My friend Gwen has a magnificent yard, a bountiful garden, and a very well stocked liquor cabinet. But her huge and magnanimous spirit is the essential ingredient in the good times we share.
She is over-the-top generous with her time and the bounty of her home. When I had my own big yard we started a friendship based on the joy of gardening: planting and watching things grow, exchanging plants, and thinking about what we wanted to get next.
She was already a very accomplished gardener and her lighthearted enthusiasm gave me the confidence that I could plant and grow things, too.
Of course it makes perfect sense that someone who has a welcoming kitchen, an eight burner Viking range, two sinks, and a dining table that is always open and ready to accommodate 16 people, would also have a generously stopped liquor cabinet as well.
I think in the beginning of our friendship we probably drank wine but when greedy little me starting to realize how many fun different spirits she had to play with, we started making cocktails.
Since we share a passion for cooking from the garden it was a natural extension to create our Garden to Glass Bespoke Cocktail Adventures.
It started last summer because her grapes were perfectly ripe and she had recently purchased some gorgeous mid century modern dining chairs. For some reason, I decided I had to pose our grape cocktails on that chair, with her terrace as the backdrop.
The lines of the chairs were irresistible and I really hoped to capture in a single frame what wonderful taste and style she has.
Yesterday Gwen and I went to a whole new level. We had made peach and blackberry sauce and blackberry ginger syrup a few days earlier with the plan that we were going to use them for garden cocktails in a few days.
I had leftover watermelon and Asian melon from Sunday brunch, and she had delicious cucumbers from her garden. Upon my arrival I noticed she also had some very liquidy, very flavorful, tomato salsa that she had made all with ingredients from her garden. Last time we got together we had made a cucumber mint cocktail, which was great, but why repeat the same old? I drained off the tomato cucumber cilantro peppery juice from the salsa and put that in one container while she infused the vodka with mottled cucumbers in another.
Okay, that would be one drink.
Then I tossed the two different chopped up melons into the blender with three shots of reposado tequila and blended it up. It was yummy just like that. I added ice later when we were ready for the photo shoot and blended it up again. The top stayed nice and fluffy and created a nice poof over the lip of the glass.
Okay, boom, that’s our second drink.
Now for the blackberries that had started it all because their copious nature makes you want to do something with them, but let’s face it their flavor alone isn’t ever really all that great. Not to mention the pesky seeds.
To get started creating the recipes I usually have her take out pretty much every spirit and liqueur she has in the cabinet to see what flavor combinations might be good.
Since she also has a generous collection of glassware, I turned to the glass cabinet next for inspiration. Of course the copper cups made me think of Moscow Mules.
“Do you have any ginger beer?” Of course she did.
“Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to make a blackberry ginger mule. That’s going to go in this cup.”
But we had peaches that I had bought and already cut for garnish. And that peach and blackberry sauce that I had been using on my yogurt all week but she hadn’t touched yet, so we need to use that as well. Plus there was the long stem martini glass to consider. We needed something to go in that. That glass just pleads “Photoshoot!” And we also needed to use our new favorite, Falernum, a sweet, slightly spicy Caribbean liqueur.
So, since I’m so lucky and she’s so generous I just decided let’s see how gin and Falernum taste together. I poured a shot of each in a cup, stirred it up and tasted it: very nice. Way sweeter than any real martini drinker would find acceptable, but very appealing. I put that in a shaker with ice and the blackberry peach syrup and that was our fourth cocktail.
I should also say that before we started making the cocktails I chose and set up the sites for the photographs.
The old wooden ladder she had trash picked went right along side the blackberry bush. We took pieces of broken slate from a pile she had alongside the fence and set them up right under a small watermelon hanging from a vine. (I don’t think you can tell it’s a watermelon from the pictures.)
I took a smaller, hand holdable stack of slate pieces and chose the hanging cucumber that we would use as a backdrop for the cucumber bloody mary.
She and I both get giddy with excitement about using what we can find in the yard to make, pose, and photograph these drinks. Of course I’m looking to generate Instagram material, but more than that it’s a creative pursuit. It’s playing with food — yes and booze – with friends!
It’s so much fun!
Also, as much as I can sympathize with people who think it’s annoying that I feel compelled to take pictures of all my food, table tops, and drinks, the truth is that, like the process of cooking, taking pictures of the creations serves an even more important purpose than Instagram. It slows down my eating and drinking, both of which I tend to do way too quickly.
And let’s not Insta bash too much because the truth of the matter is, just as food, drink, and travel are more fun when shared with friends, so too are pictures of them! So stay tuned.
I love you all.