Food Goes In Mouth

When you find yourself spending most of your time in a hotel room without a microwave you can still make delicious food. Here’s how.

Cheat, damnit. Don’t cook your food.

Ingredients

• Chivas Regal 12-Year Scotch
• An assortment of the freshest fruit you can buy locally. In this case:
  • Strawberries
  • Raspberries
  • Blackberries
  • Baby Thomson Grapes
  • Medjool, Deglet Noor, and Zahidi Dates
  • White Peach, sliced
• Water crackers, just to break up all the sweetness

Instructions

1. Put the fruit in a plastic bag and add a few ounces of Chivas.
2. Wait an hour and remove. If you’re brave, pour the Chivas into a glass and throw it back like a man.

I had the bottle of Chivas siting around from when my old team at work gave it to me as a parting gift I totally acquired it outside of work. The fruit was chosen at the local farmer’s market. If you’ve been to one recently in California you’ve probably seen the insane selection of awesome fruit available, so really just go for what you find addicting.

Some of the fruits I picked worked better with the Scotch than others. I’m not going to pretend I know the finer points of whiskey tasting, so here’s a basic breakdown:

• Blackberries: My favorite. Neither of the flavors overpowered the other and there wasn’t any harsh alcohol bite or aftertaste.
• Raspberries: These were smaller and denser than the blackberries so less of the Chivas stuck around. Tasted mostly like the non-macerated raspberries, or in other words, still delicious.
• Strawberries: Dear god this was awful. Let me spell it out in full. Chivas Regal and strawberries mixed together taste of death. I’m not even going to try to figure out how to modify it. I’m just leaving this fruit out of future Scotch equations.
• Dates: Of course, these don’t really soak up much with their slick skins and dense interior. Nothing interesting.
• Grapes: Again, they have skin. If you just dip them in the Chivas and eat them, I do like how these little sour things taste. As an aside, the grapes look huge in the picture above but it’s just the placement, shot angle, and tiny plate used. They’re seriously micrograpes.
• Peaches: These soaked up a lot of flavor. It wasn’t disgusting like the strawberries, but it wasn’t fantastic. There’s potential. What I want to do with these is macerate them and then grill them. All I have to do is figure out how to turn a hotel reading lamp into a 400°F griddle.

Final note: This “recipe,” if you want to call it that, is vegan and raw but by absolutely no means healthy. I wouldn’t be surprised if this tiny plate of fruit + booze is more sugar than you should have in a whole day. But if you’re cool with that, go right ahead, dig into the sugar pile, get drunk, and enjoy.