The Lord is Risen! Now Let's Drink! Hallelujah!

Easter was... epic this year. Truly epic. It was a feast of gigantic proportions, and I am larger for it. Our menu was as follows:

Chili sambal shrimp, made by The Boyfriend
Jalepeno Popper Dip, made by The Smalls
Raw Oysters, served by Dad, The Boyfriend, and Mr. Small
Grilled Foie Gras, made by Dad and Mr. B
Antipasta Salad, made by The Smalls
Grilled/Smoked lamb, Small Potatoes, and Asparagus with Hollandaise, made by Dad
Cheeses selected by Me
Irish Cake Bombs, made by Me.

Oh god. So much food. The Boyfriend is a mighty fine cook, which is part of why I like him so much. Unfortunately, he also has the tendency to say things like "Hey, you know what would taste great with this? CAIPIRINHAS."

A capirinha is a wonderfully refreshing drink made with cachacas, a sort of un-clarified sugarcane rum from Brazil. The recipe on the back of the bottle calls for using raw sugar, but we substituted simple syrup, because we didn't want to spill a crapton of sugar all over the floor. Our recipe was as follows

3-4 pieces of lime
1 measure cachaca
simple syrup
lime wedge garnish
sugarcane juice (optional)

Muddle the lime in a lowball glass. Fill with ice. Add cachaca and syrup. If using it, splash a bit of sugarcane juice in. Stir. Taste. Decide it's too strong and squeeze your garnish into it. Realize that you can no longer taste the alcohol. Drink three. Make a bad decision.

You don't *need* the sugarcane juice, which really just tastes like sweetened hearts of palm, but it adds a really nice green aroma to the drink that makes it especially nice on a hot day. I'd caution against using more than a splash, though, as you want the cachaca flavor to come through too.

After a caipirinha, I had a glass of sparkling Merlot. You heard me right. The Pugliese Vinyards 2003 Sparkling Merlot, hailing from the North Fork of Long Island. It is a deep purple-red sparkling wine, that fizzed up in a way that reminded me of that scene in Fantasia where Bacchus visits the centaurs and gets everyone drunk and wine gets sloshed about pinkly. It was actually pretty good, very different. Sparkling wine is such a pleasure, and when you get something that weird that tastes that good, you've just got to go for it. I recommend it highly.

There were other wines, but I found that after a few handfulls of shrimp, a dozen oysters, a caipirinha and a few flutes of sparkling wine that I could not recall much about any of them. In all honesty though, the rum drinks and sparkling Merlot were the highlights of the alcoholic reverie. I cannot recommend these enough. Seriously, go out and get yourself some cachaca and some limes and make yourself one of these, because it's The Best.