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".
Read more... Comments (5)
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.
Krupnik is a very old Polish Nalewka (vodka infusion or tincture) that was very popular in the Dzikie Pola (wild steppes) and Kresy (outskirts) areas of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. Before the days of refined sugar honey was the most common sweetener - my recipe gives this traditional honey liqueur some 
So when does a Nalewka stop being just a liquor and starts being a liqueur? It's all in the sugar, but, the funny thing is nobody can give an exact point of transition. To some people most traditional Nalewki are liqueurs because they often have some sugar. Well I think this Nalewka made the full journey from liquor to liqueur and became a cordial.
These are two very basic Nalewkas (pronounced - nah-lef-kahs) to make. Serano Sun is a variation on the ever popular pepper vodka - pieprzówka. Blue Flower Gin is a compound gin, not a distillate like the stuff you get in the store, made with juniper berries, of course, and bergamot leaves and flowers.
In days of old when knights were bold... they drank beer and wine made from fruit and grain 'cause the water made you sick and hard liquor was not invented. Usually the stuff was weak. No more than 14% alkohol - you can't get more with natural fermentation. Along came the Arab alchemists and the alembic still and the world got drunk on the possibilities.
