Crankybunny

The Wait

A blank page stares at me. OK, I’m lying, but the original document I started writing in did really have all sorts of other notes for something else that I wanted to write about, but it was really blanks with respect to Vin de Pamplemousse. 

I have been waiting months to make this stuff. Myer lemons were the first roadblock, solely because I didn’t want to use regular oranges when the recipe really calls for Myer lemons. They just weren’t available in September, or October, or November, but then late November they appeared, but much to my frustration it was Thanksgiving time—the second roadblock. With the imminent presence of a very large turkey going into my little, tiny NYC apartment refrigerator–the turkey won out. There just wasn’t enough room in the refrigerator for a 20lb turkey happily brining away and a 12L container full of alcohol and fruit. So I had to wait, again, until the leftovers (and were there ever leftovers) were out of the refrigerator.

The Day of Chopping

Who knows really what possessed me to make this particular, decadent concoction (as a friend of mine called it). I mean, doesn’t a flavored wine/alcohol drink that isn’t sickly sweet sound just great. And what a great gift–people do give homemade things to their friends still, don’t they? I like alcohol-does that count? Anyway, most likely it was the idea of process. 

You see, this concoction, besides taking up almost the entire first shelf of our baby New York studio sized refrigerator (The only other things that fit on that shelf are: a quart of milk, two soy milk boxes, two seltzer bottles, and a Britta filter – No the soy milk is not mine) is all about process. First-the ingredients, second-the production, third-the aging, fourth-the bottling, and fifth-the giving.

The Ingredients

Finally, there came a day—Sunday, December 5^th, 2004—when the refrigerator was nearly empty and I had all of the ingredients: grapefruit (pink only-I gave in), Myer lemons, alcohol, sugar and a vanilla bean.*

The wine and vodka had been ordered one or two months prior as, silly me, I thought that it would be easy to find Myer lemons. No such luck, so the wine sat in the closet teasing me, beckoning me to open a bottle. You see there was no other wine in the closet except for some very nice bottles that you shouldn’t drink when you come home pissed off about work.

Everything else came from Whole Foods: the sugar is just regular sugar, the vanilla bean was originally bought for something else. I never used real vanilla beans before and they are pretty cool, but all those seeds look like little ticks, seed ticks as a matter of fact. OK, that’s not a great image, but the seeds do remind me of seed ticks. You’re now thinking to yourself, “Why is this chick talking about seed ticks?” Well, I got a little off track. Back to the ingredients–the Myer lemons and grapefruit were perfect, fragrant and jucy. You know what? I didn’t even try the lemons-stupid me. Now I guess I’ll just have to get some more. I really needed a mix of ruby and white grapefruit, but I was tired of waiting around for “the perfect ingredients” I just sucked it up and bought all ruby. I still need one more so maybe it will be a white one – just for kicks.

The Production

This actually does not require much initial preparation…but there are lots of other steps besides mixing the stuff together. As I had not really read the directions in the oh, twenty or thirty times I looked at the recipe I thought that before I could proceed with the mixing I needed a citrus juicer. A friend of mine Michelle was to lend me hers one evening but in the course of the evening with it’s forgotten sausages, mad bike ride in the dark on the city streets, and two bottles of wine the juicer was forgotten. So, in the course of errand running the following day, Sunday, I bought one. Only to get home to find that all that was required of the multitudes of fruit that I had stored in the closet was that they be sliced up. 

So, away went the juicer into the magic cooking closet to wait to assist with future cocktails.

Then I started chopping. It was really fun-slicing great quantities of fruit. It’s the rare occasion that the normal home cook gets to process large amounts of food. Any kitchen worker knows that slicing a lot of fruit is a pain in the ass as is peeling 10lbs of potatoes, mixing batter for 200 little, tiny cookies, and well, just about any process that goes on in the kitchen. But back to us, the home cooks. It’s fun.  

Let me tell you, it is so fun opening seven bottles of alcohol and dump them into a container filled with fruit. I could hardly keep the smile from my face and a giggle from escaping from my lips-maybe it was the alcohol fumes, but I like to think it was just a my childlike glee.

The Aging and Bottling and Giving

Now my beautiful pink concoction gets to sit in the refrigerator for a month. I though about storing it in the bathtub, the only other slightly chilly place in our often overheated apartment, but the thought of my boyfriend stumbling into the bathroom some weekday morning and blindly turning on the water left me  quaking and scared for the life of my mixture. So here it waits (see the soy and seltzer-I wasn’t kidding). It gets stirred once a week and in a month I will strain the fruit out, put everything into bottles and spread the good cheer by giving bottles to all my friends who put up with my incessant, wine-addled chatter about Myer lemons and vodka.

*For an exact recipe, please refer to the Chez Panisse Fruit cookbook which you will need to get at the library or purchase from our friends at a variety of online booksellers: www.alibris.com, www.bn.com, www.amazon.com.