Recipes & Tips Archives - Old Parn’s Wine & Spirits Blog

Easter Lockdown Cocktail: The Corpse Reviver No. 2

I’ve been wondering whether it’s tasteless to recommend a cocktail called Corpse Reviver during a pandemic. Then I realised the UK Health Secretary can’t or won’t answer how many NHS staff have died and some police forces think it’s okay to start threatening to check the contents of people’s shopping baskets without any remote legal justification. So I think blogging about a Corpse Reviver is pretty fucking tame, all considered.

Anyway. Let’s not get political, eh? Let’s instead justify this as the goddamn perfect Easter cocktail, commemorating probably the most famous corpse revival of all.

Cocktail of the Month: The Martinez

It’s February and the world is bleak. Storms with implausible names rage outside, and I suggest you make yourself a Martinez.

There’s an Old English poem called The Wanderer, which is basically about being cold, having no home and everyone being dead. Mood.

‘Walls stand battered by the wind,

Covered by frost, the roofs collapsed.

The wine halls crumbled; the warriors lie dead,

Cut off from joy’

As you can see, the Wanderer doesn’t sugar-coat things. Probably due to the lack of wine halls. What he needed, it seems to me, was someone to leap out from behind a nearby ruin and hand him a Martinez. A cocktail that’s absolutely cold, but also rather warm, and entirely season-appropriate.

Rock Samphire Martini at Native Restaurant

An excellent Martini concocted by the fabulous foragers of Native Restaurant.

A quick one for you, today: Native. Amy and I had an excellent supper there, a couple of ~~days~~ ~~weeks~~ months ago. I could probably spout a few hundred words on the food, but let’s keep the focus boozy, shall we? Let’s talk about the Native Martini.

Post-Election Sardines

Today. Today is not a good day, and was never going to be a good day. Today is a day on which to find objects of gratitude rather than (as is the temptation) of rage.

So, today, I bought sardines.

Sardines, four of the buggers — whole — for under £1.50, are the kind of thing I buy whenever I see them — irrespective of weather, mood or recent national tragedy. Sardines are the polar opposite of the choice in front of me on yesterday’s ballot paper: you can’t go wrong with sardines.

The Sloe & Steady Portfolio

With Brexit slouching towards Britain to be born, a couple of jokers vying for the helm of the sinking ship that is the United Kingdom, and a low-functioning sociopath clogging up the White House’s (metaphorical?) plumbing with his (metaphorical?) shit, where the hell should you invest? A question to which, you may well believe, Old Parn devotes much thought and sage analysis. Please be aware, while reading the post that follows, that I am neither licensed nor qualified to provide investment advice, but I’m going to anyway.

These handsome jars are, I predict, one of the best investments I’ll make this year. Alongside, y’know, the emotional investment of getting married, and suchlike… But, yeah, I certainly expect the next few years’ impact on the liquid contents of these jars to be rather more benevolent than their impact on my FTSE All Share tracker fund holdings.

The easiest way to make better cocktails & mixed drinks

This is important. What’s more, unlike most cocktail-improving tips, it’s incredibly bloody cheap (just like you). So there’s no excuse.

The one thing you can do, right now, for very little outlay, that will make the biggest difference to your cocktails and mixed drinks is this.

Summer’s Cocktail: The Clover Club

The Clover Club. A magical summer cocktail that tastes just as good as it looks (and it looks bloody great). Raspberries at the ready, please.

Ah, raspberries. Perhaps my favourite summer fruit. I’m not typically an enormous advocate of fruity cocktails (I prefer ‘em punchy and boozy) but the Clover Club is an exception. A sharp, gin-fuelled affair, it is fruity in the correct way: it is not sweet, it is not banal, and the fruit isn’t masking the complexities of the alcohol.

Fast Food: Courgette & Tomato

It’s Thursday. You’re hungry, you’re tired, you’ve just got off a train filled with wankers, and you need fodder. This is what you cook.

So, what I’m doing here is frying courgettes. They just turned up, today, in the vegetable box and they’re perfect for the quickest of quick suppers.

I mean, I was on the way home and part of me was tempted to pick up a pizza from Waitrose. But this is barely more trouble, and fantastically nicer.

A Squid Supper + Portsmouth Fish Market

‘How about this one?’ he says, at length, with the barest modicum of enthusiasm.

We look at the fish. Potato looks at the fish. The fish looks glassily at the ceiling. Portsmouth Fish Market falls silent once more.

It is a beautiful (if somewhat blustery) Spring morning, and we are outside Portsmouth Fish Market. For the past year or so, Amy and I have repeatedly vowed to make this peregrination — this piscine pilgrimage — but despite living half an hour or so down the road, we’ve failed to enact our vows.

Until now.

Poco Tapas Bar’s Negroni Manzanilla took that belief of mine to one side and gave it a bloody good shoeing.

Category: Recipes & Tips