Relish Recipes — Drinks

It's cottage time here in Ontario and we've got two recipes to share this weekend. Ice box cookies are a favourite standby in the summertime. Store this slice-and-bake roll of cookie dough in your fridge or freezer - to make freshly baked cookies that are ready in 10 minutes. And keeping a jar of this lemon syrup in the fridge makes it easy to stir up a glassful or pitcher of fresh lemonade for company!

Rhubarb is a tell-tale sign of spring. But what exactly is it? Rhubarb is a spring vegetable, one of the few that is still truly seasonal. The edible part of this perennial plant is the vibrant pink stalk, which is almost always cooked with lots of sugar because it is very sour. Raw rhubarb is quite sour, just as mouth-puckering as lemon. Eating raw rhubarb stalks is completely safe and we recommend trying a little slice the next time you’re cooking with it just to experience its purest flavour. What rhubarb tastes like is really a question about what it tastes...

This healthy and creamy immune-boosting smoothie made with almond milk is naturally sweetened with frozen fruit, but we like to add a "booster" shot of our local Backyard Honey Company honey. Local honey is antiviral, antibacterial and especially helps with sore throats. So keep all those sniffles at bay while sipping away.

Eggnog is pretty much synonymous with Christmas. What other time of year do you get to drink something that’s basically custard spiked with alcohol? A good eggnog is made up of just a few simple ingredients – alcohol, sugar, cream and raw eggs. Now if you are skeptical of drinking something with raw eggs, take note that the Centre of Disease Control (CDC) tested copious amounts of homemade eggnog  to find that the addition of alcohol basically wiped out the risk of any contamination. And if all this isn’t enough to entice you, December 24^th is National Eggnog Day. So go ahead and indulge a little – it’s the holidays.

 From Jam Bake by Camilla Wynne, Penguin Random House, 2021

This jam is a great solution for those times when you come home from the farmers' market with a half pint of every berry you couldn't resist buying but aren't sure what to do with them. I came up with this recipe when I moved to a house to a house with my first real honest-to-god garden in the ground and started planting the berries I'd always of growing; black and golden raspberries, black currants and jostaberries. The trouble is, most berries take a few years to get established, so I only had a handful of each the first few years. On their own, each bush's harvest was just a snack, but together they made a jam. This recipe also works well with frozen fruit. If you buy an extra half pint of berries every time you go to the maket, throw them into the freezer and come November, when you're facing the true onset of winter, you can make what tastes like British summer pudding - a mixture of juicy sweetened berries encased in soft white bread. - Camilla Wynne