It’s that time of the year, or close anyway, where the warm spices come out and people want to sit by the fire in their slippers and sip muddled wine and munch on cookies. It’s a bit of a problem here in SoCal, though, because it stays pretty warm in comparison to the rest of the country and although I hate the cold, even after eight years of living here in Los Angeles, I still think it odd to celebrate the holidays without snow. Yeah, seeing Christmas trees and wreaths and all that crap is just different without the misery of a real east coast winter. West coasters just don’t understand how it is. You’re outside in the biting cold and you come inside to warm yourself. A cup of hot chocolate perhaps? Maybe something stronger? Maybe something with rum and cinnamon, other warm spices, and the one two knockout power of coconut milk and condensed milk. Yeah baby. There’s something about that combination that makes an old, feeble bartender want to spin around while singing reggae until he’s dizzy. Yeah mon! Add a little rum…some lime…and now the tiki gods are quite happy.

Coquito means “little coconut” in Spanish. It’s egg nog sans egg in most recipes and coconut, rum, and condensed milk all of the time. We made it last year and of course, saved some of it for this year. A quart to be exact. The result was nothing less than unreal. I don’t know what happens to these things as they sit in the walk in after so long but they always thicken up to a good but weird consistency. When I opened the top and looked inside it had transformed into a dark mass resembling ice cream if you had kept it at 38°.

Last year’s batch was a little strong (151) so we toned it down a little bit in 2023 for the punters. It’s actually meant to be drunk in smaller doses than a nog. Like little shots throughout the night, so it’s supposed to be higher in alcohol, that said, last year’s version was a little too crazy…It didn’t burn the delicate membranes of the throat…But there’s something about 151 rum that makes us all a little crazy.

At any rate…I’ve been to Puerto Rico. I went back in 2012 and had a grand old time. It’s a magical place. I think I’ve written about it before in the confines of this blog. Let’s just say Vieques Island is where it’s at. Long stretches of beach where you see no one else. Armed to the teeth military patrolling everywhere. Actual wild horses everywhere. Roosters crowing before dawn. Piña coladas at Saint Voodoo’s Mar Azul right on the water. A bioluminescent bay trip at midnight where we were taken to the middle of nowhere, hiked through pitch black, mosquito infested terrain with canoes, and thought we would be stabbed and left for dead in the jungle. The whole damn thing. Oh, there were also excellent fish tacos on the other side of the country at a little joint in Rincon with ice cold beer right next to a nuclear power plant. Just go.