Cookbook updates, now with Cocktails

Since last week, my fiancée and I decided to try getting into mixing cocktails. We both like food, and what better way to expand the potential for dinner parties than by adding drinks! As such, we’ve bought all the tools to get started, and we each got a book filled with recipes. She wants to focus more on the non-alcoholic variants, mocktails, whereas I’ll go for the alcoholic versions.

I quickly found that many people use different units, and sometimes even different ingredients for their cocktails, if only because some countries still use imperial units. Some people measure precisely with a jigger, some people use cups or spoons. Some people use one specific brand of liquor, while others insist you must use whatever brand they prefer. Obviously, I would like to have a list of cocktails using a standardized measuring system, and if at all possible, the same units that I would like to use.

Luckily, I happen to have a cookbook section on this site already, and I was pretty certain I could just use it for any other kind of recipe too. Which was true, giving me an interface I like for keeping track of whatever it is I’m cooking up. The only downside was that I’m now mixing various types of recipes all in one big list. I’d like stuff that belongs together to be together, so if I’m not exactly sure what I want to make, but now what category of thing I want to make, I can cruise through the list and get an idea that way.

And so, I added categories to the cookbook on my site. There are several already, and I made it relatively easy to add new categories later. I split up the cooking recipes into their own respective categories as well, hoping it would result in a more cohesive cookbook. The different categories have also been given id attributes, making it even easier to link someone to a specific section of the cookbook.

The cocktail category is there already, as well. I’ve already added some of the recipes I tried in the past week that I liked, and I hope to be able to add more recipes over time. If you have any suggestions, whether cocktails, mocktails, or cooking recipes to try out, feel free to suggest some! Summer is here, its a great time to start cooking and mixing!