Recipe Tue Aug 31 2010

Snackable Drinks

By Andie Cavedo

I'm not a great hostess. Years of throwing out an overly complicated appetizer at the last minute and throwing together a cheese plate have eventually taught me that, while my cooking talents are at least modest, my menu planning and execution skills for social gatherings are at the most fair-to-middling. I'm okay with it -- and more than happy to help YOU cook and bake and stir and braise if YOU're hosting a party I'm at. But I had to do some measured risk-taking to provide my guests with SOMEthing to eat and drink at a recent backyard garden party. Cheese plate, obvi. Spiced crunchy chickpeas were, sadly, less awesome than I'd anticipated. Chips and salsa! Beer...wine... margaritas, served in coffee mugs because I forgot to buy plastic cups. Mugaritas. And in a culinarily successful experiment, strawberry margarita jell-o shots. Classy, yet accessible. And most people seemed to actually like them.

I borrowed some inspiration and concocted the following:

Strawberry Margarita Jell-o Shots
1 lb. strawberries
1/2 cup water
1 lime
1/2 cup sugar
4 envelopes gelatin
1 cup tequila (blanco, or whatever you prefer to make your margaritas with)
1/2 cup triple sec
Lime zest
Salt

Stem, core and puree the strawberries in a blender or food processor until juiced (but not too frothy) -- add up to a 1/2 cup of water to get 2 1/4 cups total of liquid. Transfer over to a sauce pan on medium heat. Slice your lime in half and squeeze the juice from each half into the strawberry mixture, heat until just boiling. But don't throw the lime away! While the juice is heating up, stir the sugar and powdered gelatin together in a small bowl, and then stir slowly into the boiling liquid. Keep stirring for about 5 minutes until all of the sugar has dissolved into the juice, then turn the heat off and let it sit for a bit to cool down before adding the alcohol (about 15-20 minutes). If you were so inclined, you could just pour it into a baking dish now and have some really fresh-tasting non-alcoholic jell-o...if you're into jell-o, I guess. If you're more into booze, wait until the mix cools down a bit and then stir in the triple sec and tequila. Pour into a baking dish and stick in the fridge. After about an hour, grab that juiced lime and microplane as much zest off of it as you can, the finer the better. Sprinkle onto the jell-o, which should be mostly set at this point, and return to the fridge for at least another three hours, or overnight. Right before you serve, sprinkle a bit of kosher salt over the tops of your shots for the full margarita experience, slice, and serve. (You could also do the college-style individual paper shot glasses, if you were so inclined. But for me, at this point, my power had been out for two hours through a totally unrelated circumstance, and I was pretty much over it.)

They looked...kind of like ahi tuna squares. They tasted good...though quite strong (I went with two full cups of each kind of alcohol. It seemed like a good idea at the time.) If I make them again, I might include a few strawberry slices mixed into the jell-o before it sets, just for that church-picnic kind of textural excitement. They were, overall, worth making again. Hostess win!