Author: John Fladd

You promised your therapist that you would try to take better care of yourself. And you really meant to. But the kids had camp, and then your sister had a fight with her boyfriend and showed up at your house with three suitcases. And then the weekend you thought you might actually get away, the dog came down with food poisoning, and then all the water in the faucets turned rusty.

With one thing or another, you never got to sit in a cabaña, sipping umbrella drinks and making small talk with attractive strangers.

And now summer is over. This is deeply unfortunate.

I hesitate to give you unsolicited advice, but your sister is still here and there are at least three movies that the kids want to see, so maybe:

1. Do what you have to do to grab two or three hours to yourself. Spring for movie theater popcorn, if you must.

2. Put on a playlist of Harry Belafonte and Don Ho.

3. Drink one — or both — of these Decadent Vacation Cocktails:

Rum Runner

• 1 ounce white or silver rum – Because this is a strongly flavored drink, you probably won’t want to use your best rum for this; any subtle nuances will be overwhelmed. Don’t use the ultra-discount-bottom-shelf stuff, but you don’t need to sweat finding really good rum for this. Captain Morgan or Bacardi would be fine.
• 1 ounce dark rum – Again, don’t let this stress you out; I like Myers’ Dark for tropical drinks.
• 1 ounce crème de banana
• ½ ounce blackberry brandy
• 2 ounces pineapple juice – I like to buy the little 6-ounce cans of juice for this; you don’t end up with a giant, half-empty can slowly going bad in your refrigerator.
• 1 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice
• ½ ounce grenadine

Pour all ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker, then shake thoroughly. Strain over fresh ice in a large glass. Garnish or not, depending on your mood; too many cherries might be nice. Again though, the key here is to avoid stressing out over sub-crisis decisions.

This is a classic fruity, boozy Attitude Adjustment Tool. The rums play well with pineapple juice — why would they not? Pineapple juice gets along with everyone. The lime juice adds a touch of acid, and the grenadine — which is pomegranate syrup, if that’s weighing on your mind — adds color and rounds off the juices, keeping them from being too acidic.

Bahama Mama

• 1 ounce coconut rum – the sweet kind
• 1 ounce dark, overproof rum – the kind you remember from college as “151”
• ½ ounce coffee brandy
• 2½ ounces pineapple juice
• ¾ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice

Again, pour all ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker, shake, and strain into another large glass — or the same one; there’s no one around to make pointed comments — over fresh ice.

On the face of it, these ingredients do not seem like a great match. Pineapple juice and coffee? But I stand by my previous comment about pineapple juice going with anything. Rum — the friendliest alcohol — has already been making sustained eye contact with the lemon juice and trying to organize a limbo contest.

Either — or both — of these drinks will improve your attitude. When your children return from the movies, call them Lola and Sergio regardless of what their actual names are. This will freak them out enough that you will be able to demand that they bring you Cheetos®, and they might actually do it.

Featured photo: Rum Runner and Bahama Mama. Photo by John Fladd.

I think that it’s fair to say that Florida doesn’t have the best reputation.

Take, for example, the “Florida Man” game. If you’ve never tried this, your eyebrows are about to rise higher than you ever suspected was possible. Open an internet search engine, and enter the term “Florida man” and a date — your birthday is a good choice.

Feb. 9, for instance, when, according to the Florida Times-Union, a Florida man “was arrested … and charged with assault with a deadly weapon without intent to kill after Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation officials say he threw a 3.5-foot alligator through a Palm Beach County Wendy’s drive-thru window.”

But it wasn’t always like this. There was a time in the 1940s and ’50s when Florida was seen as a chic and even elegant place. Miami Beach was where the most beautiful and wealthy people went to be seen, to dance in the moonlight and to drink cocktails. Powerful, cigar-chomping men in good suits flashed their brightest smiles — and wads of cash — in an effort to catch the attention of beautiful women in floral dresses. White-jacketed waiters delivered drinks to wide-eyed tourists. Dance bands played, and everywhere there were flowers.

I feel like we need more of that — more white suits and fancy drinks, and fewer fast-food alligator attacks.

