For Sunday's afternoon garden party, I wanted to serve a light cocktail with a spring-y vibe, and decided on simple, kinda retro wine spritzers. Wine spritzers are something I associate with, like, ladies wearing shoulderpads sitting in a fancy restaurant in 1985, but for some reason they feel fresh again. Throwback-y.
And they are easy to make, and delicious, and lovely-looking, and there you go: perfect warm-weather cocktail.
Classic White Wine Spritzer
A suggestion for this weekend's festivities: be lazy.
So lazy.
Look, I love making sangria from scratch. Mostly I love how it tastes, but it's also fun customizing your own blends with whatever fruits are in season at the moment. But when you're talking about serving in bulk, sangria transforms from "adorable homemade touch" to "enormous pain in the butt."
Presenting: Lazy Lady Sangria.
There are many wonderful things about being pregnant. Not everyone loves the expectant state, but I actually enjoy it, to the point where even though I think we're probably good with two kids, I'm definitely a little sad about the idea of never being pregnant again.
What I enjoy slightly less: being pregnant in the summertime and wistfully gazing at all the rose that is being drunk all around me by friends and family, and of which I cannot partake (except for sips - which were taken, believe you me).
Rose is really good.
Being pregnant makes me way more inventive when it comes to my drink menu. I always like the idea of serving a "specialty drink" at a party, but usually it sounds like way too much of a pain to make, and I end up just setting out some beer and wine, having a few cans of soda on hand for anyone who wants something non-alcoholic, and calling it a day.
But I'm kind of sick of ginger ale and was feeling like something a little more fruity and summery, and so when I had a few friends over on Sunday afternoon I decided to make a drink (adapted from a recipe I spotted in US Weekly) that would work for equally well as a cocktail and as a mocktail (and for the kids).
When I first moved to LA, I found an apartment right off of the Sunset Strip and a job at an upscale-ish pizza place called Cheebo (the phonetic spelling of the Italian word for "food"). It wasn't too bad of a job - the food was pretty reasonably priced and lunchtime-focused, which meant that tips were only okay, but I liked my coworkers and really liked the staff meal that we got at the end of every shift. The part of it that I hated was when my manager asked me to work the brunch shift, because the brunch shift involved fresh-squeezed orange juice…and you know what's a major pain to make?
Fresh-squeezed orange juice. If you have never done this, let me tell you: you have no idea how many pieces of fruit it takes to make your teeny, tiny four-dollar glass of Vitamin C.
I think working at Cheebo gave me a bit of juice-making PTSD, because never since have I been enamored of the idea of fresh-squeezing my own anythings…but pregnancy does weird stuff, like make you all of a sudden need fresh lemonade RIGHT NOW.
When Kendrick and I got home from our Saturday adventures, it was that moment right before the sun sets when all you (or at least I) want to do is collapse into a hammock with an US Weekly. So that's what I did, and I was all relaxed and cozy...and then I turned the page and spotted a recipe for something called a Strawberry-Basil Rickey.
You know what makes those just-before-sunset-in-a-hammock moments even better?
A cocktail.
This particular recipe required things like fresh herbs and mortar and pestles and Cointreau, though, so as delicious as it looked, it wasn't going to happen. Not right then, anyway.
My love for sangria is well-documented around these parts (I've previously posted recipes for Guava Sangria, Summery Red Sangria and Winter White Sangria), but this?
This is something special.
Let me introduce you to the cocktail (recipe via Bon Appetit) that my aunt served us at Passover dinner on Sunday, because it is ridiculous good.
Sweet, but not cloying-sweet. Tangy, but not forces-you-to-make-weird-faces tangy. My aunt warned me that making them for a crowd can get a little pricey once you throw in the Hendrick's...but also said that good old Absolut does the trick nicely as well.
What you need:
It's so good. It sounds so bad. But it's so good.
So the other night I was in bed rifling through People, and there was this whole special on "unusual things to do with avocados", and one of those things was avocado popsicles. Which sounded weird and yet also kind of amazing...and also like they were missing something.
