The Sheila Variations

Expert essay: How to make a damn good Bloody Mary

See my Expert Essay project description below. I am re-posting some of the beautiful essays I've received the other times I've done this Expert Essay thing.

The following essay is by Carrie, of Broom of Anger - This one is really fun because I actually got to try her delicious Bloody Marys when I visited her in Belfast. That was a total treat. So here is her essay entitled: How to Make a Damn Good Bloody Mary.

How to Make a Damn Good Bloody Mary

Kathy at Kate and Pansy wishes she drank Bloody Marys. I love Bloody Marys. The Apartment does the best Bloody Mary in Belfast, although cocktail bars in the city center are always springing up and I haven't tried them all yet. Usually, though, if you ask for a Bloody Mary, you get a glass with a bit of vodka in the bottom, a tiny bottle of tomato juice, and some white pepper and salt. Tabasco if you're lucky. Not good. The Apartment however does a real kick ass BM. Of course, the best BM is the one I make at home, which I'm real tempted to make now even though it's not just past noon. I got all the ingredients out to take the snap and they are taunting me.

So Kathy linked to a basic BM recipe which is good to start with. As you make more Bloody Marys you'll vary it and go by your own tastes. Here's what I do. I put salt and ground black pepper on a little plate for putting on the top of the glass. Rub some lime juice on the rim of the glass before dipping it in the salt and pepper mix. It's usually a good idea to do this first, before you put any liquid in your glass. Now, I like my Bloody Marys so I use a pint glass but then again I don't mess around. Plus it's the sort of drink you can take around with you for a bit. You know, wander from the living room to the kitchen and back again.

Anyway. Lime juice, I usually get a bottle of it from the baking section in the grocery store to have on hand when I don't buy fresh limes. As you can see in the photo, though, I have fresh limes. This is because the other day I made me some guacamole and I had to buy avocados for that which are in the produce section the same as limes and guacamole tastes good with a squirt of lime in it but even better than that I found some Mexican beer in the liquor section so I had to buy limes. I was so happy. But I digress. It's handy to keep a bottle of lime juice in the fridge for Mexican emergencies like when you get a hankering for salsa or you have a bunch of ready salted crisps on handy and you want to make some hot-sauce-lime-juice crisps. This is a treat that I learned from an old boyfriend who was from Mexico City where you could get a bag of Ruffles chips sprinkled with Tapatio hot sauce and lime juice from guys selling them on the street along with hot corn and the like. Not like a guy hustling spicy crisps - "Psst, hot crisps, hot crisps" a la some sort of narcotic trafficker, but like those street traders who sell all sorts of stuff from fresh fruit to roasted corn to tacos to spicy chips.

I should really write a recipe book because it would turn into a novel. Like Water for Chocolate except not.

So you've got your glass edge with lime juice on it rolled into the salt and pepper - the juice makes the S & P stick to the glass. Now you get your can of V8 tomato juice. Another reason I like to use a pint glass is that I don't have to measure anything when I use a tin of V8 cause it is the perfect size. I prefer V8 - which I hated as a child and still won't drink on its own, I mean, tomato juice? Bleech - because it's a bit tastier than straight tomato juice. At this point I sometimes like to put my salts and peppers in, because I find the tomato absorbtion of it is real nice (I do this with my salsas too. Have you ever had a salted tomato? It's real good, especially when you give the salt a few seconds to set on the tomato. So I reckon the same concept works with salsa and Bloody Marys). You want to use Celery Salt, regular salt, maybe a little bit of garlic salt and/or onion salt (if you like it, you don't have to put them in) and a bunch of ground black pepper. Stay away from that namby-pamby white pepper that you find in every salt and pepper shaker here. What's up with that? Give me some real earth-shaking pepper, man.

So then you pour your vodka in. Put as much or as little as you like. Mix it up a bit. The add your Worcestershire sauce. I like a lot of it. And then tabsaco. I like a lot of that, too, but less than the Worcestershire. Mix again. Taste. Add more salt and pepper. Taste. Add more Worcestershire or Tabsaco. Squeeze a drop or two of lime juice in. At this point, you may want to add some ice or maybe you've already put the ice in before you put everything else in, depends on how you like to do it.

For fun you can add other hot sauces, such as the Tapatio I use or perhaps the fantastic Chiplote Tabasco sauce which will give it a nice smoky flavor.

Garnish with celery. If you got green olives and like them, put some of them in, too. You can also throw in some of the fresh lime you have left over from juicing the edge of the glass. Don't forget to eat the celery as you drink! The thing with the celery is (and why it's good to have celery salt in the drink), is that it gives a real nice contrast in taste to the drink. Try it, you'll see. And it's handy as you're drinking to use the stalk to push the salt and pepper from the rim of the glass into the drink and stir it around a bit.

So there you go. How to make a fabulous Bloody Mary in the comfort of your own home. Enjoy.