I’m not going to call this Homemade Feijoa Vodka recipe zero-waste — yes, you’re using the skins of fruit that otherwise would’ve been thrown out, but driving into town to buy a bottle of vodka rather undermines any sense of environmentally pietistic efficacy. But there is something fun, thrilling even, about using scraps you would’ve discarded, making something from nothing, it feels like you’ve discovered the secrets of alchemy, or stopping time. And never was alchemy so low-effort: just hiff the feijoa skins into a jar, top with vodka, let it all sit, and there you have it.

There was a moment of horror when I first unscrewed the lid and tried the vodka — it was giving nail polish remover, and had this disturbing and lingering metallic finish — because the only thing worse than being wasteful is going out of your way to repurpose waste and then wasting that, to say nothing of the fact that vodka doesn’t grow on trees. To my immediate relief, adding some sugar made it spring to life, turning it from acetone into something not just merely potable, but delicious: lusciously fragrant, delicate, deeply feijoa-y, silky-textured.

There are a lot of things I miss about bartending (it would be more efficient to list what I don’t miss: the pay) but I was particularly lucky to have a lot of freedom when I ran Motel to just dick around with infusions and experiments and whatever I wanted. There isn’t quite so much call for jars of macerating liquor now that I live with my parents in the middle of nowhere (nor, sadly, is there a company card to blithely put the costs on) but we do what we can, and making this Homemade Feijoa Vodka reminded me of those happy times, trying my hand at tepache, infusing rum with various whole spices, and so on. To that end, this feijoa vodka would be excellent shaken into cocktails: I’m thinking a Feijoa Gin Sour, with about 1/2 a shot of it in an otherwise straightforward sour of gin, sugar syrup and lemon juice; a sort of Feijoa Crumble vibe with apple juice and cinnamon syrup; a Feijoa Collins or Gimlet or — prosaically but always a valid choice — in a long glass, topped with Chi and a slender sliver of cucumber to make a Falling Water.

After doing some taste-testing I can confirm that it’s also about smooth enough to be sipped on its own, the way you might with a Cointreau or similar after dinner, but it really has to be fridge-cold for this.

Obviously I’ve had to wait a month for this vodka to sit around before I could write about the recipe so I hope there’s still enough Feijoa Hours left in autumn for you to make this for yourself. If you don’t live within reaching distance of a feijoa, or if you detest them but like the idea of fixing your own liqueurs, there’s always my (astonishingly good) Passionfruit Liqueur and (not quite as blow-your-hair-back but still excellent) Mandarin Liqueur recipes. As for accruing all those feijoa skins, I kept a container in the fridge for everyone to put them in once they’d scooped out the flesh, but to hasten the process, there’s not much better you can do with this fruit than make my Feijoa Ice Cream. Three-ish ingredients, no-churn, tastes like a dream.

Homemade Feijoa Vodka

Stunningly fragrant, and mellow enough to be sipped on its own, but obviously begging to be used in cocktails, all this requires of you is a little patience while it infuses. And a lot of feijoas. Recipe by myself.

• Skins from 18 to 20 feijoas
• 1 litre vodka (look for one that’s 40% eg Absolut)
• 3/4 cup sugar
• 125ml (1/2 cup) recently boiled water from the kettle

1: Find a large glass jar of around 1.5 or 2 litre capacity. Trim any of those brown, x-shaped stems from your feijoa skins if they have them, and then pile these bright green skins into the jar, pour over the litre of vodka, place the lid on the jar and put it in a cupboard somewhere and forget about it for a month. Don’t throw out the bottle, as you can use it for the finished vodka.

2: One month later, strain the vodka into a measuring jug, discarding the feijoa skins (I imagine our compost bin was a scene of Dionysian revelry for the rats and worms after I threw them out). In a smaller jug or bowl, stir the 3/4 cup of sugar and 1/2 cup boiling water together until the sugar has dissolved, tip this into your jug of infused vodka, pour it all back into the original vodka bottle using a funnel, and that’s it!

Makes 1 and a bit litres. Store in the fridge.

music lately:

I Feel Insane by Daisy Chainsaw, the combination of the abrasively raucous guitars and KatieJane Garside’s air-deflating-from-a-helium-balloon voice is chaotic and perfect (for something less confrontational, Natural Man has a kind of acoustic Nirvana vibe).

Hard To Say I’m Sorry by Az Yet. And! After! All! That! You’ve! Been! Through! No disrespect to Chicago (the band, not the city, no disrespect to them either though) but there is no way this song wasn’t written expressly to be sung by a close-harmony 90s R’n’B group, it simply didn’t exist before then and could never exist again.

Adagio from Spartacus by Khachaturian, impossibly beautiful — specifically the crescendo from about 5 minutes 50 onwards, so if you’re impatient like me you’ll want to jump right to that point to see what I’m talking about, it’s absolutely unreal — verging on irresponsible — for a piece of music to be this stunning, the first time I heard it I burst out laughing from sheer nervous emotion, it’s like falling in love and being run over by a herd of rhinoceroses at the same time.

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!

Show a thousand people a Rorschach inkblot-rendered image of me and not one of them will say “that’s a patient person”. While patience is a virtue I’ve always considered myself to lack, I am good at making time disappear and jump forwards either through procrastinating or simply zoning out aimlessly – and what is zoning out if not patience’s weird goth cousin? Conversely, what is patience if not zoning out persevering?

