Happy Hour With 3 Ingredients: Morning Martini
Happy weekend and welcome back to Happy 3 Ingredient Hour , a weekly drinks column featuring very simple yet delicious libations. This week I want to talk about morning drinks, especially morning gin.
I’ve never been the type to squeeze pearls before noon, but some drinks seem more appropriate for the morning than others. I love martinis, but sipping gin and vermouth before coffee is a little rough even for me. However, there is an elegant solution to this puzzle: just soften the spirit a bit with a breakfast dish, in this case marmalade.
Lainsborough bartender Salvatore Calabrese uses the pungent and sweet power of orange marmalade to round out his morning gin, but his recipe is too many ingredients for our purposes. I ditched Curacao to make my brunch easier, but I also swapped out the standard orange marmalade for some peach-mango to sip on in the summer. (If you can’t find peach and mango in the same jar, just pick your favorite; any of them will do.) To make this sparkling cocktail, you’ll need:
- 3 large tablespoons peach-mango marmalade
- 1/2 ounce fresh lemon juice
- 2 ounces gin
Add the marmalade and lemon juice to the bottom of an empty cocktail shaker and stir until the marmalade is dissolved. Add gin and ice on a shaker. Shake and strain into a compartment glass or martini glass. Take a sip and start your day off with pleasure.