Decluttering.

So we had this pantry shelf that was totally occupied by partly-empty liquor bottles.  

A couple of them I remember buying for one recipe or another (blackberry liqueur goes in my waffle topping, for instance).   Most of them dated from the Clinton administration.  I am pretty sure that some of them had been at the open bar at our wedding.  At least one was a bottle of ouzo that Mark's college roommate brought him back from an archaeological dig in Greece.  

It's not that we don't like a drink now and then.  It's just that we seem to have been running with a bad crowd ever since we moved to Minnesota.  

Anyway, Mark decided he was tired of looking at them, so he made a New Year's resolution to drink them all up.

"When we finish one of these full-size bottles," he said, "I will replace it with a half-size bottle.  That will take up less space."

Also we can buy better stuff then, I thought, eyeing the big plastic bottle of "Karkov" brand vodka.

"And if we finish the half-bottle fast enough," he continued, "that proves that we actually drink the stuff, and I can then replace it with a full-size bottle."

So we got down to business.  The Maker's Mark bourbon, arguably some of the better stuff we had, went first, mostly over ice, in just a couple of weeks.   "What's next, the Jim Beam?" I asked.

"Um.  I don't think that's all Jim Beam anymore," he admitted.  "I have a memory of consolidating a few bottles of whiskey at one point."  

Of course, when we got to the vodka we started to run into problems.  Who wants to drink plain Karkov vodka?  Not me.  Since it's the middle of winter, we always have  grapefruit around, and so we started making salty dogs.  With fresh-squeezed ruby red Texas grapefruit, they're quite nice.  However, we should have known that the moment we began twirling the rim of a glass in a dish of coarse salt, we were headed down the road of trouble.

"Hey, what do you need to make kamikazes?  Aren't those vodka and lime?"

"Let's ask Steve Jobs." [iPhone interval] "Yeah, but you also need triple sec.  Do we have any of that?"

"We have peach schnapps."

"Um, no."

"Blackberry liqueur?"

"Definitely not."

The next day a brown paper bag mysteriously appeared on the counter.  It contained (besides a chunk of fancy cheese) a bottle of DeKuyper triple sec.  Kamikazes!

"You know what else you can make with triple sec?  Margaritas."

A few days later a new brown paper bag appeared, containing a bottle of tequila.   Also some limeade concentrate, which is close enough.  I had one on the rocks while soaking in a hot bath.  Life was good.

* * *

One thing leads to another.  In other words:  If you give a mom a tequila, she's going to want some orange juice and grenadine to go with it.

And once you've got the grenadine, the floodgates are open.

... she's going to start coming down the stairs first thing in the morning saying, "You know what we need next?  Kahlua.  With Kahlua we can make white Russians."

Even Mark has been getting more creative at the bar at his business trips.  He came home from his last one and confessed, "I tried to get the bartender to make me something interesting, and I wound up with a Blue Hawaiian."

Which made me run to the internets for this clip:

(There's no recipe for a chocolate choo choo online that I could find.)

* * *

Anyway, I can't help but noticing that we set out, ostensibly, to get rid of all the old bottles taking up space in the pantry.   To simplify, you might say.  

And now we have more bottles of stuff than we had before.  Grenadine.  Bitters.  Triple sec.  TEQUILA!!!!

There's a lesson to be had here, but I'm not sure what it is.  All I know is that we have this bottle of rum, and maybe after years and years of bragging that I never kept the stuff in the house, I'm now starting to wonder if I could make some room for a case of Coke.

Comments

[Cathie]

Sounds like my attempt to declutter my school books. I got them down, listed them on Cathswap (to which I never paid attention before) only to find 2x as many as I sold that I ABSOLUTELY NEEDED.

Too funny!

If you bring coffee tomorrow, I promise I can add Baileys. ;-) I can't promise coffee, though.

[Amy F]

Well, there's somrthing to be said for updating to liquor that's less than a decade old, at least!

[Delores]

as soon as I read "rum" I thought "rum and coke."

Well, to me it sounds like you just need to have a drinks and snacks party. Invite all your friends and then just share the wealth. And then start over. As long as they understand that they are not allowed in if they bring alcohol to share.

[bearing]

Delores: Not enough of my friends drink. At least not heavily. (Didn't you see the part about where I run with a bad crowd now?)

[Deanna]

This certainly is a new spin on decluttering for me. Anytime you need help decluttering, I'd be happy to help--LOL!!!

[MelanieB]

Our liquor cabinet is in similar need of decluttering. When we were married, Dom moved into the apartment that I'd been living in for more than five years. As the last roommate standing, I inherited the liquor cabinet that had accumulated in that apartment at various parties and through a succession of roommates moving out and abandoning anything they didn't want to take with them. For some reason we've moved this collection of booze twice now, even though it contains some things like Sambuca that neither of us is likely to drink.

As for the mediocre vodka, I'd use it in a tomato sauce.

[bearing]

That would be a lot of tomato sauce -- the Karkov is in a BIG bottle (almost a jug). We must have a fifth of it -- I mean 750 ml -- still left to go.

[Robin]

Cook's Illustrated uses vodka as part of the liquid in pie crust. I guess it makes it moist enough to roll out, but not enough to activate the gluten in the dough.

Yeah, this is way geeky.