Six Great Drinks for Fall

October 26, 2018October 26, 2018 / theblindpig11 / 1 Comment

Hey Friends, we are taking a break from our Apple Fest series this week to do a quick little recap on six great beverages for Fall. Halloween is right around the corner and some of you may be hosting a Halloween or Fall Bash, so here are some beverages that would make excellent signature cocktails for your celebration.

1. Apple Mule: This easy to make and easy to drink cocktail was featured in our blog just a few weeks ago. It has the delicious taste of a traditional mule with a little apple and cinnamon kick.

2. Dark and Stormy: Like the Apple Mule, this beverage uses ginger beer but it is paired with a dark Zaya Rum. Easy to make and easier to drink!

3. Fall Sangria: This sangria deliciously sums up all of the great flavors of Fall — apples, pears, cinnamon mixed in a white wine base.

4. Rojo: We shared this drink with you just a few weeks ago. The red wine floater gives this drink an appealing appearance as well as a delicious taste. This one is dressed to impress.

5. The Eclipse: This drink was conceptualized last year to commemorate the total eclipse, but makes for a visually appealing drink for a Halloween Party, as well.

6. Golden Pumpkin Spice Martini: This cocktail is more of a dessert cocktail. It is perfect for drinks and coffee after a meal. It is super delish!

Whatever your plans this weekend, mix up a little something, something from one of these recipes. You won’t be disappointed!

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Disclaimer: The beverages on this site are meant for adults 21 years of age and older. We do not condone underage drinking, and never drink and drive.

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Not Your Mama’s Apple Crisp

October 21, 2018October 21, 2018 / theblindpig11 / Leave a comment

Hey, good news. It finally stopped raining in Dallas! We have had more rain in the past two months than we sometimes receive in a whole year. It has rained almost everyday for 8 weeks, and this weekend we get to finally see the sun. Alleluia!

To commemorate sunshine, fun and the kind of fall weather that we wish we could have, we are continuing our Apple Festival with a great apple crisp recipe: Not Your Mama’s Apple Crisp (sorry Ruth). Apple crisp is so great, because it is easy to make. In fact, Rhonda has been making apple crisp since the good old days of 4-H cooking class. It is one of those recipes that makes us feel at home. Of course, this time we twist it up a bit with a little Blind Pig magic.

For this recipe, we use our favorite caramel sauce recipe that we introduced in our Zaya Bananas Foster. Empty the contents of a jar of caramel sauce into a 10 inch saute’ pan and place over medium heat. Add a pinch of cinnamon, butter, orange liqueur and rum. Bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium and simmer the sauce a few minutes. Remove from heat and cool.

Next mix old fashioned oats, flour, brown sugar and cinnamon in a bowl. Cut in slices of softened butter until crumbly.

Press half of the mixture in a 13 x 9 inch baking dish sprayed with cooking spray. Spread a layer of thinly sliced apples.

Drizzle the apples with caramel sauce, and then sprinkle again with a layer of oat mixture. We continued with three layers. Drizzle 1/2 cup of Angry Orchard Apple Cider over the top.

Bake uncovered for 30 minutes at 350 degrees. Drizzle with 1/2 cup of hard cider, and bake an additional 20 minutes.

Remove from the oven. Apple crisp tastes best served warm with a scoop of vanilla ice cream over the top. What doesn’t????? If you want to be extra indulgent, drizzle more caramel sauce over the ice cream.

If you are viewing this post in an email, be sure to visit our site at www.theblingpig.blog for a printable recipe.

This dish is hands down a winning recipe on a cool fall evening! This recipe is large and makes enough for about 12 people. It’s the perfect dessert to bring to a friend’s house when invited over for a cozy fall evening. Maybe you should try it tonight?

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The Easiest Bread You’ll Ever Make

October 13, 2018 / theblindpig11 / 4 Comments

angryorchardbread

The Blind Pig Apple Festival continues with one of the easiest recipes we have posted on TBP: Angry Orchard Bread. This bread recipe, which only requires 3 main ingredients, will have you feeling guilty for the minimum effort and big reward to your taste buds. Yes, we said three ingredients!!!

Rhonda had a beer bread recipe for years that was super easy. One day when we were brainstorming ideas for the blog, we thought, “What if we substitute hard cider for beer in our recipe?” We tried it and lo and behold a star was born. You don’t need to take just our word for it. Our harshest and most severe critic, Blind Piglet #2, loved this recipe, so we know we have a crowd pleaser.

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Here’s what you need. Self-rising enriched flour, a bottle of your favorite hard cider (ours is Angry Orchard), and sugar. We also enhanced the recipe with some chopped apples covered in cinnamon and sugar.

The most difficult part of the recipe is that your hard cider needs to be warm or room temperature. Ours was nice and cold from sitting in the refrigerator, so we had to place it out in the sun for about an hour. (Hopefully you won’t need to do that part.)

Place the flour and sugar in a bowl. Add hard cider and stir. Place in a bread pan. Top with chopped apples covered in cinnamon and sugar. Bake for 50-55 minutes at 350 degrees. Out comes cinnamony, apple goodness!

If you are viewing this post in your email, visit our website www.theblindpig.blog to get the complete recipe.

Angry Orchard Bread: The Easiest Bread You'll Ever Make

Is your weekend as soggy and wet at ours is in Dallas, Texas? If so, it is the perfect time for making a little something, something in the oven! Are you ready to try out Angry Orchard Bread? What are you waiting for?

