Stasia's Place Of Grace

Friday, June 17, 2005

 

Booze, Books & Bushes - a day of Bs

First, get your patootie over to Claudia's blog - you only have a few more hours to help her hit the $3,000 mark for a donation to fight MS by sponsoring her tandem bike ride! Click on the cute bicycling couple to the right... ------->

She's giving away lovely stuff to winning donators, too!

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Well now... whilst waiting for soil tests, county permits, and an invisible septic crew (and since I can't do laundry, dishes, or clean my bathrooms), I have been studying a new (used) book:

I never knew you could make a cream cocktail with actual cream and not a bunch of artificial emulsifying stabilizer stuff. Or that you could make a Sea Breeze with real, hand-"squoze" grapefruit juice and not Ocean Spray grapefruit-flavored big-agribusiness chemical'd corn syrup. But now I do.

So, then, what is wrong with this picture?

You need this stuff to make decent cocktails. But you do not need so much of it. I have nowhere to keep these bottles! Why do they not sell these in a size between itty-bitty-miniature and honkin' liter? They would make a mint with a "Midi" (apologies to the Bosworths), and my relatives will then not have to figure out what to do with all of these bottles which will still be three-quarters full when I kick the [champagne] bucket.

In the meantime, I have discovered my signature drink - it is called a Berliner: 1.5 measures gin, 1/2 measure dry vermouth, 1/2 measure Kummel (caraway liqueur), and 1/2 measure lemon juice shaken with ice and strained into a chilled martini glass. The book calls it "...a dry and very grown-up sort of drink." Exactly so.

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I have been reading some other books:

"Middlemarch" is for the KnitTheClassics knitalong. Here is what I knit this time around:

Again, what is wrong with this picture? Well, aside from having blocked the far right side very poorly, I made a big mistake combining this pattern with this yarn. Koigu KPPPM is best in stockinette socks. Lace scarves are best in a plain-colored yarn that shows off the stitches.

This is supposed to have some beads sewn onto the points on the ends, but I'm not sure if it's worth doing so. I guess this will just go in the gift bin to be thought about later. Hopefully I'll have better luck on my Clapotis - but first I will finish up the top-down raglan T I'm trying to design.

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As for Bushes, I offer the following pics of what's Blooming in the garden today:

Sage, Meyer lemon, and penstemmon.

Sage, penstemmon, and some other blue flower I can't remember. Love blue flowers...

Here's another B for today.

Chives. The flowers are edible. I've frozen them in ice cubes for my cocktails.

Lavender

Strawberries with a "scare-munk". I've decided that I have too much food in my fridge and the chipmunks will never find all the seeds they are burying, so I'm going to take away Reflecty Cat and let them eat their fill. How mean am I to hoard these? And me always worried about my weight!

Spiderwort

Hope your day is as Blessed with Bounty. Go easy on the Booze and B-have!

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