-
Homemade Orange Bitters
After our visit to Thistle, in McMinnville, a few years ago, I came home sort of obsessed with bitters and delicious craft cocktails. Apparently there was an entire craft cocktail revolution going on and it didn’t take me long to find the awesome book, Bitters, A Spirited History of a Classic Cure-All with Cocktails, Recipes and Formulas, by Brad Thomas Parsons, which I’ve mentioned before in a post I wrote about My Perfect Manhattan. I bought the book for Greg because he’s really the cocktail guru in our house. It has wonderful cocktail recipes, fun history about bitters and great tips for using different bitters in drinks. But my favorite part…
-
The Thistle
There are so many things I love about fall. It’s beautifully ironic to me that in a season typically full of death, decay, and hibernation, fall has always been so alive to me, so sensory with the bright infused leaf colors, the return of the rich green to our grass, wool slippers wrapped warm around my toes. My fingers spill over the yarns at the knitting store; I snuggle on the couch with my kiddos and escape into books. And the scents, oh the scents. Burning wood stoves perfuming the air, the crisp morning dew, chicken broth simmering on the range, yeasty beers at a football stadium, all the organic…
-
Goodbye Summer!
Now that it’s officially over, I guess I have to say goodbye to summer. I love fall, but I just want to reminisce about what a gorgeous summer we had. It seemed to stretch on and on with all the amazing, warm, dry weather. I soaked up as much sun as I could. We traveled all over the country and our state, we had loads of silly fun with family and friends, enjoyed amazing food and drinks, and spent long, lazy days playing outside.
-
Happy Labor Day!
I hope you are all enjoying a lazy holiday with friends and family, and just in case you need a delicious new cocktail to toast to the end of summer, I thought I’d share this Peach Ginger and Bourbon Slushie. It’s amazingly refreshing; the peaches and bourbon taste like they were made to go together, and the ginger and lemon give it a zesty kick. If it’s hot where you are, this is the perfect drink to cool you off. And if it’s chilly, close your eyes, take a sip of this through your straw and it will make you think you’re at the beach. You can’t miss. Happy Labor…
-
Special Anniversary Dinners
Eleven years ago on a gorgeous September evening, in our friends’ backyard in Everett, Greg and I got married. Four days after that we moved to a tiny town on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains called Jasper, Georgia where we lived for about fourteen months. We had a house on a couple of acres and my favorite parts of that house were the open kitchen-dining room and the back deck overlooking our huge sloping backyard, which was surrounded by tall white pine trees. Many of our best times there were wrapped around cooking and eating meals with each other and with the friends we made. Crab boils on…
