Category: Lifestyle (Page 200 of 274)

Captain Morgan Sherry Oak Finish

July 5, 2013 /

Captain Morgan Sherry Oak FinishHere’s a new, limited edition spiced rum from our friends at Captain Morgan. I love their signature spiced rum product, but this Sherry Oak Finish offers a very nice twist on a classic. You can tell the difference right away when you open the bottle, as you can definitely sense dark cherry scents along with a hint of vanilla. The taste is excellent, with a hint of sherry wine to go along with the dark cherry flavor. Frankly it’s delicious on the rocks and should work great with many rum cocktails. We tried the classic rum and cola combination and loved it.

This special edition was inspired by the real-life Captain Henry Morgan’s 1671 victory in Panama aboard his flagship, The Satisfaction. The bottle design is slick as you can see, with a highly-detailed metallic label. It will definitely look good on your home bar and your guests will be happy to try something new.

Rum is a great option when the weather is nice, so you can break this out for your picnics and cookouts as well. Enjoy!

Lifestyle, Vices

Drink of the Week: The Hornitos Seize Your Margarita

July 5, 2013 /

The Hornitos Seize Your Margarita. First of all, my apologies that we kind of skipped over July 4th this year. It’s not that I lack love for los Estados Unidos, it’s just that I’ve been dealing with a Mexican-inspired morass. To be specific….

If anybody out there was paying attention, last week I wound up making a carefully constructed Margarita from the Hornitos people using the wrong type of tequila. Today, I am making amends with a drink where I actually used the right type of (very good) booze. What a shocker that this drink turned out to be more than okay, but actually very good.

The Hornitos Seize Your Margarita

2 ounces Hornitos Plata Tequila
3⁄4 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
3⁄4 ounce triple sec (or fancier orange liqueur)
2 pieces watermelon
2 slices of jalapeno
2 sprigs of cilantro
1 teaspoon superfine sugar (optional, see below)
1 lime slice (garnish)

Combine all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker. Muddle the watermelon, jalapeno, and cilantro into the melange of liquids with a fair amount of gusto. Next, add lots of ice and shake as vigorously as you can manage — you shaker will be good and full of stuff, especially if you make two at once like I did at one point.

Strain into a chilled rocks/old fashioned glass with ice cubes in it. If you don’t want your drink overly hot from the jalapeno, you probably want to double strain it — i.e., pour from your cocktail shaker’s strain into a regular food strainer.  On the other hand, if you don’t mind a drink that’s a bit muy on the caliente side, than just one regular cocktail strainer should be enough. Add the lime slice garnish, and toast, if you like, Hussong’s Cantina in beautiful Ensenada, Mexico. That’s where legend tells us the first Margarita was born.

****

As with last week’s drink, the Seize Your Margarita is actually intended to be made with the new (to me, anyway)  John DeKuyper & Sons O3 Premium Orange Liqueur. I’m guessing it has some kind of corporate tie to Hornitos but, for all I know, it might actually be even better that way. Still, it worked just fine with the el-cheapo DeKuyper triple sec I happened to have here at el casa de DOTW and might work well with whatever premium or cheap orangey liqueurs you happen to have on hand. I almost hate to suggest it, but the seize your margarita might even be okay with non-Hornitos brands of blanco tequila.

The other major alteration I made is the possible use of a teaspoon full of sugar. I got the idea because my watermelon wasn’t as sweet as I’d have liked. Even so, I was more than happy with my first version but I correctly guessed that I could be made happier still with a bit more sweetness. In fact, I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to adding the sugar with somewhat sweeter watermelon chunks. What’s 16 calories among friends?

When you come right down to it, when you throw tequila, watermelon and jalapenos together, it’s kind of hard to go too terribly wrong. The balance of sweet and hot is one I’ve always found hard to resist. Indeed, I have yet to meet a jalapeno margarita I didn’t like, and that includes a beverage full of the usually hated sour mixes and what not that I actually enjoyed recently at the Mexican-style bar at the Orleans Hotel in Las Vegas.

Still, the Seize Your Margarita is definitely much, much better than that prefab jalapeno margarita — and good for you too, what with all scurvy-fighting fresh fruit and vegetable extractions mixing with the health-giving power of tequila. In fact, if you’re feeling a bit of a post-fireworks let down this cinco de Julio, give it a try.

Food & Drink, Lifestyle, Vices

Make It Masculine: Bathroom Design Ideas for Bachelors (and Marrieds!)

July 3, 2013 /

ID-10069973 Couple in bathtub
Free image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Whether you are designing a bathroom for a male client or you are a man overseeing your own bathroom décor, rest assured you have many more design options today than the traditional “stark minimalist masculine” bathroom of years past. The truth is some of the world’s most innovative, creative and popular interior designers are men. It’s possible that you can have very masculine bathroom décor while enjoying luxury and style in your personal bathroom space. You may enjoy one or more of these popular styles for masculine bathrooms — or you may choose to incorporate ideas from each style to create a hybrid décor distinctly yours.

Theme Color

Often the best place to start — before even selecting your overall décor concept — is with simple elements such as color. For instance, if you favor a traditionally masculine dark or earth-toned color palette, add in a splash of a “theme color” such as red, forest green, bright blue or yellow. You may want to use this theme color just once — such as with a piece of wall art — or several times, such as with accent towels and area rugs.