Miami Dancehall

• 2 ounces dry gin – I like Wiggly Bridge
• ½ ounce elderflower liqueur
• ½ ounce crème de violette – a violet-flavored liqueur
• 5 or 6 drops rose water – There is a razor’s edge between being floral and delicious, and tasting like your grandmother’s fancy soap. Err on the side of caution until you find the level of rosiness you like.
• ½ ounce fresh squeezed lemon juice
• ¼ ounce simple syrup

Combine all ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker. Use a medicine dropper to measure out the rose water.

In the classic 1934 movie The Thin Man William Powell gives a master class on cocktail shaking to a group of bartenders and waiters. According to Nick Charles, Powell’s character, a well-made cocktail is all about timing: “Now, a Manhattan, you shake to a foxtrot. A Bronx, to a two-step time. But a dry martini, you always shake to waltz time.” He places his properly shaken martini on a waiting tray, held by one of the waiters, who serves it back to him. He takes the cocktail and drinks it gratefully, implying that making well-mixed drinks is thirsty work. In a similar vein, tell your digital assistant to play Miami Beach Rhumba by Xavier Cugat. Shake your cocktail to the rhythm. Given the time of year, and our climate, feel free to keep shaking until the outside of your shaker is wet with condensation.

Strain the cocktail into the fanciest cocktail glass you own.

Drink it as you dance around the kitchen.

Gin and lemon lead in this particular rhumba, followed by hints of violets and roses. This is one of those drinks that leave you searching for more of the floral finish, which leads to another sip, and then another, until you realize that you need (a) more excuses in your life to rhumba, and (b) another cocktail.

More rhumbas, fewer alligators.

Featured photo: Dancehall cocktail. Photo by John Fladd.

Days like this call for something cold, boozy and tropical, something with a lot of crushed ice.

Mango Rum

• Unsweetened dry mango
• White or silver rum

With a heavy knife, chop the dried mango into a small dice — very small pieces. Add the chopped mango to a large, wide-mouthed jar, one with a lid. It’s best to look around and find a lid to fit the jar you are using before you get up to your elbows in mangoes.

Add white rum to the same jar — three times (by weight) as much as the mango you just chopped. Could you use vodka, or even blanco tequila, instead of rum? You could, but you would be heading off on a different adventure than the one we are on today.

Seal the jar with a tight-fitting lid, shake it well, then store it someplace cool and dark — maybe in that cabinet above the refrigerator that you always forget about — and shake it once or twice per day, for a week.

Strain with a fine-mesh strainer. Bottle and label it. You will be surprised at how much rum has been absorbed by the dried fruit, but also how much color and flavor the rum has taken on. This rum should keep indefinitely.

Guava Syrup

• Fresh guava (Available in international markets, and at Walmart, guava is one of those fruits that you are probably pretty sure you’ve never had before, but you probably have. It’s one of the perfumy background flavors in “tropical” juice mixes.)
• White sugar
• Juice of half a lemon

Chop fresh guavas into medium-sized pieces, then freeze them for several hours. This is to let the ice crystals poke holes in all the fruit’s cell walls and make it oozier when it’s time to cook with it.

Cook the frozen guava over medium heat in a small saucepan, with an equal amount — by weight — of white sugar. Stir occasionally. As it thaws, the frozen guava will give off a surprising amount of liquid. If you wanted to help it along its way, you could encourage it with a potato masher.

Bring the mixture to a boil. Swirl it around the saucepan to make sure that all the sugar has been dissolved into the syrup.

Remove the mixture from heat, stir in the lemon juice, then strain the syrup with the same fine-mesh strainer that you used for the mango rum (see above). This syrup will keep for several weeks in your refrigerator.

Mango Daiquiri

• 3 ounces mango rum
• ½ ounce guava syrup
• 1 ounce fresh squeezed lime juice, which isn’t discussed above but you can probably figure out
• Lots of crushed ice

Wrap several handfuls of ice cubes in a kitchen towel, and beat viciously with a rolling pin or some sort of martial arts weapon that you find lying around, until well-crushed. I like to leave a mixture of different sizes of ice. Fill a large rocks glass with the crushed ice.

