kvass - the drink that tastes like bread - in your drinks cabinet. You can even make your own Kvass.

*The minimal research that I do for this blog informs me that the fermentation process leads to trace amounts of alcohol in Kvass - but they give it to children in Russia - so you’ll probably be alright. 

What do you drink in the pub at Christmas time? Let us know in the comments below or on the social media.

Photo by Gary Zhang on Unsplash

  

Finnginn’s Favourite Festive Drinks: Number 8 - Buck’s Fizz

Like a once-beloved sitcom whose protagonists haven’t aged well, this blog likes to return for the Xmas Specials in the hope that some audience approval ratings and a favourable broadsheet review will mean getting greenlighted for a series in the new year. 

Last Advent, we probed the murkier depths of my Xmas music playlist for some forgotten and some best-forgotten Xmas classics. This year I’m dusting off my bartender’s tasting notes to review some of my favourite Xmas drinks. Feel free to drink responsibly along - and we’ll be including non-alcoholic alternatives for anyone who happens to be reading this blog whilst pregnant, driving, under age, hungover or just not in the mood for booze. 

As Jimmy Saville Dave Lee Travis might have been overheard saying in 1981: At Number 8: it’s Buck’s Fizz…

What is it?

Buck’s Fizz is a mixture of sparkling wine and orange juice. Get out your biggest jug, slowly pour in an entire bottle of bubbly and top up with OJ to taste. This is a great pre-breakfast drink for parents to drown out thoughts of over-commercialisation as they watch their kids tear the paper from the carefully thought out educational stocking fillers and cast them aside in favour of the selection box of Cadbury bars.  

Even if you can afford to drink Champagne, it seems a bit of a shame to be drowning an expensive bottle in a carton of ‘made from concentrate’. Far better to save the champers for toasting the Queen’s King’s Speech. If you can’t afford to toast with Champagne, Cremant is your friend here.

But for true value for money in your Buck’s Fizz (and naturally I’m ruling out those dreadful pre-mixed bottles here - we have standards on this blog) you’re going to want to get yourself a bottle or three of Lidl’s Arastel Cava Brut (currently priced around the £5.50 mark but frequently discounted in the build up to Xmas). I’m open to a sponsorship deal if anyone from Lidl wants to send me a case.

Then the trick is to up your Orange Juice game. Forget cartons, forget even the branded ‘not from concentrate’. Go out and source some large oranges and extract the juice from them. If you have one, you can use a juicer for this purpose. If you don’t have one - word to the wise - don’t buy your girlfriend one for Xmas.

(Before we were married, I thought it would be a good idea to buy my partner a juicer for Xmas one year. This turned out to be a terrible idea because a juicer comes in a big box. So naturally, she thought the giant wrapped box was secretly containing a little box with a diamond ring in it. Imagine her disappointment when the giant box actually contained a giant juicing machine! Still once a year, I dust it off to make the best damned Buck’s Fizz you’ll ever taste!)

Teetotal Alternative: St Clements

British readers will be familiar with the nursery rhyme that starts with the sweet refrain “Oranges and lemons say the bells of St Clements” and ends with the brutal beheading of a child by candlelight. This mocktail cleverly draws its name from the friendlier end of this rhyme and is a combination of equal parts: Schweppes Bitter Lemon and Orange Juice. 

What do you like to drink Xmas morning? Leave your comments below or on Facebook.

(Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash)

 

Finnginn's Festive Countdown: Number One

I spent what I could of today listening to my Xmas playlist and choosing something appropriate for the number one slot. There were a few contenders and if I was writing this on a different day, it might easily have been a different result.

Compiling a list like this has really helped me to define what I like in an Xmas tune. I particularly like genre takes on classics. I have developed a strong taste for military style snare-heavy drumbeats. And you can’t go wrong with a pretentious Latin title and a bonkers angelic inspiration. 

Number One: In Dulci Jubilo by Mike Oldfield

I feel an extra appreciation for this work of genius is added by being able to view Pan's People's dance interpretation from 1975's Top of the Pops. My Xmas gift to you all.

The tune’s history is pretty interesting too. I recommend listening to a choral arrangement such as this one by the choir at King’s College and you’ll hear Pearsall's partly English translation of the words and music that dates from the 14th Century.

German Mystic Heinrich Seuse wrote down the music he heard angels singing in a vision brought on by mortification  - an extreme religious practice for which Heinrich Seuse  invented and wore underpants studded with 150 inward facing brass nails. They really knew how to get close to God in the 14th Century. 

The underpant craze remained a niche practice, but the song really caught on. JS Bach loved the song so much that he wrote a prelude for organ (JBV729).

You might think that such a distinguished musical pedigree might put off the average prog rock studio musician, but Mike Oldfield realised that there was a banging tune hiding in In Dulce Jubilo  - it just needed speeding up and the addition of two slightly stifled electric guitars and some snare drums.

Well, this has been a gas, can’t believe that I have managed to write all eight of these before Xmas! It's kept me sane whilst also writing hundreds of near identical corporate Christmas messages for my day job writing the internet. 

Thanks to everyone who’s got involved and joined in the comments and shared their favourite Xmas tunes and their opinions on my choices. I hope the list has provoked thought more than it has disappointed.

Happy Xmas everyone!

Finnginn's Festive Countdown: Number 2

Some songs happen to have been popular at Xmastime, but have little discernible Xmas content or theme: Here in the UK, East 17's Stay Another Day is a case in point - sleigh bells notwithstanding. My mum, who has been following this countdown closely, keeps messaging me to remind me of the existence of David Essex’s A Winter's Tale (which I can exclusively reveal has not made the number one spot). Even Jingle Bells is pretty heavy on the delights of winter equestrianism and light on any actual Xmas references.

Because Xmas music is a fuzzy category, there are plenty of songs that can be in or out of the set depending on who’s making the distinctions. 

When I worked as a bartender, back in the days of CDs, we had the Best of the Pogues album behind the bar. Inevitably, if ever the familiar piano chords of the opening track would start to play, you could guarantee some member of the public would pipe up: “Why are you playing Christmas music in July?” But for me, A Fairytale of New York is a Xmas song that is not just for Xmas - it’s great all year round. 

But Fairytale of New York is not the Pogues’ best Xmas song. That honour goes to…

Number 2: Dark Streets of London by the Pogues

“Now the winter comes down, I can't stand the chill

That comes to the streets around Christmastime.

I'm buggered to damnation and I haven't got a penny

To wander the dark streets of London.”

Honourable mention should go to Thousands Are Sailing which is frequently my favourite Pogues track and includes the line "...from rooms that daylight never sees, where lights don't glow on Christmas trees..." I feel like Shane Macgowan really had a handle on Xmas lyrically and wasn't afraid to reference it in unexpected places, including songs about failed relationships, troubled souls feeling lonely in capital cities, and the Irish immigrant experience in the 19th and 20th centuries. 

Have I missed any Pogues Christmas references? Let me know in the comments here or on Facebook.