Month: May 2013

Garden Update: How Does Your Garden Grow?

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As I write this I’m sitting in the backyard with my laptop, tiki torches lit, listening to Adele playing through a bluetooth speaker and feeling grateful for the modern technology that allows this.  And then around the corner lies the very non-technological garden plot that flummoxes me and supplies me with new mysteries to contemplate each and every day. I should clarify that the reason I am blogging about our gardens is not because we are experts in gardening.  These gardens, both the traditional soil garden and the aquaponic garden, are works in progress and we are learning through trial and error, as well as getting advice from friends and friendly folks we meet at the garden center. When I last wrote a garden update, things seemed to be progressing very nicely.  We had had a series of windstorms that wreaked some general havoc, but all the plants were healing up nicely.  Today, there are some new developments and some explosive growth as well as a few plants that I’m about to write off as …

The Cesar Ritz Martini

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It’s Friday and it’s cocktail time!  I was thumbing through one of our cocktail books this afternoon,  “The Modern Mixologist”, by Tony Abou-Ganim.  Normally what happens when I’m looking for cocktail inspiration, I come upon a drink that looks absolutely mouthwatering, but then I find that it requires me to either buy an exotic ingredient, or what happens more often, requires an infusion that takes one to two weeks to prepare.  So, you can imagine my excitement when the book fell open to reveal a cocktail that was not only easy to prepare, but included everything that I already had in my pantry and refrigerator. I made a small substitution–the recipe called for English cucumber and I only had a good, old-fashioned regular cucumber, but I think the only difference it made was the final presentation.  In short, it was tasty and refreshing and perfect for a Friday evening after a long work week. The drink is called the Cesar Ritz Martini and the author created it as a signature drink when he was working …