Looky, Daddy!

Election Night Cocktail

The Ginger Martini

3 oz vodka
1/4 lime, squeezed
ice
1/2 oz ginger syrup

Ginger Syrup

lemon peel from one lemon
2 cups chopped unpeeled ginger
1 cup sugar
2 cups water

Chop the lemon peel and ginger in a food processor, then throw it in a saucepan with the sugar and water. Bring to a boil, then simmer 15 minutes. Strain and cool.

Shake, strain and serve.

(Editor's note: Originally, the last line of this post read: Shake, strain, and serve. Or pour it in a bottle, top it with a rag, and let the revolution begin. It speaks volumes about the climate of this nation, and of my own head, that when I reviewed that last line, it didn't seem as funny as I had hoped.  In fact, it seemed about as far from funny as I could get. I hope, I sincerely hope, when this day is over and the votes have been counted, this country begins to confront, correct, and heal the tension that has slowly built up over these past two years. It's beginning to really cramp my style.)

Drink Your Summer in October

(Part 5 in our Summer Drink series. Enjoy.)

Before they are totally gone from the supermarket, go buy a pint of strawberries. Cut them in half and put them in a large, airtight container. Now, take a bottle of decent tequila and pour it over the strawberry halves. Put a lid on it all, seal it tight, and stick it way, way back in your refrigerator. For a month.

Now I know what you are thinking: If I can't even get my shit together to make a crockpot meal before I go to work, how am I going to put together a drink that has to sit for a whole month before it's consumed. And the answer is that you won't. 99% of you will not make this drink. But a few of you will, and when October comes and you open that lid to ladle out a two or three shot glasses full of this summer-infused tequila, you will thank me. You will thank me and name your babies after me. You will ask your town council for a permit to throw a parade in my honor. You will carve effigies to me in butter, or whatever product your region is known for.

Or you'll just get sloppy drunk and send me an unintelligible text message. I'm cool either way.

Sangria

My first girlfriend in college talked a lot about feelings. This was new to me. I grew up in the geekiest house of boys rural Texas had ever seen. What feelings could we have talked about? "The way you always kill off my eighth-level magic user hurts me, Dungeon Master," or "Mom, Dad, my French horn lessons have empowered me to explore my creative side"? We weren't "feelings" people.

So it was always with great trepidation that I ever spoke with my first college girlfriend. It didn't help that she would often continue our conversations even while she excused herself to pee in the small bathroom of her dormitory suite. She'd pee with the door open, cutting off the flow whenever she spoke, and I never heard a word she said over the voice in my own head yelling, "Leave! Leave now, while she's occupied!" But I never did. I stayed out of fear of a woman who could stop peeing at will. (It wasn't until many years later that I learned all women could do that. Oh, Internet, if only you had existed in the 80's.)

Since I didn't have much experience talking about my feelings, I ran out of them fairly quickly, so I ended up making up a lot of crap to tell this woman, this never-tiring seeker of emotion, [insert blogging metaphor here] and over the months I began to buy into it myself, slowly reconfiguring myself from small-town dork to The Most Interesting Person You Will Ever Meet [continue blogging metaphor here], a title that sounded so cool, I held onto it far longer than I should have.

It was while I held that title that I stopped a couple of burglars from robbing my future-wife's apartment.

Actually, I didn't exactly stop them; they stopped themselves. All I did was walk in and surprise them. If they had wanted to, they could have easily continued robbing the apartment even with me there, especially since I greeted the first guy with a pleasant, "Hi!" thinking he was the apartment's super, or a repairman who had perhaps been hired to rifle through the place and take away the expensive pieces. By the time the second guy came out of the back room holding a TV set, I realized something was up and my friendly "hi" turned into an octave-higher "hey!" to which the two men, realizing I was clearly not someone with whom to be trifled, left out the back door.

The whole scene took no more than a half-minute from beginning to end, but in the ten minutes it took for the police to arrive, I replayed it over seven thousand times in my head, coming up with over seven thousand possible actions I could have performed, each one a significant improvement over squeaking "Hey!" (Action Number 107: Look closely at the perpetrators. That way, the police report would not have read, "Witness describes the two suspects as males of indeterminate height, indeterminate build, and indeterminate race." After taking my statement, I had the distinct impression that the responding officer wanted to close his notebook and pummel me with it.)