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October Bonus Post: As American as Baseball and Apple Pie

October 11, 2018 / theblindpig11 / 2 Comments

apple mule

It’s October Bonus Post time! This week we continue our love of the apple harvest with a delicious and easy apple mule cocktail. We’ve had this recipe in mind to share with you for awhile, but we were waiting on the right time. What time is better than the fall? This drink tastes like apple pie and is perfect to sip while watching a bit of baseball playoffs.

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The apple mule is sooo easy to make. Add 1.5 ounces of Seagram’s Apple Vodka to a rocks glass or mule mug. Fill with ice. Top off with ginger beer and a squeeze of lime juice. Garnish with two apple slices and a cinnamon stick.

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The cinnamon stick gives the drink enough cinnamon flavor without overpowering the light apple and ginger beer mix. It is a delightful, light and refreshing drink to serve anytime.

A great complement to the Apple Mule is to have a snack of sliced apples on the side drizzled with Butter Rum Fondue. It makes for perfect fall afternoon snack.

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Is your favorite team in the playoffs? Let us know if you decide to serve apple mules to your friends at your next watching party. We would love to hear about it.

Disclaimer: Beverages on this site are meant for adults 21 years of age and older. We do not condone underage drinking, and never drink and drive.

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Autumn Salad with Hard Cider Dressing

October 6, 2018October 6, 2018 / theblindpig11 / 1 Comment

autumn salad

When you think of fall you think of definitive sights, smells and flavors. Maybe you think of colorful leaves falling on your lawn. Perhaps you think of the fresh smell of cooler morning air or piles of burning leaves. We think of the distinct flavors of pumpkins and apples.

We are back this week with a great fall salad that will have your mouth enjoying a bountiful harvest. Our salad is made with hard cider dressing, which goes well with the flavors of the season. We occasionally like to drink a hard cider. It has a crisp refreshing taste that you can’t get with a beer or a glass of wine. Our favorite hard cider is Angry Orchard, so we used Angry Orchard in our dressing recipe.

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We served our salad with a nice pork chop that Craig cooked on the grill, but this salad can also stand its own with a hearty steak or with grilled strips of chicken.

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To make this salad we used mixed greens as the base. We sprinkled chopped apples, chopped pears, dried cranberries, and pumpkin seeds over the top with a few thinly sliced onions. We topped the salad off with our special blended hard cider dressing made of olive oil, dry mustard, brown sugar, hard apple cider, salt and pepper.

If you are viewing this post in your email, visit our website for a complete printable version of the recipe.

This salad is easy to make and easy to eat. Try it this weekend with your favorite fall grilled meat and let us know what you think! We are going to make a few Rojos and sit by our chiminea this weekend. What will you be doing?

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Rojo

October 1, 2018 / theblindpig11 / 1 Comment

rojo

Happy Fall Friends! Just when we think it is never going to return, we feel that crisp breeze and the scent of Fall is in the air. In Texas, Fall is a very welcome old friend and a great time to sit on the patio with friends and loved ones sipping on a delightful cocktail. This week we are sharing a cocktail with you that complements the season well. The Rojo has a full bodied flavor that is perfect for sipping on a cool autumn night around a fire.

To make the Rojo, you will need Zaya Rum or another high quality dark rum, fresh lime juice, brown sugar syrup, and medium bodied red wine. To make the brown sugar syrup, follow the same directions for making simple syrup. This time you will use a 1:1 ratio of brown sugar and water.

The Rojo gives us an opportunity to share some new elements with you that are popular on the cocktail scene. The first new element is the trend to garnish drinks with dehydrated citrus fruits. We adapted the recipe a bit, and noticed that it was garnished with a dehydrated lime. So we partook in a little experiment to see how to go about creating this effect. Apparently, dehydration has become popular in many bars and restaurants to prevent wasting so many citrus fruits at the end of a shift.

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To dehydrate limes we thinly sliced a lime. Then we placed the limes on parchment paper on a baking sheet. We set our oven as low as it would go, which was 200 degrees. If you can set your oven lower, we would suggest trying it. Place the baking sheet in the oven and let the limes slowly bake. This process will take almost all day long. We checked on our limes every hour- two to make sure that they were not burning. After about 4 hours, we took our limes out of the oven and flipped them over. As you can see, our limes dehydrated and caramelized a bit. However, if you are lucky enough to have a dehydrator, your limes will only dry and not change color. We still think that our dehydrated lime gives our drink and interesting garnish, and the limes are now sitting in our pantry ready to be used for other drinks or plopped in a glass of ice water for a lime flavor.

Another fun element that brings a little extra sizzle to your cocktails is adding a red-wine floater. To create this effect in your cocktail you make the cocktail as directed and pour into your glass. Then very gently drizzle wine over the back of a spoon to disperse the wine atop the cocktail. This creates a thin layer of wine at the top of the drink, and makes for a visually pleasing cocktail. If you need to see how to make a float in action, we found this helpful video on YouTube.

The last element that makes this drink special is ice. We have shared with you before the importance of matching the right ice to the right cocktail. You want to use a large cube with the Rojo. If you don’t, the floater will not have as big of an effect and the drink will have less visual appeal.

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If you are viewing this post through email, you can visit our site theblindpig.blog for a printable version of the recipe.

We would love to hear what you think about the Rojo. It is a fun drink to make and even better to drink! Happy Fall.

Disclaimer: Beverages posted on this site are meant for adults 21 years of age and older. We do not condone underage drinking, and never drink and drive.