Drink and a nosh: North Shore cocktail, and olive sun-dried tomato spread

 

If you google "north shore" and cocktail, you'll get a hit for this recipe from the Vikre Distillery. Since we found ourselves at a liquor store in Duluth, we picked up some of their Lake Superior vodka and gave the recipe a try.

North Shore cocktail

From Vikre Distillery. They list this as one of their for "town" recipes as opposed to for the lake, but we stretched a point and made it lakeside at the cabin.

Ingredients

2 ounces vodka

½ ounce freshly squeezed grapefruit juice

¼ ounce freshly squeezed lime juice

¾ ounce simple syrup

Method

Shake ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker. Strain into a cocktail glass. 

Rating: Fine. A tad sweet, so if I make it again I might use less simple syrup. Which is a little less simple if you find yourself at a cabin and have to make a tiny batch with most of the cache of sugar I took up for sprinkling on scones to bake for breakfast. And improvising a cocktail shaker adds to the fun. Perhaps I need one of these.

 

I always bring along some multipurpose spread in our packed 40-quart cooler.

Olive and sun-dried tomato spread

From “Lee Bailey’s Portable Food.” I have sometimes substituted sun-dried tomato paste and anchovy paste when that's all I had on hand.

Ingredients

¼ cup pitted chopped oil-cured olives

½ cup chopped pimiento-stuffed green olives

½ cup chopped sun-dried tomatoes

½ cup chopped canned pimientos

3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

2 anchovy fillets, mashed

2 teaspoons minced garlic

½ teaspoon dried oregano

1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

½ teaspoon black pepper

4 ounces cream cheese, softened

Method

Combine olives, tomatoes, pimientos, parsley, anchovies, garlic, oregano, lemon juice and pepper. Stir into the cream cheese until well blended.

Rating: This is a very versatile and tasty spread. In addition to using it on grilled bread slices for an appetizers, we used it on sandwiches using some porketta we bought at Northern Waters Smokehaus in Duluth.  A dollop on a grilled steak worked like a flavored butter.  

Everything tastes better at the lake watching hummingbirds doing their swoop-swoop dive bomb at each other. Male hummingbirds are massively aggressive, not passive. Catching a hummingbird in flight? Not so easy a shot through the window as you might think. But a great show with Lake Superior as a back drop. It was 44 degrees when we woke up in Croftville this morning. It was 89 degrees when we pulled off the freeway this afternoon. Ooof.

Play along: Any soundtrack is good with that view, but we were skewing a little classical this time. The soundtrack to "Love Is Strange" filled the bill. It's available streaming for free on Amazon Prime.