Posts made in August, 2012

Wildcrafted…really?

Posted on Aug 15, 2012 in Botany, Featured | 1 comment

Can you eat any of the plants in this picture?  Really?  How do you know? This post from the always excellent Rowley’s Whiskey Forge got me thinking about this.  He posts a really cool recipe for a liqueur called mistela de chimajá. I couldn’t resist–I had to go look up the plant.  But more about that in a minute. First, some background:  So the foraging/wildcrafting movement has met the craft distilling movement and the result is that people want to go out into the wilderness, or into a vacant lot, or into the woods, and pull a plant out of the ground and drop it into...

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Drink Your Flowers

Posted on Aug 15, 2012 in Botany, Featured, Recipes | 3 comments

Not every flower belongs in a cocktail glass. But these do.  They’re easy to grow and totally worthwhile. Check it out: Borage. People say that borage leaves taste like cucumber, but if that’s the flavor you’re after, why not just eat a cucumber? Use the leaves if you want—some people pick small, young leaves for salads or cook them with other greens—but it’s the flowers I’m interested in.  The dazzling bright blue color isn’t found in many flowers, particularly edibles, and the fact that they hold their color when frozen means that you can do a very elegant little ice...

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Cocktail-Themed Paint Colors

Posted on Aug 1, 2012 in Featured, Make This | 1 comment

So there I was, choosing colors for a cocktail-themed garden I’m building, and as I was looking for paint colors for the fence, I realized that a lot of paint colors are named after iconic cocktails and their ingredients.  You can get a paint color called Whiskey Sour, Negroni, Gimlet, Bloody Mary, or Cosmopolitan.  If you want to mix your own, there are paint colors called Grenadine, Orange Bitters, Rye, Dark Rum, and Lemon Zest. So I lost an entire evening to the creation of a Pinterest board of paint colors with cocktail names.  The combination you see here is Margarita:  Tequila...

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