When I first started dating my wife I was introduced to two things that growing up as a Jew in Toronto I had never experienced before … Christmas and glögg. I’m pretty sure you know about Christmas, so here’s a quick description of glögg: 

Glögg is a mulled or spiced wine that you traditionally drink around Christmas (or Jul) in Sweden.

It’s November and here in Quebec the days are cool, the nights are long and chilly. Glögg is a great way to stay warm.

So, let’s make some glögg!

You’ll need the following ingredients:

• a bottle of red wine
• 3-4 cinnamon sticks
• 3-4 prunes
• 1/2 cup of sugar
• cloves (to taste)
• cardamom (to taste)
• fresh ginger (to taste)
• slivered almonds
• raisins

Get all your dry goods ready … not the slivered almonds and raisins, we’ll get to those later, I promise!

Add sugar to about 200ml of water. Put this on a medium heat so you can get that sugar to dissolve more quickly.

Once that is dissolved, add the cinnamon, cloves, prunes and cardamom.

My wife loves cardamom so we probably are using more than most people would, but that’s the fun of cooking. Make every recipe your own!

Grate in some fresh ginger. A microplane is good for grating the ginger. A handy trick is to freeze the ginger ahead of time to make the grating easier!

(being a ginger myself, this part always leads to at least one terrible joke)

Stir the whole thing together ….

Now bring it to a hard boil … here’s where things start to smell pretty awesome.

For the best flavour, let the spice water cool and leave it to sit for a day

For the sake of ‘it smells too good and I want it now’, you can keep on going with the recipe if you want!

And now THE BOOZE!

Pour in that bottle of wine (we use a big 1L bottle, because that’s how we roll)

At this point, I’m thinking it needs a bit more of a ‘kick’

Time for some gin …. sure, that wasn’t in the recipe at the top, but like I said, make it your own. For me, that means ADD GIN!

But wait, isn’t this Swedish?

Gotta add some aquavit (note, straight from the freezer, my fingers were pretty much screaming while I did this)

Okay, now it’s gettin’ there

Heat up that glögg! 

Don’t bring it to a boil now that the booze is added … get it to just under that boil!

waiting … waiting … the kitchen smells lovely now!

Remember I mentioned slivered almonds and raisins? We combine them in a small bowl and use a spoon to add them to small cups of glögg  Everyone knows it’s best to serve it with pepparkakor (ginger snaps)

There it is!  Glad Jul!

Now let’s get Christmas drunk … the jolliest of drunk you can be