At Scrabble practice the other night, Amy, Courtney, and I were talking about making limoncello, a delicious lemon-flavored Italian liqueur. I just ran across a recipe, by way of Seattle-based writer Maggie Dutton’s blog, Wine Offensive. I’m a big fan of the blog—Dutton knows her shit, and she writes about wine and other boozes in a really accessible, down-to-earth way. The recipe is here, if you’re interested; it’s surprisingly simple, just lemon, vodka, and sugar, left to steep for a few weeks.

The same article also reminded me of this great tip for improving cheap vodka:

Fancy vodka is unnecessary if you have a handy Brita home pitcher. Most vodkas endure charcoal filtering to catch nasty impurities that are all too common in the low-rent stuff. Activated carbon is precisely Brita’s modus operandi. You can run any cheap vodka through the pitcher four or five times to class the hooch up. Why pay so much for odorless, tasteless liquor when you can do the work yourself and clean the pitcher in the process? (Just rinse the filter a few times when you’re finished.)