Cooking With Booze: Meals That Let You Eat and Drink at the Same Damn Time

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Ripe mangoes are sweet and absurdly juicy on their own, but bathe them in a caramel sauce spiked with dark rum and vanilla and it'll be like you're eating boozy candy. The best thing you can do is heap them over ice cream. Get the recipe on Food52.

What's really dangerous about this bread pudding is that you probably have all of the ingredients for it somewhere in your kitchen. And if you don't have dark chocolate and bourbon on hand, you should consider making a life change. Get the recipe on Food52.

If used responsibly, alcohol can make (almost) any situation better—even eating swiss chard. With a little help from white wine, honey, and vinegar, bitter swiss chard becomes perfectly tender, tangy-sweet, and addictive. Get the recipe on Food52.

When you're craving something meaty, savory, and creamy, this risotto covers all of your bases. It's got mushrooms, pancetta, beef broth, chicken broth, Parmesan cheese, and a hit of red wine to bring everything together. We dare you to find anything more impressive for an at-home date night. Get the recipe on Food52.

There's no doubt that rosé's delicious (and not sweet or lame or girly), but that doesn't mean people won't make fun of you for drinking it. Trick them into falling for the pink stuff with his chicken recipe. The tender, golden-brown chicken legs that cook in the wine will keep all unfavorable comments at bay. Get the recipe on Food52.

The only thing you can do with good red wine that's better than drinking it is pouring it into a pan with cognac and beef and cooking until the meat is melt-in-your-mouth tender. But since you'll want some wine to sip while eating, you'd better get an extra bottle. Get the recipe on Food52.

When you're not eating bacon, you should be drinking bourbon. Now you can do both at the same time—just call it multitasking. This dish combines bacon, bourbon, clams, corn, and tomatoes in one best-of-summer pot. Mop up leftover sauce with good, crusty bread. Get the recipe on Food52.

Every guy wants to have his own secret-recipe barbecue sauce. Here's one you can pass off as your own (and don't worry, we won't reveal where you got it). The secret ingredient is full-bodied red wine, which adds a complexity that'll have your guests singing your praises. Get the recipe on Food52.

There's a whole list of things that are terrible "drunken": drunken fights, drunken texts, drunken hook-ups, and on and on. But drunken clams—cooked with white wine, heavy cream, and Italian sausage—are always better than sober ones. Get the recipe on Food52.</p

Sugar steak is what you'd guess it is: a steak rubbed with sugar, then grilled. What you wouldn't expect is that it takes a long soak in bourbon and a healthy sprinkle of hot pepper flakes to balance the sweetness of the sugar and bring out the meatiness of the steak. Bourbon's never gone down so easily. Get the recipe on Food52.