Bad Home Cooking

Mad Housewife and other fine wines

Yes. I have bought bottles of wine purely on the strength of the label. Are you listening marketers? I'm highly susceptible to an appealing graphic or a well-turned name.

Standing in the wine cellar at Greenblatt's earlier this year, I spied a $15 bottle of BITCH. I was overcome by the NEED to purchase this wine, which I'd never heard of much less tasted, for my friend Debbie, who both loves wine and is indeed a bitch. As I suspected, she loved it. Perhaps not so much for its taste as for the spirit in which it was given.

And there's the rub with wine marketing: a clever label or name will win a customer once. But if the wine inside proves to be swill, there will be no repeat customers.

Fortunately, there are a lot of wines with party names out there that I have yet to try. Here are a few that most pique my interest.

Used Automobile Parts sounds like a wine I could get into -- gritty and hard -- with undertones of the working class. Except that at $50 a bottle, nobody in my tax-bracket can afford it. Guess those wine snobs have a sense of humor sometimes.

The guy who created Vin de Merde (shit wine) definitely had a sense of humor. The winemaker in the Languedoc region of France, created it to prove a point - that his region's wines aren't medal-winners, but they aren't that bad, either. His first production sold out. He doubled the price of his next batch, and that sold out too.

No doubt the guys who make my personal favorite, Two-Buck Chuck (or Charles Shaw, sold at Trader Joe's nationwide for $1.99) were watching Vin de Merde's success.

There's the successful line of Fat Bastard wines.

Here's another one I am compelled to love, and would buy merely on principle: Big Ass shiraz.

Mad Housewife is a wine whose name I can get behind, even though I don't qualify to be called at least one of those descriptors (guess which one?) And I just love her subhead: What's domestic bliss without a little wine? Yes! Excellent question! One I can raise my glass to!

OK. I open this up. What's your favorite wine label?

Mommy's little helper: Basil Daiquiris

Not a day after I'd made a complete mess of my pesto attempt, I found this recipe and forwarded it onto my momterage. Kelli immediately emailed me back with the promise of concocting this for the next concert in the park. "I have another basket-full of basil," she wrote. "We'll have this ready for Wednesday."

In the charming Southern Californian town where I live, the municipal band has free concerts in the park every Wednesday night. Everybody goes. And I mean everybody. And their kids. It's a community love fest, with little tots running free, grade-school kids chasing each other over the green, middle school kids huddled in tight circles checking each other out, high school kids nervously flirting...and us grown ups dining al fresco and surreptitiously drinking behind the family picnic baskets. Alcohol is not allowed in the public park, but everybody drinks anyway. We're just better at hiding it than the teens.

These basil daiquiris weren't the clear green I'd hoped they'd be, but that's because Kelli used purple and green basil, which is an admirable use of resources. Nor did we have clever cocktail glasses or twists of lime to tart them up. Kelli and Christy smuggled them over in two soup containers hidden in a little red Radio Flyer wagon. And we drank them out of plain plastic cups. When officious sorts came around, we simply hid the cups underneath the wagon. Such is the subversiveness of moms.

But no matter. Even out of a brown paper bag, basil daiquiris are delicious. Sweet, refreshing, easy on the tastebuds...and delivering an easy, delightful rum buzz that sneaks up on you before you know it. A huge hit, soon consumed. Everybody remarked on the sweet, unusual taste...and came back for more. A giant hat's off to Jessie Bluejay, the San Francisco writer who sent her url about this cocktail to Slashfood, where I picked it up. 

Here's her recipe:

A handful of basil (20-30 leaves or so)
juice from two limes
6 Tablespoons of sugar syrup (see below for instructions)
Copious amounts of white rum (at least a cup)
Splash of water

Make your own syrup. It's a 1:1 ratio of sugar to water. Boil your water, add sugar, stir, and when the sugar dissolves, voila! syrup. Put the basil leaves and the lime juice in a shaker and muddle it up (note: I let Kelli the expert do all of this, so I can't really say what muddle means. Use your imagination.) Add the sugar syrup, the rum, the water, and a handful of ice. Shake it like the 5.4 quake here on Tuesday and pour it over ice. Consume.

Kelli and I are going to perfect this cocktail on Friday. Make it green. Use proper cocktail stems. And twists of lime. Everyone's invited. Come on down!

Aunt Vere's Slush

Hot young starlets like Britney and Lindsay have nothing, nothing on the hardy, salt-of-the-earth folks who populate Minnesota. Sure these girls party. But their partying lacks subtlety and subversiveness.

It would never occur to them to create a cocktail as insidious as Aunt Vere's Slush.

Lynne had described to me the delicious lemony adult drink before. She'd gotten the recipe from her neighbor, our mutual friend Colleen. Colleen explained that she had gotten the recipe herself from her Aunt Vere, a quiet, gentle and proper lady from Owatonna, Minnesota (seen pictured above with her husband Harvey).

Today I had my first taste of Aunt Vere's Slush at a 7-year-old's birthday party. Lynn dished it out to three of us moms, as our kids ran amok around us. Several of them, attracted by the scoops of light tangerine color slushy in glass tumblers asked if they could have a taste. "This is for mommies," we told them gently.

And how. Delicious. Refreshing. Sweet with a ping of tangy-ness. And a gratifying, very sneaky buzz.

I haven't included cocktail recipes on Bad Home Cooking before this, either. But it was that good. Or rather, it was that bad. In the very good sense of the word.

Here's what you do: Pay attention.

boil and cool:
8 cups water
1 cup sugar

In a large bowl or Tupperware container, add:
one 12 oz can frozen orange juice
one 12 oz can frozen lemonade
one 46 oz can of pineapple juice
two and 1/2 cups vodka

Freeze this concoction overnight. The vodka will keep it from freezing solid. The next morning (or whenever you need your first mood-enhancing beverage) scoop out the resulting "slush" with an ice-cream scooper and add it to a glass until it's 3/4 fill. Add 7-up to fill.

Aunt Vere, wherever you are, we, the Moms of Southern California hoist a glass and salute you. Long-live prairie-woman ingenuity!