Many people enjoy a glass of wine while getting creative in the kitchen, but for one Black Diamond woman liquor is the integral ingredient.
Scotland-born Florrie Wood, who works for Spirit Hills Honey Winery in Millarville, said she’s been adding liquor to her meals and desserts for five years.
"The fact that we had so much access, it’s just sitting around so I would grab some and add it,” she said. "Liquor adds a dimension to food you don’t get with anything else. Often people add water, but I add wine. It gives it that really nice richness that you wouldn’t get with anything else.”
Eager to share her love of food and wine with others, Wood penned The Tipsy Kitchen Cookbook with help from Spirit Hills co-owner Hugo Bonjean, which boasts 52 of her own and other Foothills residents’ recipes that combine cultural dishes with Spirit Hills honey wines and other Alberta craft liquors.
Spirit Hills is an award-winning family-owned winery that integrates ancient honey wine fermentation techniques with local fruits and flowers to produce wines with a distinct Alberta flavor.
The Tipsy Kitchen Cookbook features an array of recipes, including some Spirit Hills wines, like wine burgers, rum cake, spiked hot chocolate, Saskwatch Stew and Chunky Drunky Chicken seasoned with captivating photography and peppered with whimsical drawings with a pinch of humour.
Wood said Spirit Hills organized a cooking contest in Calgary last year and included 22 of those recipes in the book.
"We’re a very food-orientated group of people out here,” she said. "We wanted to make some very interesting and never-really-tasted-before recipes from using the wine to create some new Alberta recipes.”
All of Wood’s favourite dishes are included in the array of recipes.
"I pretty much cooked for six months and tried out lots of different recipes,” she said. "It was easy because I’d done it for so long but in a way it was a hard because I’m not a recipe person, I’m a throw-everything-together person. I’m very much a scoop-of-that, pinch-of-that person. With recipes you really have to be exact. That was the challenging part was getting it on paper.”
For Wood, perfecting the recipes to suit her audience’s liking was no chore.
"Cooking is definitely something that I’ve always enjoyed,” she said. "Even as a kid I remember looking through my mom’s cookbooks and marking the recipes I liked.”
Spirit Hills has developed a Facebook group called Tipsy Kitchen Kings and Queens, inviting people to share pictures of the recipes they try.
The Tipsy Kitchen Cookbook is available for $25 at various Chapters and Indigo stores in Calgary, Red Deer and Edmonton, as well as at Spirit Hills.
