Getting My Mojito Back

I didn't take last week off from writing because I was gone or sick or in love or sick or whatever. I just wasn't drinking much. None of the recipes in my calendar looked especially appealing, though I'll have to mix them up at some point to make my goal of drinking every one this year, and most evenings I just didn't feel like a drink. Maybe it was the heat.

Saturday night I went over to my sister's and started with a couple of beers (lites; oh, well), then took a sip of one of her strawberry wines (running home afterwards for a quick shot of insulin), then a sip of my brother in law's cloudy 'martini' made with the bottle of Burnett's I'd taken over there and some lemon (no vermouth), then moving on to a Campari and gin. I was feeling pretty good while we watched The Bucket List. And I still knew the answers to Morgan Freeman's Jeopardy questions.

Tonight I tried to get back in the groove. Before dinner, a drink called 'Love Potion" or something equally silly from the calendar: lemon-flavored vodka (I used Stoli with some sweet and sour), chambord (I used a raspberry liqueur), and cranberry juice (I used pomegranate). Verdict: sweet, but not bad. I'd bet the pom was better in it than most commercial cran juices would've been.

Second, today's recipe, a mojito. After I'd seen Sex and the City yesterday, I should have made a Cosmopolitan, but this was the next best thing. You all know what goes in a mojito. I used some mint from my herb patch and citron-flavored Cruzan gin. Not bad, especially after I stirred it up. I wouldn't say it's my favorite drink in the world, but a nice summer drink, and I can see (or taste) why it's taken off like it has. I bet a better sugar than the plain ol' white stuff I was using would make it really swing.

One of my goals for the second half of this year of drinking is to make vittles, as we call them around here, to go with the drinks. I'd been planning to make hummus, one of my favorite finger foods, for a long time, and I'd picked up a jar of tahini over the weekend. The plastic bag split and the jar fell and broke, so I really did pick it up (the grocery munchkins did, actually). I whirled up a batch in the food processor and had some of that with blue corn chips and my mojito: chickpeas, tahini, lemon juice (I was too heavy handed with that), olive oil, salt, cumin and smoked paprika, which I toasted on the stove. I forgot the pine nuts until five seconds ago as I was writing this. Good stuff to nosh with a mojito. And the dogs liked it too. Rosie liked it on the chips. Maddie got it as finger food - paw food from her point of view.