Upside Down Dirty, courtesy of Bob

On the drinks train, Bobert, as Gail would say, typed this up for me. Also, I am back in Oakland and what??? What is my life?


RECIPE:

Add 3 dashes lemon bitter. 

2 tsps pickled onion brine. 

2 Oz dry vermouth

1 Oz gin to a mixing glass filled with ice. 

Stir and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. 

Twist a strip of lemon over glass and discard. 

Garnish with a pickled cocktail onion. 

 

 

 

Prost!

Summer nostalgia cocktail: Beeeeee Sting

Late December - when not even the winter solstice and the promise of incrementally increasing daylight seems good enough. (For those of you curled up in extra wintery places, please forgive my current west coastness... I remember what ice and snow plows look like. Solidarity.)

How about a lovely distraction? During a(n ongoing) tequila kick, the interwebs led me to the following delicious cocktail, the Bee Sting! It has been tested and approved of by persons such as large groups of my friends, older radical lesbians, and significant others' family members. Suffice to say: vetted. And while special tequila is a delight, it is not a requirement. Give it a whirl! Also, super boozy.

The Bee Sting

Official Ingredients (per single cocktail, expand as necessary):

1.5 oz (reposado) Tequila
.75 oz honey syrup
.75 oz lemon juice
jalapeno chiles (serrano or other green chiles also work)

Non-binding instructions:

1) Make a honey syrup by blending honey and water in a 1:1 ratio over low heat on the stove. Stir until the two have completely blended, and set the mixture aside to cool. Honey is a miracle and doesn't go bad, so you can make this concoction ahead of time and keep it in the fridge for whenever you want to whip up a cocktail or dose a pot of tea.

2) Juice a bunch of lemons and get rid of the seeds.

3) Slice and de-seed your chiles, and add a few to the bottom of your shaker/mason jar/improv container. Mash these around with a muddler or a wooden spoon.

4) Add the tequila, honey syrup and lemon juice to the shaker, along with some ice.

5) Shake!

6) Taste! (I always add more honey syrup here, but perhaps you are more h-core than I.)

7) Pour into glasses using a strainer, add a slice of chile to each glass, and serve!


Recipe from Rachael Davis of Lucy's Fried Chicken in Austin, Texas.
Accessed from seriouseats.com, and photo credit to Melody Fury.

Louis Drummond's Avocado Margaritas

Hey y'all!

A guest post from none other than Gail!
 

Louis Drumond's Avocado Margaritas


1oz tequila

1/2 oz triple sec

1oz fresh lime juice

1oz simple syrup

1/4 ripe avocado

Leaf or three cilantro

Blend with equivalent of a 14oz glass worth of ice cubes


Gail says: "Story is, invited Derek and his 4 boys to Prouts Cocktails and a quick-snap e-convo ensured over the course of the week.

Louis + his wife Vickki run a resto in the interior of BC.

Shake + Smile"

anti-oppression margaritas

After extensive testing, I decided there are many many ways to make a drinkable margarita, but if a person wants to keep one's friends as friends, it might be a good idea to invest in some sort of juicing apparatus that isn't giving your friend a fork and a bag of limes. Disclaimer aside, here is one of my favorites. For best results, drink on my porch.

A few preliminary thoughts:

Tequila is magical. Also sort of like a drug. There are loosely three kinds but anything you buy should be 100% agave. Blanco is clear - just distilled agave. Resposado is aged in oak barrels for up to 1 year, and anejo between 1-3 years. Or to put it another way: blanco $, reposado $$, anejo $$$.
Conveniently, blanco is great for margaritas.

Simple syrup is a 1:1 mixture of water and sugar. Heating the water helps the sugar completely dissolve, so maybe make this ahead of time and store it in a jar in your fridge so it's cold when you feel like a drink. I don't think it ever goes bad. I may or may not still be using a jar of ss that I made last summer and that may have traveled to the Gaspe and back. I promise not to serve you a drink with the 2013 vintage. I will make a new batch for this summer.

Also ratios instead of measurements - infinitely preferable and great for growth potential. Not like unsustainable inequitable capitalist growth, like more friends on your porch growth.

_____________________________________________________
The breakdown:

1 part tequila
1 part simple syrup
1 part lime juice (fresh is best)
a squeeze of orange juice in every glass
chunky salt for the rims (si quieres)
lime slices for the rims


Tips for the salt: slice a lime into smiley sections and make perpendicular cut across the centers of the sections. Use this cut in the lime to wet the rim of the glass and then twist gently in a pile of salt (the tops of yogurt containers are great salt-holders). Return the lime slice to the rim of the glass as a garnish. Probably wash the lime before you do any of this.

