urban gardening | A Bourbon Gal in Utah

A vibrant cocktail made with herbal gin, dry vermouth, zucchini juice, and celery bitters. These bright, elegant flavors eek out the last of summer’s bounty with a boozy kick. AND, it’s yet another way to use up that wheelbarrow full of zucchini!

Green Envy
Gin, Ransom dry vermouth, celery bitters, zucchini juice, tarragon, and a bigass ice cube

Green Envy

2.5 oz strained zucchini juice

3-4 dashes celery bitters

1 oz Ransom dry vermouth

2 oz Beehive Jackrabbit Gin

tarragon sprig

To a bar glass, add zucchini juice, bitters, vermouth and gin. Stir well with ice. Strain into a rocks glass over a bigass ice cube. Garnish with a tarragon sprig.

The story behind the drink….

This is NOT the side of the fence she’s supposed to inhabit.

Every year I get requests from friends on how to use up zucchini, so this is a general H.O.A.G.Y (Help Out a Gal/Guy, Yeah?) response to add one more recipe to the arsenal, y’all. With a boozy cocktail!

This year’s garden situation has been hit-and-miss. My man The Macallan graciously built garden fence version 9.2 to keep the dogs and chickens out (this’d be an annual endeavor that has been unsuccessful every damn year). Sure enough, we get everything up and thriving, then BAM, come some dark August night I go out to investigate rustling in the tomatoes and find one or both of our chocolate Labradors gleefully gobbling down veggies left and right, waging destruction on the tender fruits in their 80 pound wake.

Zucchinipalooza! Fried, casserole-d, and in dense bread that’s more like dessert than bread.

We’ve been able to salvage a few baseball bat zucchini that the canine horde missed in their grazing, and I’ve been doing the usual harvest blitz of convincing my family that one of my favorite vegetables should be theirs, too. Zucchini bread’s always a winner, and who doesn’t love anything stuffed with cheese and then tempura battered and deep fried (that’d go for the zucchini blossoms). They are beyond tired of grilled zucchini already, and gave a “meh” vote to the buttery casserole. Whatevs. I will persevere.

Persevere with booze in my glass, anyway. After squeezing the shredded zucchini to release much of the liquid before it goes into the bread batter, I’m left with a few cups of gorgeous vibrant green juice. Sure, I could be all healthy and put it in a smoothie, but I’d rather toss it in a cocktail. The Macallan and I drank a couple of these sitting in the garden while trying to figure out Fence Version 9.3, and finally decided that we’d give up this season and go for full electric badassery next year. And those dogs’d better get their asses in gear for duck season to redeem themselves or they’re gonna be on my shit list for a while. Who am I kidding? They’re adorable and sweet as can be. It’s a good thing they’re so damn cute. And at least they don’t eat the lettuce.

Rhubourbon Smash
Rhubarb, strawberry, sugar, lemon, rhubarb bitters, and lots of bourbon.

Rhubourbon Smash

2 oz. high proof bourbon

3 dashes rhubarb bitters

3 oz. rhubarb smash*

1 oz. fresh-squeezed lemon juice

To a pint glass add rhubarb smash (including fruit pulp) and bitters. Smash with a muddler or the back of a spoon to further break up the fruit. Add remaining ingredients, plenty of cracked ice, then stir, stir, stir with a bar spoon for about a minute. Strain into a rocks glass filled with cracked ice. Serve with a straw and strawberry garnish, if so desired.

Rhubarb-strawberry smash. Basically, macerated fruit.

*Rhubarb smash: combine 2/3 c. rough chopped rhubarb, 1/3 c. chopped strawberries, and 1 cup sugar in a large non-reactive bowl or quart jar. Rest in the warmest part of your fridge (or in the cellar) for at least 24 hours and up to 2 days, until fruit has released all its juices. Stir to re-incorporate sugar and evenly distribute fruit before using. Smash syrup will keep refrigerated up to 3 weeks.

The story behind the drink….

Growing up, my sibs and I spent summers with our maternal grandparents in rural Indiana, and my Gram had rhubarb plants spotted along her drive like landscaping features from the Little Shop of Horrors. They were massive plants, or maybe just remain that way in my childhood memory. Mostly they were shudderifically scary because they were inevitably full of spiders, and harvesting stalks from them was an arachnophobic kid’s freakin’ nightmare. After much squealing and squawking about the spiders, I’d chop off the toxic leaves, and blast the stems with a garden hose before I brought ‘em inside. They were transformed into preserves, pickles, and my everliving favorite: pie. Gram made the best pie crust (using chilled shortening and oleo) and there’s nothing I liked better than helping her make the criss-cross lattice weave delicately topping a strawberry-rhubarb pie.

Nothing says “Spring” quite like peonies and rhubarb-strawberry cocktails.

One of the first perennials I planted in our Utah garden when we moved here 10 years ago were two rhubarb plants. Only one of ‘em survived the first winter, but it supplies a shit-load of stalks for our family starting in April and going all summer long. Right now I’m in the midst of putting up all things rhubarb, usually with it’s sweet-tart Gemini sister strawberry right along side. I’m brewing up a huge batch of rhubarb-strawberry shrub, and last night skimmed some of the fruit and sugar mash prior to adding the shrub vinegar blend to make a zippy bourbon concoction. It’d be in the ‘smash’ category of cocktails (think along the lines of a julep, but adding fruit to the muddle), which is a half-assed way of saying you smash whatever you like and add booze. Excellent.

For more on how to make seasonal fruit cocktail shrubs, check out my previous post, here.

A Bourbon Gal in Utah

DARBY DOYLE: food, booze & all things outdoors

Tag Archives: urban gardening

Green Envy

Rhubourbon Smash