Innovation Meets Function

One way designers are currently approaching bathroom décor for men is to incorporate innovation with functionality. For instance, if you love having the latest gadgets, why not create the most modern bathroom imaginable — complete with flat-screen television embedded into the wall space, a European sauna that includes a shower and seating area, a surround sound stereo speaker system that connects to your iPod and similar elements? For best results, choose a black-and-white or neutral-tone theme that is easy to maintain so you can spend maximum time enjoying all your gadgets in your ultra-modern bathroom.

Earthy and Sustainable

One new bathroom trend that is gender-neutral is the sustainable bathroom. You can install eco-friendly options for the bathroom vanity, the fixtures and furnishings and the lighting. If you have kids, this is a great way to teach them about what the planet needs and how each person can help. If you are single, it just feels great — and makes for interesting conversation with guests. You can select certain sustainable pieces (such as a low-flow toilet or “green” light bulbs) or go all out and completely “green up” your bathroom space with recycled materials and bamboo storage cabinets. Either way, the result will be a bathroom space that you can feel great about.

Classic Rustic

With the classic rustic bathroom style, you can incorporate elements like reclaimed wood, an original iron stove (for heating the bathroom in winter), natural stone instead of a traditional counter and floor tiles and lanterns rather than modern light fixtures. This gives your bathroom an early American log cabin look and feel that combines well with the more masculine décor overall.

Combination Styles

There are several popular combination styles that maintain a masculine atmosphere while incorporating elements of decadent luxury.

• Art deco with minimalist modern. Incorporate the traditionally masculine minimalist (or functional) bathroom space with a few art deco touches — a cubist painting, a stained glass window (also helpful if you want more privacy), bolder tile or wallpaper designs, or an innovative light source.

• Renaissance with Early American. If you love early American and European clawfoot tubs, Renaissance torches and period oil lamps yet also enjoy the simple living of early American settlers, try adding a signature piece from each period — such as lighting your bathroom with a series of electric wall-sconce torches and putting a clawfoot tub in the room’s center as the design focal point.

• Zen with sustainable. With this décor theme, combine open shelving made of sustainable bamboo materials with the elements of a traditional Zen space — running water, natural stones, clear glass paneling in the shower. Use black with neutral tones for the color palette.

These five bathroom décor concepts easily reflect masculinity while still adding in all the luxury, creativity, innovation, beauty and enjoyment a well-designed bathroom space has to offer.

About the Author: Matthew Long lives in a penthouse with two full baths. During a renovation last year, he decided to go with a luxury-meets-minimalist approach that earns him rave reviews from house guests.

Lifestyle

Drink of the Week: The Hornitos Kickstarter Margarita (More than a Little Remixed)

June 28, 2013 /

The Hornitos_Kickstarter Margarita. The suspense is over. I’m 95% over my cold and back in the saddle and boozing again, this time with another cocktail provided by one of my mysterious liquor-supplying benefactors.

In this case, the liquor is Hornitos Plata tequila, which I’m really glad I got. I really think tequila might be my very favorite spirit to drink straight and this is some good stuff for a relatively reasonable price – I gather between $20 and $30. It’s got a kind of spicy, sweet underside to it for a blanco tequila, as well as the more expected pungency. It’s bracing, and that’s good.

I also appreciate that this drink brings me back in touch with Anjou pears. Even though I’ve always loved pears, I’d had so many bad experiences buying them in supermarkets I’ve mostly avoided them until called to do so by this week’s drink. It turns out the ones in my local discount food emporium are actually not half bad these days. Good to know.

But now we have a big problem. Just as I was writing those last words, I realized that I’d misread the recipe in one key respect. The drink I’ve been making all week is actually supposed to be made with Hornitos presumably more mellow Reposado Tequila, not the Plata, which is the only kind of Hornitos I have here! So, consider this week’s drink a bit of an off-the-cuff and entirely accidental collaboration between me and Hornitos’ in-house mixologist. Let’s see how things go.

The Hornitos Kickstarter Margarita (as muddled beyond all recognition by DOTW)

2 ounces Hornitos Plata Tequila
1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice
3/4 ounce triple sec
1-2 dashes Angostura bitters
3 slices of Anjou pear
1 additional pear slice (garnish)

Combine all the ingredients, garnish excepted, in a cocktail shaker. Muddle the pear slices into the booze. Add ice cubes. Shake very vigorously and strain — Hornitos’ original recipe calls for you to run it through an additional strainer but I like the microscopic pear bits — into a chilled cocktail glass, with ice cubes. (It’s not usual to put ice in coupes or cocktail/martini glasses, but it works better this way, in this case)

Sip and toast either Belgium or France, one of the two nations thought to be responsible for the ever so tasty Anjou pear.

****

Okay, so aside from my using the wrong expression of Hornitos for this drink, the original recipe calls for John DeKuyper & Sons O3 Premium Orange Liqueur. Since no one was sending me that, however, I used the plain old DeKuyper Triple Sec which I happened to have on hand. I would have tried it with Cointreau, too, but I ran out of that on a failed experiment with the Hornitos Plata.

The final adjustment is that I reduced the amount of lemon juice from 3/4 of an ounce to 1/2 ounce. It was simply too tart for me at the original strength, your taste buds may well differ.

As for this version of the drink, it’s not a stemwinder of a Kickstarter. However, considering how badly I screwed the pooch on matching the original recipe, it’s not half bad. Just don’t do what I did one or two times and forget the bitters; they’re absolutely crucial in terms of giving the thing some body. It’s also kind of cool to use bitters in a Margarita which, for a purist, makes it more of a “real” cocktail.

Okay, so it could have been worse, but I’ll be returning to the well next week for a somewhat less bastardized Hornitos margarita variation. Stay tuned!

Food & Drink, Lifestyle, Vices

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