Boozy Summer Fruit Recipes
Get your fruit drunk
Berries and stone fruits—they're just like us!
All they want to do on vacation is lounge around soaking up alcohol.
Here are three no-recipe recipes for our favorite boozy fruit combinations. Use them in drinks, salads or dead-simple desserts.
Halve and pit a pound of the fruit, then let it hang out in nearly two cups of brandy, sugar, a tablespoon of rosewater and two sprigs of thyme.
After three days, take them out of the liquid—no need to dry them off—and throw them right on the grill. Once they're nice and charred, serve them with fresh whipped cream or crème fraîche. Spoon them over ricotta pancakes or waffles, or drop a handful into a pitcher of Prosecco-topped white sangria to add heady floral notes.
Tequila may seem overpowering, but two pints of the little blue babes hold their shape and sweetness after soaking for a day or so. All you have to add in are tequila's old friends—a few strips of lime peel and two dried árbol chiles—and some sugar.
The berries are a natural garnish for margaritas and other tequila cocktails, for that matter. Spoon them over toast spread with a thick layer of queso fresco or ricotta. Muddled, they're an intense base for salad dressing.
And the liquid's so sweet-smoky delicious, you can just pour it over ice with a couple of berries and throw it back.
The booziest of the bunch; eat a handful and you might get tipsy. Pitted cherries marinate for three days in bourbon, vanilla extract, sugar and orange juice and zest until the sauce really sinks in—they're an obvious Manhattan garnish and rival to any Maraschino.
Drop the cherries right over ice cream, or go next-level and boil down the liquid to make bourbon caramel. Chop them up and add them to pie fillings or eat them straight from the jar. We did.