So, Aleta has finally “encouraged” me sufficiently to finally write an entry for our blog. As I’ve been doing a lot of cooking lately while swimming through the masses of employers offering me glamorous positions running very complicated laboratories for extravagant salaries, I’ve been doing a bit of cooking. I’ve usually enjoyed cooking, and I really like to tinker with stuff, so I’ve been trying a few things lately that I’ve either never prepared before, or have tried to prepare and failed at miserably in previous attempts. I’ve done crispy hash browns, pancakes from scratch, a few different breads, and I can honestly say that I am currently more comfortable preparing a nice light ‘n’ puffy gnocchi than I am at pronouncing the things. One of the more exotic things that I prepared recently is something that I had never heard of anybody I knew EVER attempting to prepare fresh, that being Bloody Mary Mix.
When I set out to make Bloody Mary Mix, I was under instruction from Aleta, who told me to “perfect a Bloody Mary mix from scratch”. ‘Okay ‘ I thought.. How tough can that be? I figure that If I try to do a few batches that I’d be able to perfect this mix.. So, after finishing the (very overpriced) Bloody Mary that was in front of me (this conversation, surprisingly occurred over Bloody Marys) I hit the world’s most complete cookbook (i.e. “The Internet”) and began looking for recipes. Uniformly, these “recipes” ran along the lines of: ‘open a can of tomato juice..’ or ‘open a can of V8’… Really? This is a recipe? So, I resigned myself to a bit of research. How to make V8 at home seemed a good place to start, so that’s where I started. It turns out that the original V8 has a bit of weirdness in the ingredients: carrot (okay), spinach (fine), celery (also fine), watercress (really?), parsley (really?!), beet (hmmm, don’t those stain?), and lettuce (?!). I noticed that the one thing that was missing was, well TOMATO. I also knew that aside from adding a bit of tomato to the mix, that I’d want some other flavors in there as well. I thought that onions, garlic, scallions, a spicy pepper or two, and a host of other seasonings had a good deal of business being included as well.
As soon as I had my tentative list together, I hit the stores. I needed a whole mess of produce. I needed enough that I skipped the regular grocer and headed to the restaurant supply shops. A flat of tomatoes, forty ounces of spinach, industrial bag of parsley and a host of other ingredients were making the closing of our refrigerator a serious gamble I got started. On the first batch… And then on the second batch…. By the third batch I had a good idea of how things should probably go when making this stuff, so instead of giving you a list of everything I did and didn’t do over these batches, I’ll just tell you what worked for me.
My ingredients: About fourteen or so tomatoes, cored and sliced (retaining the juice), two white onions, thinly sliced, one bulb garlic (also thinly sliced), one bunch of beets (cleaned, peeled and sliced), one full bunch of celery (sliced- leaves and all), a half dozen or so carrots (scrubbed and thinly sliced), one HUGE yellow pepper (sliced into fine pieces), a big bunch of scallions (eight or nine shoots, sliced thin), one colander full of spinach, three big handfuls of parsley, one bunch of watercress, one large and mean-looking jalapeño (sliced- ribs and seeds included), a couple lemons and a lime, celery seed, coriander, cardamom, black cohosh, black pepper, dried prickly ash and a good bit of salt.
My process: I put the tomatoes, onions, yellow pepper, jalapeno, carrots, beets, garlic, celery and my spices into a very large pot, scattered salt across the surface, and set it on the high end of medium heat, covered firmly. When these veggies had cooked down to a soupish consistency, I added the leafy veggies- first the parsley and the scallions, which I let cook down for a while before adding the spinach and watercress along with another scattering of salt. After another ten minutes or so, when the spinach was well cooked, but not yet going dark I ran the whole mess through a food mill. What didn’t g through the mill was discarded, and the liquid was saved in both a large mason jar and a milk jug, which were stored in our poor overcrowded refrigerator. To this chilled liquid (the mix- shaken before use to distribute the sediments) I added a dash of Tabasco, a splash of Worcester sauce, a bit of lemon juice, lime juice, ice and vodka (of course I added vodka). I think that my recipe is pretty good… Or maybe after making nearly three gallons of the stuff over two days time in three batches I’ve just managed to convince myself that it’s good.