Por arriba
Por abajo
Al centro
Y al dentro

Guest post: Nadine's multilingual summer cocktail

Here's a terrific summer drink for you and your loved ones:

Greyhound:

-freshly squeezed juice of 1 Pampelmuse
-gin (1 -2 shots)
-a splash of whiskey (optional)
-ice wuerfel

Prost!

xox nads

Climate change in action?

Madrid is having a pretty brutal winter. While most years it rarely dips below 0ºC, this year has seen quite a bit of snow. Madrileños are still talking about their brush with death a few weeks ago when a full 10cm accumulated, more snow than they have seen in 40 years. Hundreds of flights were cancelled, only the children ventured outside, the city was paralyzed - it was hilarious. It also made me realize that I actually miss snow. How great of a Canadian am I?

Well... not such a great Canadian that I don't appreciate this last week of 15ºC and sunny (Madrid has apparently recovered from its cold spell). Hence the recipe. This cold summer soup is what I made yesterday after I went running in the sunny Parque del Buen Retiro in shorts and a t-shirt. Kisses!

Gazpacho
NB: Spaniards insist this is not a soup. The best description I have heard is "Andalusian liquid salad." Serve in a bowl or drinking glass.

2 slices stale white bread, crusts removed (75 g)
4 large ripe tomatoes (1 kg)
1 green bell pepper
1/2 cucumber
1/2 onion
2 cloves garlic
4 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp salt
5 tbsp white wine vinegar
some water or ice cubes
garnish: toast cut into cubes, chopped hard boiled eggs, and any of the vegetables mentioned above that you want, chopped.

Soak the bread in water (mmmmm soggy bread). In a cuisinart, combine the tomatoes, seeded peppers, cucumber, onion, and garlic. [Purists insist you need to run it through a sieve to get rid of skins, seeds, and other undesirables. Whatever.] Squeeze the water from the deliciously soggy bread and add to the mix. Add some oil, salt, and vinegar to taste. Add water to taste, or ice cubes if you want to serve immediately.

Mango Lassi

Indian dining in your own home. Makes 4 cups.

1 cup plain yoghurt
½ cup milk
½ cup mango pulp, or 7 oz fresh mango, pitted and sliced
Sugar to taste

Blend for 2 minutes.

HEALTH ALERT and a smoothie suggestion

Hi everyone,

I was browsing the good old NYT when I came across this article about the (sometimes fatal) risks of blogging/being a blogger.

Some excerpts:

They work long hours, often to exhaustion... This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.
Bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

“If I don’t hear from him, I’ll think: Matt’s passed out again,” said Brian Lam, the editor of Gizmodo. “It’s happened four or five times.”

Mr. Lam... is known to pull all-nighters at his own home office in San Francisco — hours spent trying to keep his site organized and competitive. He said he was well equipped for the torture; he used to be a Thai-style boxer.Should we disallow posting between midnight and eight am to promote a healthier work environment for ourselves? And, maybe we should join a gym or something?

A quick, refreshing and nutrient packed smoothie that could help you to keep on keeping on while blogging, or pursuing any other interests.

Locate and put into a blender:

1/2 a block of silky tofu
tip: it can come unflavoured, or you can choose mango or coconut or mixed berries or anything you could ever dream of
1 banana, in chunks
1/2 to 1 cup of frozen berries
tip: I prefer blueberries, but rasberries, mixed berries, any other kind of fruit work just fine, though I would probably stay away from pineapple
tip: frozen berries are good because it's like adding ice and fruit at once, which gives it a frothy texture. if you are lucky enough to have on hand fresh berries, throw them in the blender and add ice as well
enough orange juice to cover everything in the blender
tip: if you only have concentrate, you can plop some in and add water straight to the blender, it will all come together in the next step which is............

turn on the blender. keep it on until everything seems to have blended. try a little. adjust. feel free to blend to the rhythm of your favourite song. it may annoy other people in the vicinity, but they will be grateful because this recipe makes 2-3 tall glasses of smoothie, and you might be willing to share.

cause i wouldn't be me if i didn't reference bd

courtesy of theme time radio hour, the "drinking" episode:

bob dylan's mint julep recipe:

4 sprigs of mint

2 ½ ounces of bourbon (“i prefer 3” - bob dylan)

1 tbs powdered sugar

1 tbs water

put the mint leaves, powdered sugar, and water in a collins glass (now ladies and gents, actually who are we kidding... ladies, bob is very specific about the collins glass. as a fellow member of the 'i get all my glassware from dollarama' club, i am posting a picture to facilitate acquisitions)

fill with shaved or crushed ice.

top with bourbon and more ice.

garnish with a mint sprig.

and to finish 'er off, another dylan gem:

“two or three of those and anything sounds good!”