Summertime, lazy, warm afternoons by the pool. You’re sipping your mojito feeling hot and looking cool. You shimmy up to the girl ready to make your move and a big fat piece of mint stuck to your teeth spoils your groove… I love the refreshing taste of mojitos in the summer but I hate the whole muddled lawnmower droppings vibe that, for me, spoils the whole affair.
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Here in SoCal, almost like citrus fruits, peaches, plums, and nectarines are so acclimatized they are like natives. You can grow them in your yard or just wait till summer when a never-ending river of numerous local varieties shows up at your local farmer’s market. Starting in late June till the end of August delicious, ripe, local California PPNs are in constant supply. So lets make a peachy keen Nalewka with them!
In Italian Tutti Frutti means "all the fruits". It's a popular, colorful treat made with a variety of candied fruits. It can be an ice cream flavored with many fruits includeing cherries, raisins, pineapple and some nuts thrown in for good measure. The Dutch use the name to describe a compote made by boiling a bunch of dried fruit. In Belgium, Tutti Frutti is a dessert made from raisins, currants, apricots, prunes, dates, and figs. I guess in England they took the idea, made it inedible and called it Fruit Cake. In Poland, today, it is perhaps one of the most popular homemade Nalewkas. It's roots are ancient and it's fun to make so here we go...
What? Pharmaceutical hooch? Well, it’s not that strange when you consider that before people started making alcohol infusions for pleasure they made them and drank them as medicine. They always seemed to make the patients feel better as long as they took their medicine in high enough doses. Nalewka Farmaceutów has got to be one of the strangest vodka infusions I’ve made so far.
Yes, all things considered, it's a strange combination. Xocolātl, also know as chocolate or cacao was widely used by the Aztecs in food and drinks. Kim quật is the Vietnamese name for a citrus fruit that originated in China and found great favor on the islands of Nippon. Combine the two by using an old Polish method of drowning stuff in vodka and you get a delicious Nalewka who's origin spans 3 continents.
Picture if you will the mandarin, the scholarly imperial bureaucrat immersed in poetry, the dedicated civil servant in his finest regalia sipping a dainty cup of expresso. Now picture the mandarin, the majestically orange, oblate fruit, the clementine or the tangerine pierced by the finest expresso beans and smothered in the waters of life. One more Mandarincafécello and I will have to pull out my copy of "The Selected Poems of Du Fu".
Limoncello is an old, traditional, Italian lemon liqueur made by infusing vodka, grappa or some other hard liquor with lemons or lemon peel. It got some notoriety in the States recently by the excesses of Danny DeVito and Avril Lavigne but it has been enjoyed as an end-of-meal refresher and pick-me-up for centuries.
I'm big on tea. My favorite is black tea. I drink 2 or more cups every day. Sometimes I'll go for the naturally flavored black teas like jasmine, bergamot (Earl Grey) or rose. I like to have a Nalewka with my evening tea. Hmmm… what if I made a tea flavored Nalewka? Sounds easy enough and opens up a whole kettle of possibilities.
About 4 years ago my in-laws, Syd and Marcello, gave me a pomegranate tree for my birthday. I planted it, curb side, in front of the house and it has done rather well. This year I got quite a few pomegranates but the neighbors took most of them. I decided the last 2 had to go into making a Nalewka.