Add the mango rum, guava syrup and lime juice to a cocktail shaker, and shake it over ice, until it is very cold. Feel free to shake it longer than you normally would; this is a strong, sweet drink that will benefit from the cold and the melted ice.

Strain the shaken daiquiri over the crushed ice. Call up footage of a beach view of Bora Bora on your laptop. Watch it through half-closed eyes as you drink this daiquiri. If small children try to disturb you while you do this, tell them that you are listening for secret messages that you have to be very, very quiet to hear.

It’s no secret that rum plays well with sweet fruit, which in turn plays well with acidic citrus like lime juice. The first sip of this daiquiri will be sweet, then a little sour, which will make your mouth water, which prepares you perfectly for another sip.

Featured photo: Mango daiquiri. Photo by John Fladd.

We had just come home from a long trip, and I’ll admit that I was a little out of it. Jet lag and a week of over-indulgence had definitely taken a toll on me. And yet I made a surprisingly good decision — there was still time to go to my usual exercise class at the gym and try to clear some of the fog from my brain.

A less good decision was eating two bowls of coleslaw before I left the house.

An hour later found me tripping over my feet and frustrating one of my workout friends.“You are really out of it tonight,” he said, not unkindly. “What’s the problem?”

“Six time zones and a bellyful of coleslaw,” I told him, which stopped us both in our tracks, because that is probably the best title for a blues album ever: Six Time Zones and a Belly Full of Coleslaw

Our theme this week is the blues.

Blueberry Syrup

• 1¾ cups (250 grams) frozen wild blueberries, the kind you have in your freezer to use for smoothies.
• 1¾ cups (250 grams) sugar
• Juice of half a lemon

In a small saucepan, heat the blueberries and sugar over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the mixture comes to a boil. Let it boil for a few seconds, to make sure that the sugar has thoroughly dissolved. Because the blueberries started out frozen — Well, they didn’t start out that way. They were young once, and had hope and joy in their hearts, napping in the dappled sunshine, listening to birdsong. — At any rate, because the wild blueberries started today frozen, their cell walls have been pierced by large ice crystals, and they will give up a surprising amount of juice. During this syrup-making process, if you wanted to help things along with a potato masher, who could blame you?

Remove the blueberry pot from the heat, and place a fine-meshed strainer on top of it. Squeeze half a lemon into the mixture. You could use a hand-held, nut-cracker-looking juicer, or one of those reamers that look like a primitive medical device, or even the ends of some kitchen tongs to get all the juice out of the lemon. Because you remembered to put a strainer on top of the pot, you don’t have to worry about getting seeds or pulp into your blueberry mixture. Stir the lemon juice into the blueberry sauce.

Use your strainer to separate the cooked berries from the syrup. Squash the pile of berries with the back of a spoon — a little, a lot — it’s up to you. (Don’t throw them out, though. You have just made very nice blueberry compote to have on toast or stirred into yogurt.) After 15 minutes or so, transfer the syrup to a bottle. It will keep in your refrigerator for several weeks.

Blueberry Margarita

• 2 ounces blanco tequila – I’ve become very fond of Siete Miserios, lately.
• 1 ounce blueberry syrup – see above
• ¾ ounce fresh squeezed lime juice

Combine all three ingredients over ice in a cocktail shaker, then shake until very cold. At this time of year, it will be ready when a thin layer of frost forms on the shaker.

Strain into a cocktail or margarita glass. If you wanted even more ice, the Margarita Police would not stop you.

Sip, sitting in your garden or on your deck (or surreptitiously on a bench in the park), listening to Carlos Santana, who, unlike Life, never disappoints.

Unless you’re a purist, this is everything you want in a margarita at this time of year. It is sweet and sour and slightly smoky and utterly refreshing. Blueberries play extremely well with sour citrus fruit. We tend to pair them with lemons, but they are more than happy to dance with limes. Tequila too, has an affinity for citrus. Even the concept of this drink is refreshing.

Salud.

Featured photo: Blueberry Margarita. Photo by John Fladd.