Garden Tomato Bloody Mary

We are in the midst of a total kitchen renovation which we are doing ourselves.  I think our process would not be so bad if we were moving a little quicker.  But that is next to impossible when one of you is only home one or two days a week and the other is always running kids around or making lunches, checking on homework, walking the dog or trying desperately to keep up with the dust that (despite our best efforts) has managed to make its way to every single room and surface in our house.  We’ve always heard people say how dreadful renovations can be but we say…if you can stay together during a home renovation it must be because you are drinking cocktails at night…or during the working hours when the dust is really flying.

So since we still can access the bar located in the dining room we pulled out our favorite cocktail book, Mix Shake Stir with recipes from Danny Meyer’s acclaimed New York City restaurants.  It is a gorgeous book.  Gorgeous.  We fell in love with the Heirloom Bloody Mary Recipe and decided to make it ourselves.  The book says that the bartenders at the Union Square Cafe use heirloom tomatoes acquired at the local farmers’ markets.  We used a variety of tomatoes from our garden.  They also pass the tomatoes through a potato ricer, something we would love to try next time…but being without a sink that is not in a bathroom, we didn’t want to use that process just yet.

Ingredients:

4 large, ripe heirloom tomatoes

2 oz vodka (we used our new favorite, Tito’s)

1 oz fresh lime juice

1/2 teaspoon freshly grated horseradish

1 teaspoon green hot-pepper sauce

sea salt and coarsely ground black pepper

ice

grape, cherry or heirloom tomatoes to garnish

The process we used needed to be simple as we do not have a kitchen (can I tell you how very glad we will all be when we do actually have a kitchen?!) so, as I mentioned, we didn’t pass our tomatoes through a potato ricer, but rather used our tiny single serve Ninja blender.  We took the blended tomatoes and strained the mixture with a simple mesh hand strainer to remove as many of the solids as possible and placed the liquid into a cocktail shaker.  We covered this mixture and placed it in the fridge (I know…you are probably asking yourself with no kitchen where is the fridge? It was moved to the basement which is great- you just get a little dusty getting there) for an hour.  The book recommends thirty minutes- we just lost track of time.  Once chilled add the vodka, lime juice, horseradish, hot-pepper sauce, salt and pepper to the tomato mix and stir to mix well.  We filled our glass half way with ice and then took our little garnish tomatoes and put them on a skewer.  The tomato mixture was then poured over the ice.  And while we would have preferred to be at a Sunday brunch in NYC, sitting at the bar while the bartender did the pouring…it was late and we were dusty so we opted for the new season of Downton Abbey and just enjoyed the incredibly fresh and delicious flavors in this gorgeous drink.