After the police left, I didn't know what to do. The apartment wasn't mine; I had just stopped by to say "hi" (not "hey!") on my way to a supermarket a few blocks away. Its occupant, the woman who would later become my wife, was not home, nor did I know where she was. But the real problem was that she didn't like me, hadn't ever since my transformation into The Most Interesting Person You Will Ever Meet, and I didn't know what she'd think, coming home to find me sitting in the middle of her ransacked apartment, holding the phone number of a police officer who wanted to speak with her just as soon as she had made a list of what was missing or damaged. Logic said she'd be happy to see me, considering I'd prevented more of her stuff from getting stolen, but logic was not something that I inspired in most people those days. But since the back door was busted I couldn't just leave, so I made myself as comfortable as I could. And by that, I mean I drank all of her sangria.

Sharon's apartment always had a huge bottle of sangria, a jug of it really, sitting in her fridge. Always. It was an affectation of hers, a delightfully fruity affectation. And since the nobody had stolen her glasses, and the TV was sitting on its side in the hallway, I spent the afternoon with that jug, reliving the day's events, and reimagining myself ever more the hero with each glass.

Sangria (Sharon's recipe)

1 jug of red wine

Pour in the juice of two lemons and three oranges, tossing in the rinds as you go. Add two diced apples, one sliced lime, and a third of a cup of sugar. Chill overnight. Mix with Sprite or club soda and serve over ice.

Add Orange Juice and It's a Perfectly Serviceable Breakfast

This week's drink: Champagne. Somebody up and got herself legally hitched. It couldn't have happened to a nicer groom.

So pop the cork, raise a glass, then sit back down and read a spell. LesbianDad's ruminations on marriage, found here, here, and here, should be required reading for all people who wish to live and love in this modern world.

Dark and Stormy

It was the lime that made me cry.

This drink was made for me for the first time by Lila's godmother. It was made for me the second, third, and fourth time by her as well. The drink is called a Dark and Stormy and its recipe is simplicity itself: Ice, a few fingers of dark rum, a bottle of Jamaican-style ginger beer, and a wedge of lime. And, like I said, it was the lime that made me cry.

The twins were seven months old when the lime made me cry, so it wasn't really that big of a deal. Everything made me cry back then. I blame it on my wife's hormones. We were spending a week down the shore and the week was not going well. Lila's godmother had taken it upon herself to mitigate some of the psychic damage the twins were wreaking on us all by mixing Dark and Stormies each afternoon and distributing them willy-nilly until all hands were holding at least one, sometimes two or more. I was usually a "more."

It was something in the way she handled the lime that did it. She'd cut out a wedge, and then just leave the lime right there on the counter, like she was saying, "Don't worry, little lime. I'll be right back with you in a moment." It was just so... so casual. It brought home to me how there was nothing whatsoever casual about my life right then. I could no more be expected to get "right back" to that lime than I could be expected to solve world peace. Those were the days in which I used to eat my breakfast cereal dry, because adding milk meant I had to finish it before it got soggy. Milk gave the cereal a deadline that simply was not realistic. And even dry, some days that cereal bowl would still be sitting there, full, when my wife came home from work that evening. Those were hard, hard days.

So it was one night that week, one of many, that I was up with the twins,  strapping them into their carseats so at least the rest of our shore rental house would be spared their 3 AM infernal wailing, that I passed the lime on the counter. It had three or four wedges missing, but it was still there, waiting for the next round of drinks. And I lost it. I drove around Ocean City that night, back and forth on the deserted roads, with the twins in the back of the minivan slowly trading in their cries for sighs and sleep, and I bawled. I wished that someone would come and put me in the back of a minivan and drive me around. I wished that my only responsibility were going to sleep.

I wished I could cut a wedge out of a lime and promise it I'd be right back.

Summertime in a Glass

Summer posting will be light. That's unavoidable. To make it worthwhile to stop by anyway, I'm going to be randomly posting summer drink recipes, and by random I mean every Monday.

Watermelon Mojito

This recipe makes two tall glasses. Find a friend.

Puree about a cup of seedless watermelon, then go in the backyard and pick about ten mint leaves. If you don't have mint growing in your backyard, find a backyard that does. Throw fives leaves into the bottom of each glass. Cover with one tablespoon of superfine sugar or simple syrup. Squeeze the juice of half a lime onto that, and then muddle. Go on, muddle. Don't stir, you ninny.

Throw in some ice cubes, then split the watermelon puree between the two glasses. Finally pour into each glass a quarter cup of white rum and the juice from another half a lime, and mix.

Drink outside.

Summer drinks will not be all I post. I will post of other things, too. Like Victoria's Festive Toilet™. There might even be pictures. You'll just have to wait and see.