Morgan& Alice

The last time I made a big effort to go out on Valentine’s Day, I decided Alice and I should eat at one of our favorite restaurants in LA: The Foundry on Melrose. Eric Greenspan is still one of the best chefs I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet (he would come by every table, chat a little, make sure food was good, then go back to ruling the kitchen), but having to shut down the Foundry before we got that final full meal was a little bittersweet. I’ve been wanting to play with bitter flavors recently, so I grabbed a bottle of Amaro Lucano, took a swig and imagined some Valentine flavors. Whether you love the big day for teddy bears or hate it, you’ll enjoy the Bitter Valentine.

My thoughts were twofold, if you’re like me and you don’t care if it’s the Arizona Thundarrs or the New York Battlecats in the game, but you immediately catch both of those references, you’ll probably appreciate a butterbeer influenced drink and you’ll enjoy that it resembles a very serious grown up drink, the Old Fashioned. The biggest problem with butterscotch schnapps is that it’s awfully powerful, so it was then a matter of balancing that sweetness and rounding out the flavors. I’m sure you can just get cream soda and pour in some butterscotch schnapps for a more “authentic” butterbeer, but that’s not as exciting. It’s fancy enough to fool people at your own celebration of American overindulgence, but it’s still a RAD riff off

To begin again at the beginning, a classic take on the Southside Fizz is some gin, some mint, lemon, some simple syrup, and club soda As I suspected (because I’m not really breaking new ground here, a few people have used lemon and lime in at least one or two drinks out there), it provided a nice balance to the cocktail overall, complementing the gin and champagne. That’s all fine and dandy, but when you’re having a party, that’s a bit of extra labor that you shouldn’t have to do when you’re entertaining guests. 1-part mint syrup, 1.5-parts lemon juice, 1.5-parts lime juice, 3-parts gin.

(Not that there’s anything wrong with a pecan pie, but that’s why you add the bittersweet chocolate in there to cut that extra super, duper sweetness.) There are two ways to going about this, you can take pecans and bourbon, stick them in a jar, stick said jar in a cool dark spot, and in two weeks you’ll have pecan-infused bourbon. In that case, you take your pecans, you take your bourbon, pop them in your cream whipper, close it, add the nitrous, swirl for 30 seconds, let sit for two minutes, de-gas it, then pour and strain out your final liquid. Now, with our pecan bourbon, we add some maple syrup (the darker, richer, tastier, the better), some dark crème de cacao, and a little chocolate bitters.