Whichever side of the coin you fall on, you’re gonna need at least one of these qualities to your name to endure the waiting time for this homemade liqueur to steep and come into bloom, and frankly, I suspect I have the rare edge over traditional patience here. Forgetting you have a large jar of homemade liqueur in the cupboard, only to remember it’s there waiting for you and ready to be consumed in the middle of a newly-announced nationwide lockdown? Now that’s a virtue.

This recipe is a mid-winter take on the passionfruit liqueur I made back in April, but it’s so delicious and so versatile that it deserves a stand-alone place on the blog. The method is also slightly improved, as I found that dissolving the sugar completely before mixing it with the vodka makes for a much smoother finished product.

Our mandarin tree has been on the clock since 1984, producing season after season of hostile, tight-skinned, pip-studded little mandarins that you don’t so much peel as dig into, inevitably spraying juice hither and yon. What they lack in accessibility and friendliness they make up for in sprightly, acerbic flavour, the sort of unhesitating zing that the loose-skinned, pipless, baby’s-first-mandarins at the supermarkets could only muster a mere straining echo of. This liqueur makes use of both the fruit and the potent oils lurking in the peel, and the resulting liqueur is both delicate yet beautifully citrussy.

Triple sec (or Cointreau, or orange liqueur in general) is one of the most widely-used ingredients in cocktails after the base spirits, and while this liqueur has a more mellow and floral vibe it’s still vibrantly orange enough to slot into any classic you favour – the Margarita, the Sidecar, the Corpse Reviver No.2, the Cosmopolitan – a bottle of this in your cupboard gives you a wealth of potential (presuming you also have other bottles of cocktail-friendly liquor in your cupboard.) If cocktails are too much hard work, a splash of this in a glass of champagne (by which I mean, Lindauer) is an instant delight. Even easier than that is a nip of the liqueur, straight from the fridge, poured into a small glass for chic sipping pre- or post-dinner.

And if you want in on the fun but don’t have access to (or use for) alcohol? Try this lemon cordial recipe instead, which you can adapt to any other citrus fruit and, better yet, enjoy on the day it’s made.

Homemade Mandarin Liqueur

Put some stuff in a jar, forget about it for a while, come back and you have delicious homemade liqueur for sipping or shaking into cocktails. Of course, you can use any other citrus fruit here – tangerines would be excellent. Recipe by myself.

• 750ml bottle vodka – look for at least 40% alcohol/80 proof, nothing lower than that
• 15 – 20 mandarins (no fewer than this, but more is fine)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 teaspoon citric acid
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1: Thoroughly wash a 1-litre glass jar in hot soapy water and dry with a clean tea towel. Using a vegetable peeler, strip off as much clean, unblemished mandarin peel as you can and use a paring knife to slice off any pith (the white stuff) from the underside of the peel. Now, the mandarins on our tree were quite firm-skinned – not the kind that you can easily peel without making a mess – but if you have the kind with loose skin which falls off almost as you touch it, just remove as much pith as possible and you’re good to go.

2: Next, remove any remaining peel from your mandarins and do your best to remove as much of the white pith as possible clinging to each segment. This whole prep section is quite fiddly and messy but it’s worth the effort for the delicious results.

3: Pour the sugar into a bowl (or better yet, a measuring jug so it’s easier to pour into the jar later) followed by the mandarin segments. Stir with a wooden spoon, crushing the mandarin pieces to release their juice, and keep stirring until the sugar has dissolved into the mandarin juice and is no longer gritty when you do a little taste test. Add the citric acid to the bowl and stir again.

4: Carefully tip all this into the clean jar (perhaps using a spoon to ferry the solid mandarin pieces into the jar first before pouring the liquid in) along with the slices of mandarin peel, and then pour in the entire bottle of vodka. Screw on the lid and store the jar in a cupboard – ideally, one out of sight where you won’t be constantly reminded of its progress – and leave it for a month, occasionally giving the jar a careful swirl (I say ‘careful’ because I’m still haunted by the memory of dropping a jar of quince-infused brandy onto the ground back in 2010). If your vodka is particularly high-proof you can probably get away with considerably less waiting time than a month; obviously, the only way to know this for sure is by doing regular taste tests.

5: Once the month is up, strain the contents of the jar through a sieve into a measuring jug, pressing down on any pieces of fruit with the back of a spoon to extract their last gasps of flavour. Then stir in the vanilla and funnel the liquid into clean bottles. It should keep just fine in the cupboard but will taste particularly excellent if stored in the fridge or freezer.

Makes – depending on your mandarin quantity and quality – just over a litre.

music lately:

Fast As You Can by Fiona Apple. The way she just – does – that!!

Say Hey by Branford Marsalis Quartet and Terrence Blanchard, from the Mo’ Better Blues soundtrack. The kind of jazz that makes you feel like the main character.

Could I Leave You from the Sondheim musical Follies, performed here by Dee Hoty for My Favourite Broadway: The Leading Ladies in 1998, a highly comforting yet exhilarating concert that I revisit frequently. This is such a good song in anyone’s hands, but Hoty has precisely the steel and elegance and control that makes it really shine.

Supervixens, by A.R Kane, the thing about this song is that I just never stop listening to it!

PS: If you like my writing and wish to support me directly, there’s no better way than by stepping behind the claret velvet VIP curtain of my Patreon. Recipes, reviews, poetry, updates, secrets, stories, all yours on a monthly basis. There’s no better time than right now – your support helps me to make all these blog posts!