Unwinding with Margaritas

I have no air conditioning in my teeny apartment, during the summer months I tend to avoid the apartment during daylight hours. That means filling my days with tons of stuff to do, so when I finally decide to hightail it home I'm exhausted. All I want to do is shower and relax.

Relaxation = couch + TV + a fabulous cocktail.

What's a fabulous cocktail? Lately, it's been a margarita.

It might seem easier to go out and buy a ready made margarita mix, but really, this tastes better.

Really.

When you buy a mix it's like McDonald's. It's the same basic ingredients but the cheaper version. So while a real margarita will have lemon, lime and sugar; those pre-mixes are filled with cheap sugar (HFCS), fake lime and fake lemon (citric acid, from concentrate something) then add a preservatives and stabilizers to kind of taste like a margarita. It's like scratching around the itch instead of scratching the actual itch. You don't realize how wrong it is until you get it right. Really, really right. 

You could have a bartender make it, but most places also uses those pre-made mixes (except high end places like House without a Key or Ruth Chris, but for $12 a cocktail, it better be real stuff!)

A cocktail is a cocktail, but a fabulous cocktail is guaranteed to make you forget that long day.  


Sugar Syrup
1 cup water
1 cup sugar

Place ingredients in a cooking vessel of your choice, heat on the stove, stir occasionally until all the sugar is dissolved. Let cool.

Store in jars in the fridge or make a giant pitcher of margaritas
Also good for mojitos. (post pending)
Can be made beforehand and stored in the fridge for a really long time.


Margarita, on the rocks with salt

2-3 oz tequila, I use Patron because I'm tequila snotty like that
1 oz of Grand Marnier
2 oz freshly squeezed lime juice
1 oz cup freshly squeezed lemon juice (Myer Lemons if you can get it, but regular lemon is fine too)
1 oz freshly squeezed orange juice
1 oz sugar syrup, to taste
ice
1 Tbsp kosher salt, on a plate

Get a glass and using a cut lime wet the drinking edge. Touch the edge to the plate of salt if you would like a salty rim. Once you get the salt on the rim give the glass a good slap or shake to get off excess.

Fill glass with ice, pour in all the liquids, stir. Taste, add more sugar syrup if the citrus is very tart (which depends on the season).

Sit back on the lanai at sunset and enjoy. Or in my case, on the couch with mindless reality TV. Oh, Chelsea Lately you make my night.

The Cheesecake Factory Bar

I normally would avoid a review of a chain restaurant. But I'm making an exception, mainly because there's only 1 Cheesecake Factory on all of Oahu. And this:

Blue Cheese Stuffed Olives. I know the photo isn't great, but believe me they are there. And blue cheese stuffed olives are hard to find. It shows a level of care where every other bar just pulls the thing out of the jar and plunks it in the glass.

Ok, it's not just the stuffed olives, though that's a lot of it, there is also the 10oz glasses. How many times have you gone out for a cocktail and get one of those wimpy 6oz martini glasses? And they charge you $10+ for it and it's gone in 3 small sips. Hell, for me it's gone in 1 normal sip. Look at this. This is a drink. 10oz of delicious, frosty, dirty Grey Goose martini. I have to give props to the bartender too, good ingredients are one thing but their talents took it over the top:
-they shook to the perfect icy temperature,
-enough olive juice to make it dirty but not filthy
-they were light handed with the vermouth (or skipped it all together, in which case I will not complain)
-lastly, they were prompt in an increasingly crowded bar. 

Cheesecake Factory, you had me before hello. You had me at the pre-dinner drink.

 Hello lover!